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Financial Accounts That Can Reproduce, Inherit, and Evolve

By John S James

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The fundraising ideas published along with this article [1,2] came from this writer's exploration of a powerful and apparently new proposal: that for the first time in human history, widespread online commerce makes possible financial accounts that could reproduce at their owner's request, creating "children" accounts and family trees through any number of generations.

Each new account will by default inherit any number of capabilities from its parent, such as: access to software applications and services; options and settings for these applications; overall look and feel; security restrictions; ability to accept many different kinds of bank cards and other payments; interactive business processes in many different human languages; art or other content for sale or distribution; automatic payments such as sales taxes, commissions, royalties, charitable contributions, etc.; automatic accounting and statistical projections that owners need not even request but can change if they want to; and much more.

As they reproduce and inherit, these accounts will evolve in grassroots community use, due to users' selections of accounts with the most useful "mutations" (inherited changes made by various owners of different generations of ancestor accounts).

How It's Done

This unusual idea is actually simple. Each "child" account is born as a copy of its parent, but with a different name (which the owner can make up). Initially the new account has no money, or has money inherited from the parent. The owner of any account can make changes to its options and services (through a control panel that each account has); then these changes are inherited like mutations by future generations. Owners may never need to make any changes, but they have the option to do so. And they can use the same control panel to request reproduction, creating one or more new accounts that begin essentially as copies of their parent.

Technically this system will be easy to implement, because account reproduction and inheritance consists of little more than copying a record in a database. And these "smart accounts" will be easy to introduce, because some of the most important uses (including the fundraising ideas above) have no "network effect," no need for a critical mass of other users.

Examples

Two examples are the fundraising proposals in this series of articles [1,2]. While accounts that can reproduce are not necessary for these applications, they will help by creating a uniform infrastructure in which software components need be written only once -- and are controlled by accounts that evolve on their own toward greater usefulness to people.

In other words, even without general reproducing accounts, each of the two separate server applications in those articles [1,2] could still allow a new fundraising campaign for a particular cause to be written by filling in standard parameters, much like starting a blog. But with the reproducing accounts, ultimately those applications themselves could be written this way. Of course the necessary services must be available -- for instance, selling music downloads will obviously require that the server has software for uploading and downloading files in supported formats, while games will involve whole worlds of different services (including some unique to one game). Since competing organizations will be offering these accounts, they will be motivated to add services when customers demand them.

Note that the processes of creating a new fundraising or other campaign within an existing business model, vs. creating a new business model, will be exactly the same except for complexity. In both cases, accounts will evolve over generations (of accounts) -- as designers and other account owners provide customization that is inherited, and the most useful configurations win the evolutionary race and reproduce (because people want more of them). But with the general accounts, previously unimagined business models can be created easily by those with a talent for doing that, without the unfortunate need to program the new service from scratch and teach the public its infrastructure and idiosyncrasies. Creators will sell or otherwise deliver their new business model simply by providing each client with a new account, reproduced by an account that contains the innovation or other customization, and serves as a template or master.

We have published suggestive examples of new business models, some of them seemingly bizarre but still apparently quite workable, and very easy to do with the general reproducing accounts (see http://www.smart-accounts.org ). In fundraising, for instance, particular donations of money, volunteer time, or other valuables to an organization could be registered forever and traded as digital collectables, potentially developing market value far above the amount contributed if the organization become historically important or memorable. This turns donations to well-selected organizations into investments as well, creating an entirely new incentive to give (and to choose the most important causes to give to, assisting them at critical early stages of development, before widespread recognition). Owners will be able to display their collections publicly by releasing limited viewing accounts (most conveniently as URLs), with the controlling account accessible only through its secret name.

Another simple example will let restaurants self-rate their good days and bad days online in real time, with statistical averaging (so that a restaurant that always rates itself top will always be rated as average). Then discriminating diners could arrive to experience restaurants at their best, not when the cook is sick and the establishment would rather not be open at all (or at least not have many customers, and no influential ones). Of course this will work best when diners can decide shortly before coming, and do not need to make reservations far in advance.

A New Online Platform?

The key benefit of reproducing accounts is that they will make it very easy to replicate and distribute prior work to any number of people, who can in turn use that work as a base for adding additional changes. The prior work can have any degree of complexity, created by any number of people working together or separately in various times and places for similar or different purposes. Yet the works of these various people will usually be blended together in a pleasing, coherent whole (since otherwise the account representing that package would likely not have survived).

In other words, the online financial account could in some shape or form take the role that the operating system has had, and the browser could have had (and may yet have) -- creating a platform and environment in which software and other work created by thousands of separate teams and individuals can interoperate.

Using the account as a platform for blending and customizing capabilities allows very easy, highly automated money flow as a basic system or infrastructure resource. Of course financial trust must be assured -- and it can be, since the server has ultimate control of what any account is allowed to do, and it can delegate this control hierarchically (letting certain account owners extend certain trust to other persons by giving them enabled accounts, for example), making the task manageable. Different servers and the organizations running them will be known by their reputations for how well they manage the trade-offs between flexibility and trust.

Reproducing processes and inheritance have been powerful in many fields, but we do not know of any other design for financial accounts that could reproduce, with each new account inheriting services, settings, and other capabilities from its parent. (If you have heard of any such work, please let us know.) We believe that some version, not necessarily ours, will help artists make a living, assist economic development of poverty regions (where model contracts could share part of global superstar incomes with the artists' communities, giving the whole community incentives to help its artists be successful), help activists and charities raise funds for their work, and open doors to new business and fundraising models by handling many financial details automatically, making some models far more feasible and convenient than they would be today.

You can find our work rights-free at http://www.smart-accounts.org . Our strategy is to start public conversation about online financial accounts that can reproduce and inherit, so that those who could use these ideas will learn about them. Next steps will develop from the conversation.

References

1. "Fundathon": Toward Massively Multiplayer Online Fundraising Games, http://www.aidsnews.org/2007/07/fundr-fundathon.html

2. Fundraising: Selling Digital Art in Bulk through Prepaid URLs, http://www.aidsnews.org/2007/07/fundr-url.html

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