Do you know of any online monetary systems?
I recently came across bitcoin, it is what I was really looking for at the time. "You say you want a more ""stable"" system. Recall from your introductory economics courses that money has three roles: a medium of exchange (here is $, give me goods), a unit of account (you owe me $; the business made $ last year), and a store of value (I have saved $ for the future!). I assume that you are mostly concerned with the store-of-value role being eroded due to inflation. But first consider that most people still want regular currency, so as a medium of exchange or accounting unit anything would face an uphill battle. If you discard that role for your currency, and only want to store value with it, you could just buy equities and commodities and baskets of currencies and debt in a brokerage account (possibly using mutual funds) to store your value. Trillions of dollars' worth of business takes place this way every year already. Virtual currency was a bit of a dot-com bubble thing. The systems which didn't go completely bust and are still around have been beset by money-laundering, and otherwise remain largely an ignored niche. An online fiat currency has the same basic problem that another currency has. You need to trust the central bank not to create more money and cause inflation (or even just abscond with the funds... or go bankrupt / get sued). Perhaps the Federal Reserve may be jerking us around on that front right now.... they're still a lot more believable than a small private institution. Some banks might possibly be trustworthy enough to launch a currency, but it's hard to see why they'd bother (it can't be a big profit center, because people aren't willing to pay too much to just use money.) And an online currency that's backed by commodities (e.g. gold) is going to be subject to potentially violent swings in the prices of commodities. Imagine getting a loan out for your house, denominated in terms of e-gold, and then the price of gold triples. Ouch?" "Congratulations!  You see the problem.  You can't get away from unstable currencies. The other problem is that the US will shut down anything that appears to be providing a replacement for the US Dollar.  Once a token or medallion or gift certificate or whatever starts being used outside the confines of one business or one network of businesses, it will be shut down, quickly.  It happened with Las Vegas gambling tokens.  Another more recent attempt was with the Liberty Dollar, gold and silver coins and certificates that not only had precious metal backing, but whose proponents encouraged taking them to retailers and paying with them as if they were US Dollars.  There were other problems with this idea, but it was the competitive stature of the Liberty dollar that got the headquarters raided and the main site shut down. Basically, all signs point toward dealing with currencies and their state of being systematically eroded over time.  If you do find one that appears to exist, be wary, because the rules can change at any time, and the ""money"" will be nowhere near as liquid as a proper currency." "Edit: I discovered Bitcoin a few months after I posted this answer. I would strongly recommend anyone interested in this question to review it, particularly the myths page that dispels much of the FUD. Original answer: Although it is not online, as a concept the Totnes Pound may be of interest to you. I live quite close to this village (in the UK) and the system it promotes does work well.  According to the   Transition Town Totnes website this   means that it is ""a community in a   process of imagining and creating a   future that addresses the twin   challenges of diminishing oil and gas   supplies and climate change , and   creates the kind of community that we   would all want to be part of."" If you are looking for a starting place to introduce a new type of currency, perhaps in response to over-dependence on oil and global trade, then reading about the Transition Towns initiative could provide you with the answers you're looking for." I'm the equivalent of the FED at ROBLOX. I run a virtual economy there worth millions of dollars. Even though we are in the business of printing our own money, we've seen much more stability in our currency than in the USD. It actually appreciates over time. I don't think it would make a good investment though, nor would any of the online virtual currencies that I am aware of. I'm not sure, but I think the monetary system of Second Life or World of Warcraft would correspond to what you are looking for. I don't think they are independent of the dollar though, since acquiring liquidity in those games can be done through exchange for real dollars. But there can be more closed systems, maybe Sim type games where this is not the case. I hope this helps. This site lets people deposit gold into an account.  Once you have an account setup you can pay others in gold online.  I haven't used it or know of anyone who has so I cannot provide any feedback to how well it works.
