Electronic Money

I decided to renew the domain www.OSRTX.com (Open Source Real Time eXchange). My original plan was to give the idea to Deep Capture. I felt that the idea could be of value in their push for reform of the NASDAQ.

Naked Short selling (aka Failures to Deliver) exists because regulators created an artificial gap between a stock transaction and the closing of the transaction. For example, if you bought a share of stock in GM, there is a three day gap between the transaction and the clearing of the stock during which hedge funds and brokers could resell the share you purchased.

Doing stock transactions in real time would close the gap and end the problems of FTDs. The second part of the reform was open source programming. Currently, stock transactions take place in a black box designed by folks like the progressive hero Bernard Madoff. Things happen in this black box that are not in the best interest of the stock holders. Developing a stock exchange with open source technology would shed light in dark places and the roaches on Wall Street would scatter.

I was planning on letting the domain expire. $10 is big bucks these days. I decided to renew it because I had a short epiphany this morning. It dawned on me that one could use the structure I had designed for the OSRTX itself for money.

Paper money suffers the same fault as stock. It is possible for the government to go wild with the printing press and print too much of it. It is also possible for people to counterfeit it.

It would be possible to create a monetary system where the money was simply entries in a database. Every dollar would have a position in the database. People would then have cards. These cards ccould have numbers. I would use a 32bit or possibly 64bit number. A money transaction would check the current number associated with a dollar, then assign the dollar to the new card. The database for the card would keep track of its money; so there would be checks and balances.

This system isn't all that incredible when one realizes that this is what currently happens. If you look, you will see that all your paper money has serial numbers.

The proponents of the gold standard like gold because there is a fixed quanity of gold. Were we using an electronic monetary system with a fixed database, one would end up with the same fixed quanity of money.

I have not pursued this idea beyond the realization that it would be possible to create such a system.