Obsoleting the Current Money System.

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""""Taco Bell, Dunkin’ Donuts, Quiznos, and Red Robin want to see if consumers’ love of social gaming can be converted into commerce at their stores nationwide.

They’ve penned deals with Plink, a loyalty marketing start-up that’s set to announce its quick-serve brand test partners on Thursday. It’s pretty simple: the more Plink users spend at the restaurants, the more Facebook Credits they’ll earn to play games like FarmVille, CityVille, and The Sims.

Consumers can register their credit or debit card at Plink.com to get started. When they pay with the card at Taco Bell, Dunkin Donuts, Quiznos, or Red Robin restaurant, they’ll earn Facebook Credits that can be used to purchase virtual goods on Facebook games.

Peter Vogel, Plink co-founder, told ClickZ News on Wednesday that his firm will target Facebook ads at people who have “liked” the brands on the social site. He said his Denver-based company will also appear in a variety of Facebook games via paid promos to help establish traction for its loyalty program.

Vogel said Plink will get a cut of the food sale when it drives consumers into Taco Bell, Dunkin Donuts, Quiznos, or Red Robin. “Retail brands see Facebook and social gaming as huge opportunities that continue to grow,” he explained. “This is an easy risk-free way for them to kind of dip their toe in the water and try to drive some foot traffic.”
This article found here.""""""

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This new community of corporate owned academia techo-obsessives talking bs again. It all rests on the spurious assumption that evryone has these means of distributing exchange values - whereas only the wealthy have such distribution outlets in the first place.

Even with undoubted techno improvements, How many of the poorest who even produce these goods own them or exchange values in such a way - click on link below to see their liviong conditions.

Jem Bendell also has ZERO understanding of history.

He obviously not only has zero understanding of history but also of archeology and anthropological evidence.

Well before any medieval 'knights' the early barter communities used money - and here we're takking about early pre Roman 'celtic' tribes BC civilisations - these werre systems of transaction they used because it was easier to use a system of exchange value that could be used across items that were purchased.

The credit or debit card - now a feature of modern life places power in the hands on the banks particularly - hence the talk on obsoleting these - and cheques - to be replaced by biometric identification - less of an approximation to 'obsoleting money' than monetisintg people - and hence also to the banks moves to centralise control.

Financial control = political control.

And it will be sold to you as new 'freedom technologies' to replace 'old obsolete systems'.

And the techno wonder money distribution means will be made by workers living in conditions like this;

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=chinese...,r:9,s:174



http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=chinese...9,r:15,s:0

Each window represents a room measuring 12ft by 12ft. Up to 15 workers are crammed into each room.

Bear in mind they work 70 - 90 hours a week. When they are not being worked to death in the factory, they are sleeping in those dorms. There is no time for anything else.

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[taif dhia]

(06-13-2011 10:52 PM)Djoser Wrote:  Since some of us envision a moneyless society, how long until it's actually achieved IF the current system were to crumble now? How quickly will it spread? And...What are we to do with the mo-nays, the cheddar, the benjamins, ze denero, the jacksons in our wallets? Light them mofos in the world's biggest bon fire? Or recycle?

if thats real $ theyre burning, we should thank them for reducing inflation! lol

while the thought of a moneyless society is inspiring, "if the current system were to crumble now" it would likely be replaced by the time tested system that is barter.
i think the argentina currency collapse is a great case study for what we may be in for soon, globally. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_e...(1999–2002 ) . what arose as an organic reaction to the collapse of the collective illusion that is the banking system, was local currencies, barter systems, worker cooperatives (workers literally occupied the factories and started producing without the owners, some good docs on this just google it). bitcoin is interesting, but there are low tech systems of trade that will work even when the power grid or the internet is down. i am interested in the concept of "hours" as a currency ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_banking ), and some way to convert time banks into bitcoin on a global level, without the need for fiat currency, would be awesome. but i think that people like to fantasize about venus project like money free techno untopias, but im not really sure if people are ready for that. i think that locally controlled currencies, ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_currencies ), credit unions, coops, barter, gifting, freeganism, maximizing self sufficiency (reducing need to trade) etc. are a greater threat to the current system.

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Yes, Google Once Considered Issuing Its Own Currency



The digital world has BitCoin; it's come close, it turns out, to having SchmidtCoin.

Google, Eric Schmidt revealed in a speech today, once considered getting into the digital currency game. The company has seen "various proposals," its chairman told a crowd at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, to develop a currency that would serve as tender for peer-to-peer economic exchanges taking place across Google's platforms.

The chimerical currency would have been called Google Bucks, IT World reports. (I would have preferred SchmidtCoin; I guess this is why I am not the head of Google.)

So why, ultimately, didn't Google go the way of Facebook and its Facebook Credits? The same reason it doesn't do a lot of things: legal concerns. "Governments are typically wary of the potential for money laundering with such proposals," IT World notes. As Schmidt put it: "We decided we didn't want to get into that because of these issues."

ref

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Dollar-Less Iranians Discover Virtual Currency

Under sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, dollars are hard to come by in Iran. The rial fell from 20,160 against the greenback on the street market in August to 36,500 rials to the dollar in October. It’s settled, for now, around 27,000. The central bank’s fixed official rate is 12,260. Yet there’s one currency in Iran that has kept its value and can be used to purchase goods from abroad: bitcoins, the online-only currency.