Online banks are the future. As long as you don't need a clerk to talk to (and why would you need?) there's nothing you can't do with an online bank that you can with a brick and mortar robbers. I use E*Trade trading account as a checking account (it allows writing paper checks, debit card transactions, ACH in/out, free ATM, etc). If you don't need paper checks that often you can use ING or something similar. You can always go to a local credit union, but those will wave the fee in exchange for direct deposit or high balance, and that you can also get from the large banks as well, so no much difference there. Oh where where did Washington Mutual go.... "I'm currently using You Need A Budget for this. It lets you track spending my category and ""save"" money in particular accounts from month to month. They also have some strong opinions about how one should manage one's cashflow, so check it out to see if it'll work for you. It's neither web-based nor free, but the licensing terms are very reasonable." "Uh, have you tried google docs? Start off simple. Other than that, for the moment I use GNUCash. Some day I might try to write my own, but for now it works well enough. I have a number of scheduled transactions in GNUCash, and it records them days in advance. You talk about ""I should have how much money"", but GNUCash offers a slightly better format: Future Minimum Balance. If you want to know whether you can spend money in an account without triggering a chain reaction, that's the number you want. Being web-based so that it can be accessed from any OS. GNUCash is cross platform, with Windows, OSX and Linux clients. It also supports mysql/postgres database backends, so while it's not ""Web based"", you can keep your data ""in the cloud""." If I understand correctly, you're actually asking why there isn't a society whose members generally accept/use any currency for transactions, and just like, Google the exchange rate or something.  The answer is because it's exceptionally inconvenient.  Can you imagine having a wallet with 200 pouches for all the different currencies?  Why would you want to deal with exchange rates all the time?  What if the value of a currency changes?  (A single currency at least has the illusion of being stable).  Et cetera. I think it's interesting to look at bitcoin not as a get-rich quick scheme, but rather a tool to study socio-economics through looking how areas in developing countries view this type of model (and the entire world at large of course).   The entire crypto-coin scene has a variety of different algorithms which replicate different monetary policies to promote the most value and high functioning societies. *For example: dogecoin was meant as a quick laugh but has now developed into an inflation based coin to encourage high velocity through tipping. This micropayment model and friendly community hope to gain adoption through spreading it far and wide*.   Bitcoin looks at the properties that made gold a useful state-less trade asset and tried to adapt that to the web. It solved traditional problems which made this impossible before without a central party and thus now experiments and studies can be done.   Who knows what happens. Gavin, the chief engineer of the bitcoin core development group says,   &gt; I still say that it's an experiment, and the whole thing could implode.  Coming from the guy who is literally making the edits to the code, I think it's safe to take off the wary of it being used to scam people and instead look at it from a more academic light to see what could be gleaned from bitcoin to improve current institutions. Question:  So basically the money created in this globalized digital world where capital is free to roam,  it is referring to digital money and not actual physical cash.  So the goldbugs that talk about america becoming weimar republic is delusional, since there isn't enough physical cash in relations to how big the economy is.    And it is actually the debt lending that acts as a derivative of cash money that goes around posing as the money supply or the blood supply of an economy, and that feels like inflation, but when the debt is defaulted on or destroyed, underwritten or even paid back closing the circuit then it's deflationary?   But does defaulting on ones debt create inflation since that money is still in the system and not being paid off?  You know, when debts are paid off they are taken out of the system. "Excellent question.  I'm not aware of one. I was going to say ""go visit some personal finance blogs"" but then I remembered that I write on one, and that I often get a commission if I talk about online accounts, so unless something is really bad I'm not going to post on it because I want to make money, not chase it away. This isn't to say that I'm biased by commissions, but among a bunch of online banks paying pretty much the same (crappy) interest rate and giving pretty much the same (often not crappy) service, I'm going to give air time to the ones that pay the best commissions.  That, and some of the affiliate programs would kick me out if I trashed them on my blog. This also would taint any site, blog or not, that does not explicitly say that they do not have affiliate relationships with the banks they review. I suppose if you read enough blogs you can figure out the bad ones by their absence, but that takes a lot of time.  Seems like you'd do all right by doing a ""--bank name-- sucks"" Google search to dig up the dirt. That, or call up / e-mail / post on their forum any questions you have about their services before sending them your money.  