Money Streaming

This is a rehash of an idea that I had a few years ago, and it deals with super fast monetary transactions.

I don't want to say that this is a viable solution, it's more like a philosophical thought experiment: what would it lead to?

Right now, our money system is slow. When I send money to you through my bank, in e.g. Germany, it may take about two to three days for you to receive it. When I pay you by credit card, the transfer is instant, but it's actually not being debited from my account instantly, but a bit later.

Let's say our transactional system were super fast instead, so that it would take less than a second to transfer money from me to you. We would have close to no latency for any payment.

Let's further assume that there would even be no per-transaction setup overhead, like writing down the amount of money and an IBAN into a form and hitting "Send". Instead, we would make use of direct debit flows, where, once set up, money trickles from and to me.

As an example, my wage would not be payed by month, but by the second. Likewise, I would pay my rent per second, as well as my internet, my phone bill, my policies.

If there were any shortage of money encountered, it would be temporary, for a few seconds. If work everywhere is payed by an instant, I could also do a five minute job to replenish my resources for a short time.

Money streaming would work for both individuals as well as companies.

We would get used to small numbers being handled, and we could actually express our wellbeing in revenue/cost per second ratios. If my ratio were high, I would accumulate wealth. Likewise, if my ratio were low, I would lose money. My ratio would immediately show how I would be doing financially, and I could act on my situation early, and prevent debt.

There would no longer be sudden bursts of bills and invoices, accumulation of debt happens virtually in real time - right when an income flow stops, a red light would turn on, and something could be done about it in a short amount of time.

A lot of offerings would be based on per-second transactions fees. Renting technical equipment would become a standard, where we would pay fees directly as a machine works for us. The same would go for any other kind of service.

Micropayment would actually work.