With the arrival of Paypal, which charges no annual fees and no transaction percentages for credit-card-based money transfers to any email address in the US, inertialess money is finally here. (Paypal intends to make money off the interest accrued on cash floating in their system.) This heralds the beginning of a seismic shift in the economic structure. It will herald the dawn of micropayments, take a huge bite out of the dominance of cash, eventually kick over the credit-card system now used, and perhaps create a great Webbed structure of cash applause. For some years now, I've visualized a system where, each time one visits a sufficiently great Website, one clicks a button that sends a few cents to the owner. Websites, mailing posts, bon mots, good causes, great ideas - all upheld and rewarded by a system of cash applause that, with the rise of ultraproductivity, may become a dominant part of the social system. Those who distribute the largest tips would see more pages and posts and jokes written to please them, providing a means whereby greater wealth translates into greater status and cultural dominance, while simultaneously creating a fog of money which helps to ensure that the have-nots don't starve. By way of bringing this future to pass, I've already sent $10 apiece to Vernor Vinge and Ed Regis for completely changing my life at the ages of fifteen and eleven respectively, and I've kicked back $1 to Eric Watt Forste for running a website that was one of the major stepping stones on my path to transhumanism. I'd send some dough to Mitchell Porter (for "Hyper-Weirdness by WWW") and Anders Sandberg (for the "Anders Transhuman Page"), but I believe they live outside the US, so I'll wait until Paypal extends its reach. If you have somebody you'd like to cheer on with the green folding applause, or at least blue electronic applause, then this is your chance to sign up with Paypal. If you sign up to the extent of entering a credit card, you get a free $10 in your account, which can be withdrawn (!) or sent on as applause for your favorite transhumanist Websites. If you sign up using the link https://secure.paypal.com/refer/pal=sentience%40pobox.com to register (*), you and I both get a free $10 in our account (although I believe it drops to $5 after March 15th). Let's hear it for the future, for the rise of the inertialess economy, and for free money from the venture capitalists! Yours in Singularity, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky. -- (*) I offered both ExI and Foresight the chance to be in this link over two weeks ago, but I got a response from neither; time is running out on the offer; I would be posting about Paypal and the social consequences even if they weren't offering me $10 to do it; therefore, I'm going ahead with my own account reference. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html Member, Extropy Institute Senior Associate, Foresight Institute