Fundraising new idea: online payment "smart codes" that can reproduce

* Note that a server might issue only a few codes, which could reproduce into millions if the code owners and their business or social networks wanted that many. The server might charge a small fee for each new code created, to prevent uncontrolled growth.

* Smart codes will have many uses besides fundraising. For example, they could let artists and performers even in remote villages, far from any computer or online access, sell downloads of their work through networks of fans and supporters worldwide, with essentially no startup cost

beyond recording and editing the work. Web links with smart codes in them will allow donors and supporters to buy any number of discounted bulk downloads--charging up smart Web links with free downloads that instantly pay the artists or their village when anyone uses the art. Smart codes could even compute and pay taxes or other fees automatically the moment sales are made--and mail paper checks (through a contract service) or otherwise transfer money to the artists. Code owners will just check boxes at the control center for these services, provided the server offers them.

* This smart-code design provides unprecedentedly flexible financial accounts that can be created, have children, be shaped for special purposes, or die, in an instant. The children can inherit dozens or hundreds of options and services (financial and otherwise) that the server has made available, creating family trees of accounts that evolve as users' needs change. End users will have ultimate control over most of these options and services, in case they want to make any changes--but in practice they may never need to change anything or even know that the control center exists. This is because smart codes will usually come into their lives not randomly, but through business or social networks, or for special purposes. So all the options an account owner needs will often have already been set by other people, in ancestor codes, before the new code was born.

* The estimated processing cost per smart-code transaction is less than a tenth of a cent--so even small donations like 20 cents become available for constructing rituals of community and participation.

* Some of the most important business and fundraising uses for smart codes (including three of the four fundraising scenarios noted in this article) have no need for any critical mass of users. They will work perfectly well even if only one person or organization in the world were using smart codes, and no one else had ever heard of them--greatly facilitating the introduction of this technology.

Next Steps

Could something so easy do so much, yet not have been invented already? Yes, for two reasons. First, this system of computer-controlled money could not have worked at all until recently, when Web access became widely available. Also, today's business mindset would be unlikely to invent it, due to the locus on elaborate registration. In practice, conventional registration destroys the flexibility of account reproduction, with its inheritance of options and services. And without inheritance, the control center with dozens or hundreds of services would be unfeasible, as codes could not evolve in the community without the tedious work of manually setting the options required for each new code.