Created in 2009 by a mysterious programmer named Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoins behave a lot like any currency. Their value is determined by demand, and they can be used to buy stuff. Bitcoin transactions are encrypted and handled by a decentralized global network of tens of thousands of personal computers. Merchants around the world accept the currency, from a bakery in San Francisco to a dentist in Finland. Individuals who own bitcoins and wish to exchange them for physical currencies like euros or dollars can use exchange sites such as localbitcoins.com, a Finland-based site founded by Jeremias Kangas. “I believe that bitcoin is, or will be in the future, a very effective tool for individuals who want to avoid sanctions, currency restrictions, and high inflation in countries such as Iran,” Kangas wrote in an e-mail.

The advantage for Iranians is that bitcoins can be swapped for dollars that can then be kept outside the country. Another plus: Regulators can’t easily track the transactions, since bitcoins aren’t issued from a central server. Bitcoin users can conduct business on virtual private networks, which hide customers’ identities.

At online store coinDL.com, shoppers can use bitcoins to buy Beyond Matter, the latest album from Iranian artist Mohammad Rafigh. Anyone in the U.S. downloading songs, which fetch .039 bitcoins or 45¢ each, risks violating U.S. sanctions. That doesn’t bother Rafigh, who’s studying computer engineering as well as playing music. “Bitcoin is so interesting for me,” Rafigh wrote in an e-mail. “I wish the culture of using digital money spreads all over the world, because it does not have any dependency on anything like politics.” Rafigh has translated some bitcoin software into Farsi for his friends. “I love Iran, and if bitcoin is good for me, it can be good for more Iranians like me.”

From here

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http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Threa...vio-Gesell

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The real cost of the virtual price
I thought I’d put together a short entry on the proliferation of virtual currencies and “socialisation of money” after reading today that Facebook is launching a new currency API for converting between Facebook credits and other currencies. This is another baby-step for Facebook in becoming the World’s largest social bank as more apps and websites begin to utilize Facebook credits. It seems to me that the fate of Facebook ultimately depends upon its ability to leverage wide-scale adoption of Facebook credits aswell as integrate effective location-based mobile marketing.

Facebook’s tentacles already reach out across the web with popular blogs and news sites integrating with the site: login with Facebook, Facebook comments, like our page, frictionless sharing etc. Imagine if completing such transactions earned you Facebook credits that have a notional monetary value, that’s what’s happening as social analytics derive performance indicators that can have economic value attributed to them. This is where things start to get a bit muddy in World of virtual currencies and that hesitation can clearly be seen as most (but not all) of them have very limited exchange value for real World consumables.

Why is that? Well for one thing we’re heading into new financial territory here and the blurring of “the real economy” and “the virtual economy”. However, in some sense this has already happened, the conventional monetary system pulled this party trick a long time ago, but few people even noticed. What most people think of as “money” is in fact a virtual currency (97% of money is digital). In addition, the paper money we use is just a receipt that is redeemable for nothing but itself. Even though one can buy things with this “money”, that’s only possible whilst people believe it to “hold value”, otherwise it’s just a piece of paper with some picture of a dead git on it. Then to add insult to injury, most of the economy has been virtualized through speculation as banks continually abuse their ability to extend credit.

So back to business, the blurring of “the real economy” and “the virtual economy”. What presents a challenge in this new social reality is the inevitable merging/alignment of social currencies and private currencies and to what extent they functionally co-exist. Social currencies can’t really be used to “buy” things because they aren’t fungible nor depleted by use, however they can grant access to information, resources and opportunities. For example word of mouth can land you “the right job” or they can work like property for example sharing your data with a Facebook app lets you use it for “free”. Social currencies do play an important part in contextualizing social relationships and helping us find the right information and connections. As social analytics spreads one would hope that the quality of information and network connections improves and the burden of information overload lessens.

The danger some would argue though is of becoming caught in a filter bubble, siloed off from the rest of the network, but I don’t necessarily see that as a “bad” thing. Psychologically, we can only maintain a certain number of connections to people around us before things get chaotic and cluttered. I would rather the information and resources I have available to me be determined by peripheral connections because it’s more human, more embodied. Do I really want more status updates from someone the other side of the World who I’ve never met and have very little in common with than a friend who I play sports with regularly? If anything might this make people think more about the quality of the relationships and wake them up a bit from their silly little pretentious and narcissistic social reality games.

As for private currencies, the ability for them to succeed depends upon the size of the networks using them and competitive advantage they offer over other forms of exchange. As more currencies establish themselves, new exchange platforms will take shape to help link together different currencies into the larger economy. Add to this the plethora of mobile payment systems coming online and you have end-to-end services where people can easily transact in the real World using virtual currencies (this is a few years off yet in terms of mainstream adoption, but bitcoin is leading the way).

With the rise in both virtual currencies and social currencies we will see many more opportunities for “virtual work” and microentrepreneurship as people switch from jobs to gigs. One of the concerns I have here (atleast from looking at microjob sites) is that a lot of the tasks are superfluous gimmicks, I really hope people don’t give up their day jobs to do shit like this. Getting “paid” for playing World of Warcraft or FarmVille is one thing, but remember there are real people out there and real vegetables to be harvested…


from here