“Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake”

– Chris Dodd, Fox News, Jan 20, 2012 (originally found on Techdirt)

So, I’ve struggled with how to react to everything that’s happened over the last week, and really all the things that have led up to it over the past few years. The SOPA/PIPA protest and blackouts, the abrupt shutdown of Megaupload, the rise of Anonymous and their reaction to all of it. I have seen my government and my fellow citizens attack their own for being intelligent, for being hard working, and for trying to better the world. I let it slide when Congress was discussing breaking the Internet – the greatest engine for social, economic, and technological growth since the development of agriculture and the written word – to protect a small but powerful group. I shrugged it off when Congress referred to consulting the experts who built the Internet as “asking the nerds” if it would be problematic to change how DNS works. I joined in the protests of SOPA and PIPA, and did my best to spread awareness about the complete removal of due process, the risk to our free speech, and the cost of turning over the roles of judge, jury, and executioner to a private industry with everything to gain by holding back progress.

I buy my media. It’s probably been almost a decade since I downloaded media I didn’t pay for. I have an HD premium cable package, two Tivos, two Xbox360s, Netflix, Last.fm and for a while a Hulu Plus account. I spend more on media in a given month than some people spend on food. TVs, computers, a house-wide audio system – all of it fueling the creative people in this country and around the world to do what they love and to share in their creations. But all of it enabled, and given value, by technology.

When you create a disruptive technology, there’s always someone who goes from comfortable to on the defensive. That’s why you disrupt. The blatant admission by Hollywood that they had bought politicians and expect to have their laws passed, no matter the public outcry and no matter the damage done to our rights makes them an industry worth disrupting. I believe the “at any cost” approach to protecting creative works is harmful to our economy, our rights, our culture, and our world. We have laws in place that protect this content, and despite claims to the contrary, they work quite well. More people are making more money in movies and music today than at any point in human history.

I don’t think I agree with the actions taken by Anonymous in their reaction to the Megaupload shutdown, but I can understand the anger and frustration behind them. I don’t think using technology to attack groups or individuals gains any real support for your cause. No, I don’t want to make them the victim. I don’t want to in any way encourage empathy or lend legitimacy to the actions of the MPAA. I don’t want to continue the arms race of DRM vs. hackers. I want us, the technologists, to completely take them out by building services and products so unfathomably better that they cannot hope to compete, until they dwindle to nothing.

And I encourage every creative person out there to join us. Your work is valuable. You should be paid for it, no one argues that. Help us dismantle an industry that has systematically devalued your creative labors, stripped you of your own rights (as authors, and owners of your own work), and sold the fruit of your creative efforts for their own profits.

When you can’t win because the game is rigged, you change the rules. Rather than use technology to help groups like the MPAA and their members reach new customers and adapt to a changing market, we must use technology to accelerate their end. Every day, I work to expand the capabilities of technology. Join me. This year – build something amazing, disruptive, and wonderful. When Hollywood dies, and it will, it won’t be because we bought the most politicians, it won’t be because we hired the best lawyers. It’ll be because we served their customers better than they ever could.

I strongly support the sentiment in Y Combinator’s RFS9. At no point in my life have I seen an industry so aggressively bite the hand that feeds. At no point have I seen an industry so deserving of being wiped from our economy by the tides of advancing technology. Since I started you with a quote, I figured I’ll leave you with this:

“Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.”

– Y Combinator RFS9: Kill Hollywood

I was the lone hand in the “don’t” category…my CEO included. When pressed for an answer (in front of a few hundred new co-workers, mind you), I managed to muster the courage to answer, “UBB puts service providers at an adversarial relationship with the providers that actually drive acceptance of their product” or something of that nature.

Think about it though – if we’d had usage-based billing in 2001, there’d be no Youtube. No Netflix. No Hulu. Hell, we’d probably not even have an iTunes store. More importantly, would you pay for a 50mbps connection if you couldn’t use it for anything?

Let’s be honest with ourselves. Everyone talks about having everyone pay “their fair share”, how “heavy users” are just free-loading on the poor grandparents who only use the internet once a week to check email. They bring up examples of “I don’t get all the water I want for free. Or all the electricity” True. I don’t get to just go to a library and check out all the books I want. Or watch all the TV I want, or read all the articles in the newspaper I want.

Oh wait.

