Money from the Future

Prototype of peer learning activities for Stellar.org.
Presented at the Embassy Network, April 24, 2015

Introduction

Hi I’m Vanessa. I’ll be your mission control for the evening.
Several people in this room know me from my role at Peer 2 Peer University—Jessy Kate, Ben—but I have this new gig that I am super super stoked about.
One of the reasons I joined Stellar is that I believe there is a conversation happening about digital currency that needs other voices. So this is my first prototype about digital currency and learning to help widen the dialogue.
Also I know we’re all social change-makers in the room, and in many ways money is at the root of a lot of the systems we’re wrestling with.
Question to crowd: Who here is technical? Who here owns a digital currency (don’t care which one!)
You have a special job. To not talk to each other.
To help new folks understand why this is important.
To wit, we’re going to start with a pinky swear. Raise your pinky before we can go on this mission together:
I pinky swear:
to be nice to each other.
to be open this this experiment.

We’ve Settled Mars
We’ve Settled Mars
We left the US and we didn’t bring any money with us--there was a system, but there isn’t anymore. we left it all behind.
Basically Noah’s ark for money.
You are sent in as a team of social scientists and designers to come up with how money should work on this new planet.

Why Mars?
So many of the narratives around space exploration / sci fi exist because we get the chance to reset all the ickiness and baggage that we have here on Earth
• Since currency has historically been associated with inequality, inefficiency but also identity, if we press “reset” what would we want to keep and do away with?

Your Mission:
Your mission is to design a way to transact in the future, and rethink what value could possibly mean in the future.
But first, this is a place of exploration and play, and since we’re prototyping and imagining…there are no wrong answers.

Example: Mozzadrella’s lightbeams
- Distributed through globes found at community events.
- Acts of altruism result in a salary.
- Ledger information stored in globes that wirelessly transit to each other.

What you need to do
Remember this is the future
So robots, aliens, salient crystals are all fair game

Harvesting:
- Lets harvest out the best traits of everyone’s system
- Our currency’s name is x, people get it by doing y, store in z and when we transact this happens

Infrastructure:
Since everyone here is very creative, we’ve come up with an array of amazing ideas
So instantaneous transfer, mixing of currencies, mobile money everywhere
for all those awesome ideas to exist, we need a base layer, or power grid for currency that is accessible everywhere, to everyone.

Back to the Present
To zoom you back to the present for a moment...

At Stellar.org we care
Stellar.org cares about these things, about creating financial infrastructure for all to access.
And for communities to create the right tools for themselves

We have two goals
One is technical, and the other is social

Let me break down what our protocol makes possible:

We need open access so people can save.
We need low transfer costs so people can send
We need financial history so people can borrow.
Interoperability so we can transact with aliens
And micro transactions so people can borrow in the amount that they need. From aliens.

We create an open protocol that’s a financial grid for money
what means is that two entities can move currency to each other
fast + secure
anyone can use

Thinkers + makers can use Stellar to build products upon
As an example, quantified selfers in the room could build an app where you bank $5 for every 5 miles you run

Stellar give away
- to welcome folks into the ecosystem, we give away 95% of the stellars which are created
- Stellar is the native currency of the protocol—so communities can build a bridge to their own currency

Why Giveaway? To enable Open Access
Open->means accessible to everyone
Including the folks who are not currently reached by financial services
And that’s a lot of people. Like 2 billion.

We Can Change the Way we Think About Money
Goal of that exercise is to see our financial systems as malleable
Get us thinking about how we might take the participatory culture we love, and take it to solve systemic issues like financial inclusion

Now let’s talk about why you came here?
- We’ve arranged everyone into groups based on topic
- Your discussion topic is now that you have a dream for currency, and know about Stellar, how does that affect the issue you came here for?
- How can you use Stellar to do those things?