(2009-04-15) Newitz Rushkoff Alternative Currencies

Annalee Newitz looks at alternative Currency ideas from Douglas Rushkoff and others. Craigs List CraigBucks, China's QQ coins (started as Virtual Money), M Pesa Mobile minutes... When the developed world gets over its bias for "printing press-era cash technology" then complementary currencies will be commonplace here too, Rushkoff predicts. He sees a future that has people literally reprogramming their economic systems, using computer networks and handheld devices to administer new forms of grassroots cash. Those currencies could be almost anything: Cash we can use only at one local restaurant, cash cards for Wal-Mart or other chain stores, babysitting dollars we can trade in our neighborhoods.

Related: Just last month a slick new digital-gold app for the IPhone shipped, allowing holders of Gold Money--a gold-backed currency, with over $631 million worth of bullion in its London and Zurich vaults--to touch their iPhone screens and instantly transfer as little as a centigram of gold (about $0.30 worth) to other Gold Money users.... As EGold's Douglas Jackson can attest, rolling your own currency can be a risky business: Having swiftly built up a base of over 5 million account holders drawn to e-gold both for its liquidity and its less-than-rigorous customer-identification policies, Jackson and other e-gold principals were hit with a federal indictment in April 2007 alleging that the currency was, as a Justice department statement put it, "a highly favored method of payment by operators of investment scams, credit card and identity fraud, and sellers of online child pornography." Last summer the defendants pleaded guilty to money laundering and related charges, and while they were spared prison time, e-gold itself has for the time being been put on ice: The currency, which once circulated at "velocities" of over $2 million in payments per day, has effectively been shut down until Jackson and company can bring it up to regulatory code.