That’s not what UBB is about at all. It’s about stopping competitive services. It’s about slowing down innovation in the internet space (especially over-the-top video) and extending their outdated business model just a little bit further. It’s about protecting video revenue at the cost of consumer choice.

And c’mon, if you’re designing your network for the retirees who barely understand what a computer is? You’re doing it wrong. And you certainly shouldn’t be asking for legal protection to continue being that bad at your job.

My CEO (on another topic, actually) said it best: “Do you really think you’re going to win by standing still?” UBB is all about standing still. Services providers have seen their business model change, and most of them, rather than change along with it, are trying to find a way to return to the era of $100/mo services. All these companies have seen their core business declining – first with home phone lines, then just as they started making the shift to video, down goes video. Why do I need an $80/mo video package on top of my $40/mo internet, if I can spend $50/mo on their super-high-speed connection (introduced to compete with the Cable company) and get the rest from Netflix and Hulu?

Your local service provider is terrified of becoming just a dumb pipe to the internet. They’ll fight tooth-and-nail against any real competition, because then they have no edge, no way to lock you in. It makes sense from a business perspective, but it is profoundly anti-consumer.

But all this isn’t why I don’t think it’ll happen. To get back to my point – who’s really driving faster internet and broader fiber deployments in this country? You can bet it isn’t the tiny little rural phone companies. It’s Google, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Amazon – companies that have made their fortunes in software and computing, and know digital delivery of services is the next great frontier. These companies wield tremendous economic power, and know that their ability to innovate in the space will be significantly reduced. They can even make the argument (rightly so) that it will harm the competitiveness of American innovation, and start to leave us behind against countries like South Korea, Switzerland, and France – places where high speed internet is not only faster and cheaper, but more widely available. Who in their right mind would argue it is “necessary” to slow down innovation, because we’re going too fast and a few legacy companies can’t keep up? I mean, who besides the recording industry?

Sure, there will be some places where UBB might take hold. You can point to cellphones, Canada, etc. Each of these is a bad example. In the case of cellphones, voice and text messaging has become cheaper to the point where many carriers offer truly unlimited minutes and text messages (in some cases, for as little as $59/mo). Data caps? They’re lowest on the network that refused to update its infrastructure, and non-existent on Sprint’s 4G network. And Canada? Well, the government quickly realized it was extremely harmful to their national interest, because it was limiting Canadian’s access to the broader market. They are amid a plan to reverse the laws requiring UBB. What changed? Netflix came to town.

The only place UBB will actually work is where there’s no competition. Sure, you can act as an abusive monopoly, avoiding competition by stacking the laws in your favor. But you’re also inviting some local lawmaker who wants to stand out in an election to come down hard on you. First time someone shows up in town with unlimited internet? You shed customers, en masse. Heck, it’s not long before cellphones become a competitor for UBB-structured telcos. Only one bill, more convenient…sound like the shift away from landlines to anyone else?

In simplest terms though, Usage Based Billing is an admission that a provider can’t actually deliver the service they sold. It’s like selling me a package of 300 channels and then getting upset (and charging me more) if I watch more than 10 shows a week. And that’s just stupid.

*Usage-based billing (UBB) is a general term for the idea that home internet use should be billed (in whole or in part) based on the amount of data you consume, rather than the speed it is delivered. Options include per-gigabyte, per-month usage (like $1/gb), tiered access with overages (like your phone minutes used to be/still are), or a number of other possibilities.

I won’t go into extensive detail on why this is awesome. Here’s a little demo to play with though, to get the point. Click on column headers (in-line editing is not included for this, but you can find more about that at the link above):

After including prototype.js and tablekit.js, all I had to do was define the table like this:

<table class="sortable resizable" width="500">

At this point, the table should be sortable, and you should be able to resize the columns by dragging the barrier between the column headers. You’ll notice alternating row colors remain alternating. All the formatting (including sort color, the up/down arrows, alternating rows) are all defined as CSS properties, so you can modify them easily. We’ll get to the CSS later on.

While that’s cool (and it IS damn cool, admit it), it isn’t why I’m bothering to stay up late and write a post. I extended this library to give it a new property – “linkable”. It combines the “ConvertTableRowtoHyperlink” (CTRtH) script published a few years back and rolls it into the function of TableKit. The script will also scan all rows of a given table for the first link it comes across. It then creates a function which highlights the row on mouseOver, returns to previous state on mouseOut (preserving the pretty alternating colors created by TableKit). Clicking anywhere on the row will take you to the link. If it finds more than one link, it takes the one furthest to the left. Personally, I think lots of links in a single table isn’t the best plan, but if you want it to give up on rows with more than one link rather than picking the furthest left, there’s instructions on line 90 of the script on how to do this.