If they're up front, they'll answer you." I can personally recommend MoneyWell. I've been using it for about a month now, and version 1.5 that was just released is a great upgrade from the previous version. The developer was very responsive during the open beta period, and from what I understand an iPhone version is in the works. (and no, I don't work for the publisher!) That aside, I've used a few other packages. I tried out iBank, which was fairly nice, but the account downloading functionality left a lot to be desired. I come from a MS Money background, and I am used to a seamless, reliable download scheme, and iBank's was (unfortunately) neither. Otherwise the interface was very nice. I had settled on MoneyDance before I found MoneyWell, and it's a pretty nice package. Unfortunately it's a Java application and doesn't adhere to most OSX interface practices. While the account downloading is substantially better than iBank's, the ugly interface made moving away from it fairly easy once I found something that had feature parity. "Thinkorswim's ThinkDesktop platform allows you to replay a previous market day if you wish. You can also use paper money in stocks, options, futures, futures options, forex, etc there. I really can't think of any other platform that allows you to dabble around in so many products fictionally. And honestly, if all that ""make[s] the learning experience a bit more complicated"" and demotivates you, well thats probably a good thing for your sake." Hey thanks for your response.  The commodity is actually electricity, so definitely not able to store.  Would you mind giving me a short summary of your thought process or an example of how you compare liquid markets vs illiquid ones when looking at more traditional commodities?  If that is a bit much to ask, as I am sure it could get quite involved do you have any reading recommendations?    This little project has sparked an interest. "1. As I said, the above is not actually anything like a genuine history of how money emerged, it's an explain-it-to-a-five-year-old parable to answer ""where does the money go in an economic contraction?""  2. It's also not defense/endorsement/apology for any particular set of policies or historical theory of money. It's a picture-book describing the workings of an internal combustion engine using cartoon characters, not a treatise on the social and environmental implications of American car-culture.   That said, in the parable, the reasons why the simplified caricatures in the town chose to accept the fiat currency are pretty straightforward, and are actually explained:  - They were previously using a system of a whole bunch of separate, privately-issued currencies, each with complex and hard-to-evaluate credit risks (Bob's potato certificate versus Jane's Potato certificate versus your apple-certificate versus my deer certificate). This was causing problems and confusion about how much any given certificate was actually worth.   - The system proposed was proposed in a way that was *at least* as credible as the best existing system.   - Last but not least, they accepted the new currency for *exactly the same reason* that you accept dollar, euros, or whatever: because everyone else does.   There was no law preventing any of them from still trading apple IOUs (in fact, we still traded them, later in the example, except denominated in loddars). I could have asked you for the last note to denominated in apples, but that would probably have been harder to trade than the currency that everyone else is using.   I said I wouldn't get into the gold-standard debate, and I won't, and here's why: the debate hinges entirely and solely on whether you believe that a ""good"" fiat currency is possible and realistically sustainable. If you do, then fiat currency makes a lot more sense in every respect. If you don't, then fiat currency is always just a catastrophe waiting to happen.   My parable shows the mechanics of how money works. It doesn't say whether the system is good or bad, or whether they should have accepted the fiat system proposed, or held out for a better one, or rejected it altogether.   You can argue that internal combustion engines are bad, or that much better alternatives are available, or that nobody should use them, but that doesn't make a description of they work incorrect." Bitcoin could work fairly well. Each site can just give you a wallet to dump money into. Can also do micro-payments where you could pay per-article. With a shared private key on a wallet you keep topped up, they could remove the money as you browse. I can imagine businesses that sell you hard-drive space based on the amount you use rather than a cap, calculate the cost of transmitting each packet of data. You can have one program to manage all the wallets for all your sites. But it would need more penetration before that happens. In addition to TransferWise that @miernik answered with and that I successfully used, I found CurrencyFair which looks to be along similar lines and also supports US$. I know you've already lost interest, but i just wanted to respond to this:  &gt;money is a store of value  No, it is not. Money is a very poor store of value. Money is intended as a means to transfer value from one to another.   &gt;You appear to be afraid of what would happen if people were allowed to voluntarily choose what money to use, without government interference.  I repeatedly encouraged you to use alternative currencies, i don't know where you get this from. You know what? Pay cash, but ask for a discount. And something fairly hefty. Don't be afraid to bargain. The discount will be worth more than the interest you'd get on the same amount of money. And if the salesman doesn't give you a decent discount, ask to speak to the manager. And if that doesn't work, try another store. Good luck with it!