London open money project

An application that prints its own money naturally evolves an unusual business plan. This one is particularly unusual since there's an embedded paradox in the deployment of open money, the nature and form of which virtually precludes conventional toll-booth revenue models.

An important component of the community way model is that it realises "real" money revenues from the process of creating virtual money - a development engine that generates revenues, radically reducing investment needs. This intial phase of the development programme won't operate for long, maybe 6 months to a year, but during that time it's a nice little earner.

Although the system is essentially exothermic, like a real cold fusion in the money space, once this cat's out of the bag it's essentially free and can't readily be re-enclosed. It's not easy selling water at the riverside, and trying to charge for money after you've given it away is unlikely to be successful.

David Isenberg - http://isen.com - analyses a similar difficulty that faces the providers of bandwidth - http://www.netparadox.com/netparadox.html - "The best network is the hardest one to make money running."

In this case, the strategy for financing development is to operate open money development as a fund-raising initiative on behalf of the third sector as a whole - charities, non-profits, community groups, schools, hospitals, churches etc. Providing £10 to the community for every £1 directed to the development program presents a strong defence against the sort of competitive encroachment that would quickly become a race to the bottom.

The core level of participation required to begin the London project is the active participation in community way programmes of businesses active in London region with a total of around 1000 employees. This is sufficient to yield cw£50k for development, and thereafter a steady expansion in operations and revenues can be reasonably expected.

We estimate the overall scale of this project (in the London region) to be around £100m over a period of perhaps 5 years, with perhaps £1 billion raised for the community. The yield in other regions should be similar.