Added benefit! In the old CTRtH, you had to explicitly give the ID of each table, invoke separately, and ask the script to do the row conversion. This broke with a number of things, including AJAX updates (ended up including the JS in a partial on one project). Mostly though, it meant I couldn’t have a nice, clean table with TableKit and CTRtH running in tandem. So, I spent a flight from DC to Denver figuring out what was conflicting where, and getting the two to play nicely. Now you have an extended TableKit, which will also happily convert table rows to links when given the property “linkable”, like this:

<table class="sortable resizable linkable" width="600">

First Name	Last Name	Age	Search Engine
Bill	Smith	12	Google
Joe	Cool	11	Yahoo
Amy	Rogers	12	Bing
Susan	Thompson	13	Google

Usage

Alright, down to business.

1) Download prototype.js and my new tablekit.js file. Include these in your header, ideally.

2) Make sure you add sortable, resizable, or linkable to the CSS class of any table you want to behave this way. You can give it an ID, but you don’t have to. However, like with many JS functions, if you have multiple elements with the same ID, you’ll only affect the first one. If you don’t give it an ID, one will be assigned in sequential order.

3) Here’s what you’ll need to add to your CSS to make it look like mine and behave as you’d expect. You’ll almost certainly want to change the colors, but other than that you should be good, I’ve tried to keep the CSS as minimal as possible so as not to interfere with your other stuff.. Notice the up and down arrows are also just background elements, so point them at your own up.png/down.png location.

Here’s the article I submitted over at Techdirt. No need to re-print here.

First off, the facts. While the iPhone is a popular device, depending how you slice your market demographics it ranges from “unquestioned overlord” to “mid-volume runner”. Yes, it has sold more than any single model, but most manufacturers don’t make only one model. In fact, may people are lying with statistics, treating the iPhone as only one model when in fact six exist in the US. There’s the 4gb and 8gb versions of the 2G, the 8 and 16gb versions of the 3G, and the 16 and 32gb versions of the 3GS. Blending all of these into one number, spanning multiple model years and often duplicate customers is misleading at best.

Apple’s competitors in the space aren’t exactly doing poorly, either. Many other mobile OSs have GROWN in size since the introduction of the iPhone. Symbian, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile have all increase their sales volume and revenues since 2007. On top of that, the removal of Palm’s PalmOS models from the market and the introduction of the Sprint-only WebOS models has left a gap filled largely by Apple and RIM. Even the aging Windows Mobile has grown, despite no major changes to the OS since the May 12 ‘05 release of Windows Mobile 5.

But all of that is not to discount the impact Apple has had. Devices are more powerful, rich application libraries are a requirement, and let’s not forget that their rapidly-dissolving relationship with Google gave rise to Android, which is already making significant gains in Apple’s tech-savvy elite, attracting developers and power-users and leaving Apple to scrape the bottom for new customers.

Take a look at the three images below. See what they say about the iPhone’s perception in the market. All images come from BrandIndex, via AppleInsider.com

First, this graph shows the perception of AT&T vs. Verizon, following the launch of the iPhone 3GS. Notice the sharp downturn in both companies, with AT&T’s being noticeably sharper. After the launch of the 3GS on June 18, people began to notice the struggling impact of a data-intensive device on AT&T’s aging, poorly-managed 3G network. Many users reported losing 3G coverage even while in areas AT&T was supposedly offering great coverage. While voice worked, AT&T’s data network was sorely lacking.

Next, take a look at the brand perception of Apple vs. Motorola leading up to the Droid launch, specifically among men aged 18+. Droid’s

Lastly, look at the perception of AT&T vs. Verizon in the weeks leading up to the Droid launch. AT&T was never “liked”, but it hasn’t historically been much worse off than Verizon. Now there’s an almost 40 point difference – most likely attributable to the numerous “There’s a map for that” and “Droid does” ads. AT&T, the only source of the iPhone today, is tanking in popularity and public perception among adults. Why would you want a cool phone if it’s on the nation’s worst network?

