RepliCounts: New Way to Use Money Online

Financial accounts that reproduce, inherit settings, and evolve?

The Idea

Modern e-commerce make possible online accounts that reproduce when their owner wants them to -- letting the "children" accounts inherit money, settings and other information from the parent. The new accounts are independent of the parent and can reproduce in turn, creating generations and family trees of accounts -- which can evolve through everyday community use, as they accumulate successive owners' changes and are selected for greater usefulness to people. We call this system RepliCounts (from REPLIcating acCOUNTS).

Why Account Replication?

The new "children" accounts can inherit settings of any complexity, instantly and effortlessly at birth; the owner can change these settings at any time, and the changes will be inherited, too. The result is a new financial infrastructure that can manage even highly complex and customized services easily. For example, such accounts could:


NASA Blue Marble 2012
  1. Inherit permissions and know-how to accept dozens of forms of payment, when approved by the account owner;
  2. Do business in many different languages, without machine translation;
  3. Operate an online storefront to sell digital goods (or better, mass sponsorships that make downloads or streamings free to networks of end users, while delivering the sponsor's message to them - see http://mass-sponsorship.blogspot.com/);
  4. Self-destruct instantly in certain conditions (such as likely loss or theft), returning any remaining money as directed -- even without any attention from the owner;
  5. Do their own accounting, and offer dozens of different accounting and other reports, always current to the minute;
  6. Compute (and eventually, pay) their own sales taxes automatically;
  7. Relieve gruntwork by automating non-judgment money tasks; and
  8. Provide a uniform, coherent financial infrastructure for running hundreds of applications.

Replicating processes work powerfully in other contexts; consider DNA, or nuclear reactions. Could replication work for money as well?

Open-Source Project

It was not obvious how to make replicating accounts work well in practice. Over several years I've designed one way to do so. Programming the infrastructure is surprisingly easy. But doing anything new with money is hard, for practical and legal reasons.

Our work is open-source and non-proprietary -- to benefit all, not just a handful of billionaires. If you want to work on this project, the door is open; email john2james at gmail.

For More Information

RepliCounts design and documentation went through many changes. We've archived some recent work here.

I'm doing a proof-of-principle implementation in Python ver. 3, at www.replicounts.COM. This demo runs, but is not ready for practical use.

We will rewrite the documentation, to make it more consistent and complete. Meanwhile here are some archived links:

We are not aware of any other project to develop replicating accounts. But many projects are exploring new ways to use money online. We set up a Money Innovation Search Engine (using a Google Custom Search), to find this related work.

Page updated 2012-05-16.