microstock market

["Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com>]

ultimately what cyberspace does in many ways is decrease
the "granularity" of economic transactions.

you can imagine that an economic transaction has an overhead
cost associatd with it needed to manage the bureacracy of
the cash transfer. the army of people that have to support
check passing, such as the mailman, bankers, etc., the people
in the company that have to open envelopes and punch
keys, etc. ad infinitum.

these vast teams/roles of people are going to vaporize to move
into other aspects of the economy. increasingly, the overhead
of an economic transaction will move toward the infinitesmal.
this radically changes many business models.

consider the stock market for example. you have a situation
where it doesn' t make sense for a company to be traded on
the stock market except after some threshhold has been reached.
I suspect this threshhold is due directly to economics that
could radically change in the near future (say a decade).

what I suspect this might mean is not merely new kinds of
stock markets, but a massive plethora of new forums in which
business can be transacted in cyberspace. I think we are
going to see many new stock exchanges as the capital moves
towards the ones that most efficiently handle it. and 

increasingly, I think you will see very small companies have
stocks. you will also see a much better means by which an
investor can judge the value of a company. the assets will
be more open and thoroughly revealed on public web sites
of the company. increasingly the outsider will be able
to "peer into" a company for investment or business 
purposes. the companies with the most open policies are 
going to be those most favored by their customers.

what would be neat is if one could invest in very small
companies or ideas. I suspect our economy is moving
in exactly this direction.

also in addition to this, I suspect that regulations 
governing stock transactions are going to be challenged
and increasingly melt away in the long run. the open market
will find its own ways of guaranteeing the safety of its
transactions that will make government interference
only draining or damaging.

so you can imagine that our economy of today is like moving
around big boulders-- you need a lot of people and organization
to create economic transactions. in the future, transactions
are going to decrease in granularity and you will have
a system more like the flow of electricity throughout an
entire system.

the revolutionary implications of cyberspace have barely
begun to be uncovered. ultimately it will radically change
the nature of our economics and government systems just
as the introduction of the printing press did in its
time.