Open Money main characteristics

The aim of this page is to list and explain the main characteristics of what we envision in Open Money and why.

Peer-to-peer

This for either technical, safety and ethical reasons:

• Technical: the absence of client server infrastructure allows to use the current home computer network without the need to deploy dedicated heavy infrastructure. It also solves scalability issues.
• Safety: by being delocalized, distributed and duplicated, information becomes almost impossible to alter or destroy. Rather than heavy control structure, the security is also provided by a sousveillance mechanism.
• Ethical: in the contrary to centralized banking that gives full control to a small minority, a delocalized, distributed, duplicated and open information is the best way to guaranty its democratic access and evolution.

More on Peer-to-Peer in Wikipedia.

Granularity and Emergence

Granularity means that the global system works using the emergent properties of many individual entities interacting with each other rather through micro-management by large institutions. Each piece of information and each tool should be formatted in a way that joining or quitting the network and its stream of activity is easy and painless.

Viral

This means that people have personal interest to attract other people, and new participants have an interest to join. The viral property can usually begin only once a critical mass of participants has been reached, it's useless before. The main issue resides in the number and the building of this critical mass, and the amount of energy to invest in it.

Democratic

The way the currency is defined, architectured, distributed, controlled, has to be a democratic process, i.e. to belong to and serve the community that made it. See Democratic Money for more details.