The Universe Is Between Your Ears

Business Idea: Micro-Currency Economies

The web desperately needs a way for people to send very small amounts of money to people. 

This whole idea that you should give away everything is toxic. 

If you could pay a cent or even a fraction of a cent to use someone’s content, wouldn’t you feel great knowing you’re helping them pay for something else?

Of course, you’re going to have to create some sort of marketplace for popular items, get people to buy into your economy with granularity.  They then have cents left over to invest in cool little things…

Perhaps you could create a marketplace where kids could pay other kids thousandths of dollars “PLINKS” “TOKENS” “DODADDS” if they like a drawing and want to tip the kid… who knows….

What’s going to happen?

Better go in strong.  PayPal and Amazon will be right there, extending their services to support micro payments.

Comments

2 responses to “Business Idea: Micro-Currency Economies”

  1. aBigHairySpider Avatar
    aBigHairySpider

    The technology is easy. The problem is that it costs at least $0.20 to collect a dollar by credit card. An ACH transaction will be less, if you have a large volume of transactions going through per month from people's bank accounts, but really, you need some marketplace where people don't mind depositing an amount like $10.00… so they get 10,000 "beads" or "thingiebobs" or "trinkets" to throw out to people… Actually, Paypal could do this easily, but they're too busy collecting that large transaction fee for each one… This business would MAKE LESS MONEY… collecting a discount when the seller CASHES OUT of the economy. See, Paypal makes money every time money moves… not when you take it out. This new company would have to operate like a bank, investing a portion of the cash on hand to make extra money.

    Reply
  2. Smiley Avatar
    Smiley

    I'm with you on this one Joe. The real trick to making it work is developing a system that can be implemented on the Micro-economy rather than requiring an Apple, IBM or AOL level resources. Anyway, here's my idea:

    http://my.opera.com/PMAco/blog/2010/09/26/gutenberg-spinning-in-grave-not

    Smiley

    Reply

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