When you put all these together (as I’m sure someone at Apple has) you see a pattern emerge: the iPhone isn’t really seen as a cutting-edge device anymore. It hasn’t fundamentally changed in 3 years. Sure, memory bumps are nice and getting the features that have existed on other phones for a decade is a welcome addition, but it’s not revolutionary anymore. In fact, for the tech-elite, the cutesy, childish UI is no longer a novelty, but a frustration. For top-tier developers, having a locked-down platform with an unpredictable, often irrational gatekeeper is unforgivable. And for everyone else? AT&T sucks more than the iPhone can make up for any longer. AT&T has not invested in its 3G networks (coverage or infrastructure), and iPhone users once proud of their device’s web-surfing capabilities are now behind, from a data coverage, screen resolution, and technology standpoint.

Will any one device crush the iPhone? I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure it’ll die the way Apple’s OS did – the death of a thousand tiny cuts. You’ll have a small group of users who are willing to trade the simplicity of a locked-down, highly limited environment for poor quality coverage, a less capable device, and a single form-factor.

If I had to guess though, Apple will probably react by trying to diversify, but it’ll be too little too late. The iPhone exclusivity contract will last a few more years, and they’ll release one or two more devices. Maybe one with a keyboard, maybe one with a bigger, sharper screen, but once they do that, the simple elegance of “every app on every phone” is gone.

Then they’ll release a CDMA version to Verizon and Sprint, but no one will care. Sure, there will be blog hype (as their is around a lot of what Apple does), but for the average consumer it won’t matter, and it won’t translate into big numbers. Mostly, you’ll get people who hate AT&T jumping back to their original provider (Verizon), or switching to Sprint for the unbelievably cheap internet coverage they offer.

When Copyright was originally established in 1710 in a document called the Statute of Anne, it declared that authors owned their works for 28 years. This was a big deal, because in the past patrons had owned the works created by authors. Prior to the Statute, authors’ works were purchased from the Stationer’s Company, after which time they were granted a perpetual monopoly on the publishing of the work with no obligation to pay the author. Authors were also forbidden from gaining membership in the Stationer’s Company, making it effectively illegal to self-publish. The original intellectual work was effectively property, and the right to publish it could be bought, transferred, and sold.

The importance of the Statute was that it acknowledged that the written works should be protected for a time, to allow the author and their publisher to profit from them in recognition of the work’s value to society. It also decided (for the first time, really) that such a monopoly should be finite, after which time the works could be published by anyone who wished to, because they become a part of our social heritage.

The term of copyright has been extended so greatly over the years, in an attempt by publishers and wealthy authors to increase their power, that it is now (from a legal standpoint) a minimum of 95 years from publish or 120 years from creation. The exact legal duration is defined as “Life of the author + 70 years until year-end” according to Title 17 of the US Code, sections 302 and 305.

Now what does this all have to do with Google books? Well, in a class-action settlement (which everyone who has ever written or published a work is named), Google will be allowed to monetize all works (orphaned or not) for the duration of their copyright period. Any fees associated with this (from advertising or the renting to libraries) will be placed in a steward account (under the Book Rights Registry). If no author has claimed ownership of the work in five years, the money will be re-distributed to authors represented by the Book Rights Registry. This “special deal” Google is striking is a huge problem though, as Hyde points out:

The only way a potential competitor could avoid the threat of statutory damages would be to do what Google did: scan lots of books, attract plaintiffs willing to form a class with an “opt out” feature, negotiate a settlement and get it approved by a judge. Even for those with time and money to spare, that promises to be an insurmountable barrier to entry.

Google will be the new Stationer’s Company – the only one with the right and privilege to electronically monetize and distribute orphaned works. And Google will be able to monetize however they see fit, with all the profits going to line the pockets of authors and administrators who had nothing to do with a work’s creation.

And just how many of the 7 million books Google has already scanned fall into this orphaned category? Roughly 70%, with every reason for Google to try and find more. Oh, and it isn’t the responsibility of the Book Rights Registry to find the authors of orphaned works. In fact, it’s the author’s responsibility, a process that will no doubt be time consuming and obtuse , since it benefits them to NOT find the authors.

