Online-Payment, Fundraising Website Moved

by John S. James

Summary: Our design for online financial accounts that can reproduce, inherit potentially hundreds of automatic services and options, and evolve independently for fundraising and other purposes has moved to www.RepliCounts.org

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This online-payment design resulted from accidental discoveries of better ways to sell downloadable information (such as articles, songs, videos, or database access).

What's new is the realization that online financial accounts could feasibly manage dozens or hundreds of automatic services and options -- provided that they can also reproduce at their owner's request, creating children accounts that by default inherit the services and options of the parent. These fully powered children accounts could have children of their own, through any number of generations. Such reproducing accounts could evolve independently in businesses and communities, as owners fine-tune their accounts for many different purposes, and descendants inherit the settings. Account owners could benefit from hundreds of services, often without needing to change any of them -- because the ones they require may already have been set up for them by other people in ancestor accounts, before their new account was born.

The result will be unprecedented flexibility for hundreds of uses, making many new business models feasible when they would be difficult today. For example, these online smart accounts could automatically inherit the ability to accept credit cards and other online payment systems (through the server that manages the smart accounts), so dozens of payment options could routinely be offered to customers if the account owner wishes. Also, any unrestricted smart account could generate families of Web pages that all work the same way (even thousands of separate pages, each created by pasting text, pictures, videos, Web links, or other information); each could be specialized to sell a particular songs, article, etc., to present a fundraising appeal, or to provide information. For international commerce, each of these Web pages could show an array of national flags that users could click to rewrite much of the page in the language and currency of their choice; the owner simply checks a box in a parent account, and all the children inherit the multi-language service automatically. Separately, an artist's or merchant's site could not only compute but actually pay estimated sales or other taxes, royalties, commissions, charitable donations, or other payments, instantly when sales occur.

Accounting reports and statistical analysis will be current up to the minute, always available to account owners on request, and able to trace the moment-to-moment sales impacts of weather, news reports, or other public events in the past. Buyers' and sellers' accounts will be able to negotiate prices automatically, kicking the decision upstairs to the human only if the robots cannot reach agreement themselves.

Artists will be able to market their work independently through social networks worldwide, to end users and donors/supporters alike, with no upfront expense, by distributing smart Web links; these will allow anyone to donate any number of prepaid free downloads, which actually pay the artist the moment someone downloads their work for free -- and can optionally deliver a message from the donor as well. Estimated processing costs are negligible, less than a tenth of a cent to transfer money from one account to another, so artists should be able to keep almost all of the sale price -- from individual downloads, and also from purchases of potentially thousands of prepaid free downloads from donors who want to support the artist, art, or art movement, and/or want to purchase gifts for their friends to use and to share.

Fundraising will benefit in various ways. For example, it will be easy to click a link and instantly donate 10 cents, 50 cents, $50, or any amount to thank and encourage good work -- and to include a message as well. Such quick and easy donation at whatever financial level desired could become part of everyday life -- both as personal expression and as group rituals, such as team competitions worldwide.

And for something completely different in fundraising, certain major donations to historically important organizations could be time stamped and recorded forever as digital collectables, by smart accounts that never contain any money but allow the owner to control any number of presentations of the history and people around that donation, and of successive account owners who chose to add to the history as well. These scarce donation histories (there can never be new ones for a year after that year passes) might develop value for collectors greater than the amount donated -- like a rare stamp that sells for more than its original postage value. If so, they could turn donations to important projects into investments as well, creating an entirely new incentive to give.

How to do all this is already published at www.RepliCounts.org -- where I also explain why writing the software will be relatively easy. My personal goal is to develop and improve this design through a public conversation -- but not to start a business, due to my commitment to AIDS Treatment News. Others are welcome to use these ideas for commercial or fundraising purposes.

Note: This article appeared online only, not in the print edition of AIDS Treatment News.

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