Big Data and the Future of Money

The subject of this post was a presentation at the World Big Data Conference 2013 by Daniel Austin, Principal Architect of PayPal.

Money Systems meets Big Data and the future opens up!

From the presentation:

• 11. EVOLUTION: MONEY AS AN APPLICATION • Digitally encoded currencies are only the first step • Need to add application functionality – “Object-oriented Money” – Encapsulate data, business rules – May include its own models – Allows for indeterministic behavior • Conditional Money – Tied to a specific purpose or intent
• 12. SELF-AWARE MONEY? What if you wanted to send $1000 into the future, say 1,000 years? • We need a means of preserving and transferring value across longer timescales than existing currencies allow • By giving money autonomy and conditionality we could enable action on our behalf over long periods of time. • 

Yes!  Money as an Object.   In my prior post I explained that in the monetary system I propose money is debt free.  Once created as a uniquely serialized digital dollar with a value of one it lives forever.  It is a fixed central instance of all dollars in the controlled population on which the owner associated with that dollar changes as  function of a transaction.  Money is a Class:Object with attributes and behaviors.  Now it is just a number in an account.  Users would continue to see it as a number in an account but each the total amount of dollars in each user transaction would "explode" to each serialized digitized single dollar in the Cloud  (With provision for decimal amounts) and there the new owner would replace old owner.  All that is transparent to the user.

An Object is Self Aware.  Money now is not.  When we design and define what money is we can manage what money does.

Big Data can handle the volume and complexity.  The complexity becomes simplicity in a well designed Object Oriented architecture.