Read the Statute of Anne

What’s the purpose of a music video? Is it to be an artistic expression in-and-of itself? I can’t honestly think that it is. No, a music video (much like a radio spot) is an advertisement – for the band, the song, and the album. It is quite frankly absurd to me that artists believe that they should be paid – beyond the amount they already get through the ads they place on their own pages – because Google is providing them a platform to transmit their commercials to millions of people around the world – FREE.

So when the Performance Rights Society (PRS – UK’s RIAA) could not reach an agreement, Youtube pulled all the music videos down in the UK, signaling that, in fact, it doesn’t need them nearly as much as they need Youtube. The best part? Numerous artists, even ones who had been complaining about how Google was “stealing their money” and “not paying for music” suddenly found that their own, personal websites didn’t work. The videos on their own sites had been embedded versions of Youtube videos. That’s right, in addition to providing free advertising and free distribution, they were also shouldering the largest, most expensive part of a band’s website – the streaming media content – FREE. The cost to artists to host and stream their own videos, thousands or millions of times, would be far higher than anything they could hope to re-coupe from licensing fees.

It appears that the PRS is doing everything it can to actively torpedo its artists’ futures online. Their actions have already driven Myspace Music and Pandora to simply cut off UK service. Does it appear to be hurting either of them? Not in the slightest. You know who it is hurting though? I made a list:

• The Fans
  • No longer able to find their favorite band’s music online
  • Can’t introduce friends to the music in an engaging way
• The Musicians
  • Less exposure means fewer ticket sales
  • Fewer new fans because of lack of sharing
• Music Video Makers
  • If a music video can ONLY be played on MTV, it has less value
  • Less value means people pay less to make music videos
  • Fewer bands (especially UK bands) will even bother making music videos

I hope this is helpful to the people at the PRS, and that they carefully consider who they are ultimately trying to serve. Clearly, artists and fans are both hurt by their actions, and value is generated for no one. It is yet another example of an outdated, monolithic group trying desperately to stay relevant.

So here’s my proposal: If artists want Google to pay them for every view, they can pay Google for every single embedded version of the video. Every time someone embeds it anywhere and Google isn’t getting any advertising revenue, the band can go ahead and get billed for that bandwidth. Then, at the end of the month, they can get together and see which bill is bigger – bandwidth or licensing.

Here’s a Radiohead (one of the bands that complained) video. Just for you to enjoy on Radiohead’s theoretical dime.

Media storage is getting cheaper and easier all the time: the rise of the home server. Over the next few years (certainly by the end of 2020) most homes will have some kind of centralized storage. Just like 10 years ago people didn’t have routers and switches in their homes, now almost everyone does. With a home network comes multiple comptuers. Multiple computers leads to all kinds of problems – syncing files between machines, duplication of data, ease of access, usage location, etc. All of this adds up to a solution early adopters are starting to notice. Why put music on every computer when you could just store it on some low-powered, high-storage computer? Why set up complex mechanisms for downloading, transferring, and storing content on a laptop when you could just as easily store it on some server you own?

The obvious solution is to store it on a remote server someplace, up in the “cloud” for easy access anytime. The problem is that people don’t trust the cloud yet – data gets lost, privacy and security aren’t well explained, and retreival times are limited. Sure, you’ll keep things you explicitly want to share with others, but not most things. You’ll never keep your collection of tax records, illegal mp3s, adult entertainment and pirated movies up on a server someplace. No, you want it in a little box, tucked away in your house.

Ideally, it’ll be the size and shape of a router. It’ll plug in and have a bunch of storage for local use, and you’ll be able to expand it anytime. Why not?

Routers with extensible RAID file systems: the next big thing in home networks.

Certainly, a portion of this country receives broadcasts over the air, and probably will for quite some time. This will limit us to the time-locked, one-show-per-channel But an ever-growing number of us have a feed from our local cable or phone company for internet. What that means is that the same person providing me the access to some arbitrary multicast feed of channels that I pay an exorbitant amount for is also letting me stream from the myriad of services online – Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, and a myriad of network-specific sites, like NBC.com and ABC.com. I feed all the “channels” into my Tivo DVR and then watch them when I want. The whole thing seems silly though, and there has to be a better way for everyone involved.

And here it is:

Currently, networks like NBC see themselves as content providers, effectively they are both publishers and distribution houses for a very narrow stream of content. They have a limit on the content they can carry, both from a financial resource standpoint, but more importantly they only own a few channels, which can only put a single show at a time on. This is a choking point which doesn’t NEED to exist in a modern system, but is vestigial backwash from when radio waves carried a signal out from one tower to your house.

