You’ve Got to Treat it Like a Lady

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Money Services in the Coming Decade

You’ve Got to Treat it Like a Lady.

So my friends, now there you have it
I said it’s the easy simple way
Now if you fail ta do this
Don’t blame her if she looks my way
‘Cause I’m gonna treat her like a lady…

‘Money goes where it is treated best’, as the saying goes – and there have never been better ways for courting it than those emerging today. We think a lot of that money will be on the move in the coming decade, seeking much better treatment.

Transporting money around the world has always been an iffy proposition. If ancient highwaymen and pirates didn’t rob your gold by the sword or pistol, some modern coalition of politicians, banksters, hackers and regulators will find a subtler way to lighten your wallet through inflation, bail-ins, rehypothecation, predatory taxation, capital controls and other forms of legalized theft.

Historically, there hasn’t been much the average person could do about this – but history is about to change. Transparent, incorruptible, irreversible, peer-to-peer open ledgers are the exciting new way to treat your money better! It’s the next megatrend, driven by the flight of capital from the rampant lawlessness creeping rapidly into the current financial system.

Cutting out the middlemen

Open ledgers cut out the middlemen where most of this mischief occurs. Decentralized, robotically honest software running everywhere – the only place it can’t be corrupted – will take the place of those middlemen, ultimately providing most forms of financial services with a far faster, fairer, friendlier, freer, and more fastidious quality of service.

Bitcoin started it all a few years ago with the ability to confirm currency payments anywhere in the world in one hour instead of the many days it can take the current financial system. Three techno-generations later, BitShares offers an industrial strength network of digital asset exchanges, able to execute most familiar financial transactions in one second – and scaling to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. Ethereum, Identabit, MUSE, NXT, and an alphabet soup of other innovative start-ups are exploring ways to disrupt every erstwhile centralized industry from finance, music, gaming, and even polling and public elections.

OpenLedger

This month, CCEDK.com and Cryptonomex.com are unveiling OpenLedger on the peer-to-peer BitShares Exchange Network. Our competitors and partners are joining us because, well, it’s an open ledger that even we don’t own! There will be six such members from six countries, with six diverse business models when the curtain goes up on October 13. Each member gets the profits from its own customers while offering them the benefits of shared market depth and the ability to leverage the financial products and services of all other members. These include smart coins, smart contracts, collateralized bonds, financial derivatives, prediction markets and user-issued assets ranging from stocks to coupons to tickets to frequent flier miles.

And yet none of these members represent a counterparty risk to their customers, because their customers always keep cryptographic control of their own assets, even while their funds are sitting on the decentralized exchange or moving around the network. Multi-signature safeguards you can design for yourself will virtually eliminate vulnerabilities to hackers, dishonest employees, and rogue governments.

Unprecedented use cases

Member companies can now team up without negotiating, contracting, or even knowing each other. A farm worker in the Philippines can feed pesos into an ATM machine from one network member, and his wife in Kosovo can buy groceries in Euros with it seconds later on an unknown partner’s debit card. The next decade will see a Cambrian explosion of frictionless, disruptive economic opportunities in which the current gatekeepers must play nice or simply be bypassed.

Or consider this scene. Stock exchange broker Joe is sitting at his PC in Toronto, Canada. He can now trade on stock markets across the entire world due to OpenLedger and its financial platform for cryptocurrencies. He has closed some great trades and made a great deal of money. He decides to send part of this to his family back in Indonesia. With the click of a button the money is now in his wife’s bank account, thanks to collaboration between a crypto service and a global remittance company, ready for her to do with as she wants. He then decides to go downtown to cash out a few Canadian dollars with his NanoCard, using the same card an hour later to pay for his dinner at the local Sushi restaurant. All funds for trading and spending originate as BITUSD from his OpenLedger wallet. This is located on the blockchain, and BitUSD funds all of his costs instantly – when a transfer is made, when cash is withdrawn from an ATM, and when he pays the restaurant. In each case, his wife can even receive an SMS for her to confirm according to the integrated multi-signature account procedure – ensuring that Joe doesn’t overspend even if trading is going well!

The coming decade

So www.OpenLedger.info is only a glimpse into the early stages of the coming decade. It will be a time of instantaneous, almost free transactions across incorruptible, transparent, open public networks that respect and guarantee individual property rights with the rule of law directly encoded into their open source software. Many of today’s biggest players will try to dominate this new financial medium with their own proprietary networks. But the mere act of owning such a network robs it of its incorruptibility and renders it useless to everyone else.

The future of money is open, incorruptible, secure and private. It will not be a system that anyone can own.

With apologies to Neil Young and Linda Ronstadt…

Here is a rose but you better not pick it
It only grows when it’s on the vine.
A handful of thorns and you’ll know you’ve missed it
You lose your role when you say the word ‘mine’.