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How It Works


Sustained income for ongoing cc development

In conventional economics, if you can't charge for something, it's valueless. In the usual money game, if you can't sell it, it's worth nothing. They also say you can't sell water by the river. So, how can we make a living giving away free money?

The cost of open money services is already very low and will only get lower. It will never be realistic to finance cc development through any surcharge on service provision.

Indeed, the open money space can't be enclosed - it is, because it's virtual, a commons. You can't build fences in the open money space. So there's none of the usual incentive for conventional entrepreneurial action - it's hard to make a quick profit. Yet open money can raise funds for development if it uses means that fuel the process without collapsing into a fight for advantage.

There isn't a problem with the value of the basic service. By comparison with bank charges and the services banks offer, open money is a great deal. However, by their nature, cc can be freely provided, and so they will be provided for free, more or less. Open money curiously compromises its own development by giving itself away.

How can a long term revenue base be set up to provide funds for ongoing development? One proposal is an arrangement where three bodies of interest are comfortable to benefit from their joint association, within which no one body has ultimate control, and each participates in equitable collaboration. By their association, they establish and maintain a flow of funds that serve their joint interests and harm none.

The total diversion to this revenue stream is very small,

  • and thus not attractive, so competitive efforts are virtually pointless.
  • nor creating resistance - as initial contributions are virtually painless.
  • and also, as an automatic internal registry procedure, virtually costless

Most of the direct revenue, around 90%, is then redirected to support non profit organizations, providing virtuous cover for the 10% that goes to regional development funds.

In summary, the basic model -

  • cc college is responsible for the naming system in Japan
  • and assigns domains to cc service providers to operate cc cystems,
  • including a protocol that generates funding on a regional and local basis for
      (a) non profit organizations and
      (b) cc program development
  • local and regional programs are informally associated at a national level - presently through the japan open money project - "jomp"
  • jomp supports the college - however, the college is its own independent association.

The college gives ccsp the licence to provide cc account services, if they support the development efforts that increase "cc" use, and the developers in turn support the college in the task of developing and maintaining national standards and procedures.

The pieces work together or not at all, with no ownership or monopoly, just a matter of relationships and responsibilities. If the participants collaborate and the outcomes meet all their needs, the venture will prosper. Otherwise it will fail.

There are precedents for this way of working on common goals. Dee Hock - in "The Chaordic Alliance" - tells how the VISA network began in exactly such a way. However, perhaps the most spectacular example is the development and growth of the internet itself - a project where nobody was in charge.

Of course, for any such collaboration to be successful, good peer to peer processes are essential. Those who make the world work, and make the work good, are those who are willing to say what they are going to do, then willing to do what they said they would do, and then finally willing to say what they did. Projects of this nature cannot happen without an effective do-say-do network.


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