I envision a day when networks like NBC act almost exclusively as content aggregation. They pay for shows to be made, insert their commercials and so forth directly into them, and then send dozens (or hundreds) of shows directly to my local cable / internet provider each week. Then, my provider can set up a “portal” – possibly even give me a little Set Top Box to stream it directly from their servers. Even manage subscriptions through the box – letting me automatically download a show (effectively subscribe), letting me pick my shows and pay for groups, seasons, genres, or just single episodes. Or an “all I can eat” pass to watch whatever I want when I want it.

Everything is On Demand. The amount of traffic I pull down from the Internet is dwarfed by the amount I pull down over a high-speed, local connection to a server sitting halfway across town. Why stream from NBC’s servers over an expensive, “real” internet connection when I can pull down from my local ISP?

What this will do is basically abolish the concept of a TV “network”. They’ll be feed services, and can focus on what they’re actually supposed to do – provide content. They’re publishers, not distributors, and they should stick to that. The value of a themed “schedule” pales in comparison to the value of watching what I want, when I want it, with not limit to storage, capacity, or the number of channels I can record at once. And I shouldn’t need a $1000+ piece of hardware or something I pay an extra $15/mo for. I should just do it.

Microsoft is working on something called “Media Room” – it is effectively a DVR for an entire cable provider. Record everything, turn your entire network into an “on demand”. It is incredibly promising, but the current content providers are crying “Foul!” at the concept of delivering content to users whenever they want it, rather than based on an arbitrary schedule. They’re fighting with lawyers and lawmakers, and it’ll be a while before technology and consumer benefit win out. The old, lumbering media giants don’t want to give up a piece of their estate, even though they’d be better off in the long run. Also, they don’t want to make it really easy for new competitors to enter the business of media distribution. There isn’t a way to easily monetize Youtube (yet), but if I could put content on my local ISP’s network and let people pay a quarter per show? I wouldn’t need NBC at all, except to make the expensive shows. The value of their distribution network would no longer be a hurdle, just the amount they can front for famous actors / sets / equipment.

Leveling the playing filed scares them, so they’ll fight it as long as they can.

What would happen if the dollar lost 50% of it’s value next week? What would it mean? A lot of people have a difficult time separating the terms “currency”, “money”, and “wealth”. The US Dollar is just currency – it symbolizes an agreed-upon value (known as fiat money), but has no intrinsic value in and of itself. It is a tool, to facilitate trade. But like all tools, its usefulness waxes and wanes, and sometimes there’s a better tool for the job. Another currency, or another method all together.

Right now, I get paid in US Dollars, because the convenience (and expense) of not having to convert form another currency to the one used where I live is less than I’m likely to lose due to fluctuation in the value of the Dollar. If my economy started to nose-dive, what motivation would I have to keep my money there? Sure, decades ago it would have been nearly impossible to jump-ship with my money. Today, it’s a button on a (good) bank’s website. Why shouldn’t we shop around for the currency that offers us the best “bang for our buck”?

If the USD began to slide, and I mean really slide, due to inflation, poor management by our government, or for any other reason, today I can opt for another. How’s the Yen, Yuan, or Euro doing?

If you want to see what this is like, open up a Paypal account. Deposit, say, $20. Then flip it back and forth between any of the few dozen currencies they suppor, maybe once or twice a week at most . Their conversion rates are pretty good, they take a very nominal fee for the conversion (less than 3%). You’ll see you can, in fact, keep your money in any curency from USD to GBP to Yen to Euros. Neat, huh? Now, you’re a currency trader.

if you can easily switch currencies, there’s a second advantage: any one backed by a reasonably large and developed country won’t really nose-dive. The value of wealth circulating in a country can be thought of a lot like the market cap of a corporation. Currency is a futures market; betting on the ability of one currency (country) to out-perform another in the long-term. If the USD slips below the cash value of all the assets within the country, international currency traders will buy up TONS of it, because you know it is going to recover. You know you’ll get your money back if you wait long enough. Buying up billions of dollars will raise the price of dollars, correcting any downturn we begin to see. Or maybe they’ll just offer really valuable foreign currency for local services, like buying your house or car off you.

But until the rest of the world’s major and ancillary economies all collapse at the same time (in which case, you’re SOL no matter what),

don’t panic.