Because of the global connections of the Internet, open to almost anyone, we are moving from an economy where capital is finite and concentrated at power centers to one of the infinite capital of trust and reputation. Based on my blog post at http://newmedialeaders.com/community/trust-the-currency-of-the-new-economy-423/

1. Trust Is The New Currency
The Trust Economy
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By Mark Traphagen
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2. Trust Is The New Currency
Why do people stop at red lights?
Why do people stop at red lights? Sure there is the fear of possible punishment from law
enforcement if you don’t. And there is the risk of being hit by someone coming the other way.
But a mass disobedience by all the people encountering any given red light could obviate
either of those in a moment. But that doesn’t happen. 99.99% of the time, people stop.
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By Mark Traphagen
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3. Trust Is The New Currency
Cooperation is how we survive
I submit that the primary reason they do is a conditioned understanding of the value of
cooperative trust in a social system. My stopping on red gives someone else a chance to go;
and the mutual stopping of others allows me to go in my turn. Through this unspoken but
powerful social transaction, we all get where we are going faster and more efficiently.
Sure the punishment and injury threats strongly reinforce this behavior, but I still believe at
its core is an innate knowledge, programmed into us by evolution, that cooperation based on
trust aids the survival and thriving of our species.
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By Mark Traphagen
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4. Trust Is The New Currency
Trust and Collaborative Consumption
All economies are built on a similar social trust in some form.
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By Mark Traphagen
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5. Trust Is The New Currency
Industrial Economy
In the capitalist economies of the Industrial Age, we were asked to place that trust in large
institutions, primarily banks that control the capital and governments that regulate its flow.
While that economic model built great and mighty things, it also thrived on scarcity and finite
games resulting in a few big winners and lots of lesser players (or losers).
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By Mark Traphagen
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6. Trust Is The New Currency
Connected Economy
In the emerging connected economy trust and the capital that flows from it are increasingly
decentralized and distributed. Now it is possible for virtually anyone to become a center of
trust and reputation in any given field. And from that center can flow capital (in all forms, not
just money) and power/influence.
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By Mark Traphagen
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7. Trust Is The New Currency
Rachel Botsman: Collaborative Consumption
"Collaborative Consumption: A social and economic system driven by network technologies
that enable the sharing and exchange of assets from spaces to skills to cars in ways and on a
scale never possible before."
- Rachel Botsman
(from http://youtu.be/kTqgiF4HmgQ)
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By Mark Traphagen
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8. Trust Is The New Currency
Exchanged Space: AirBNB
AirBNB is an online service that connects people with extra space (from a spare bedroom to a
spare medieval castle) with people looking for a place to stay in a particular city. It has taken
off incredibly, with people now in 192 countries willing to open their homes and spare spaces
to strangers.
At the core of the success of AirBNB is an effective trust rating system based on reviews.
Both guest and host can be reviewed. The benefit for hosts is obvious, but what is different
and powerful here is the benefit for guests from such a rating system. A frequent guest who
earns a high rating can command special deals and preferences from potential future hosts.
Reputation has its perks.
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By Mark Traphagen
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9. Trust Is The New Currency
Online Networks Build Economies of Trust
According to Ms. Botsman, ”It’s about empowering people to make meaningful connections,
connections that are enabling us to rediscover a humanness that we’ve lost somewhere
along the way…Instead of consuming to beat the Jones’s, consuming to get to know the
Jones’s.”
A study by the Pew Research Center found that “the typical internet user is more than twice
as likely as others to feel that people can be trusted.” Online connections really do help
establish reputation which turns into the power of trust.
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By Mark Traphagen
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10. Trust Is The New Currency
Reputation Is Contextual & Needs Scoring
Just because you’re trustworthy in one thing doesn’t mean you are in another. An individual’s
“Reputation Capital [is] the worth of her reputation–intentions, capabilities, and
values–across communities and marketplaces.” Rachel Botsman envisions that in the
not-distant future there will be apps that will allow us to access the earned reputation of
individuals across a broad array of categories.
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By Mark Traphagen
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11. Trust Is The New Currency
Reputation As Currency
There are already startups working on this. Reputation will become the most powerful
currency in the 21st century. And it will make a number of staples of the 20th century
industrial economy obsolete: credit scores, resumes, headhunting services among them.
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By Mark Traphagen
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12. Trust Is The New Currency
A Future of Wuffie?
All individuals in Cory Doctorow's novel Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom have implanted
brain chips that are able to transmit and record wuffie. Wuffie is simply the cumulative score
of reputation garnered from others who have encountered you. If you do something amazing
or beneficial, your wuffie will go up. Be rude to someone or break a promise, and your wuffie
may go down. Wuffie can be consciously sent to another, but most transactions take place
automatically and unconsciously as the brain chips simply measure and transmit the
sentiments of one human being toward another.
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By Mark Traphagen
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13. Trust Is The New Currency
AuthorRank Trust Scoring
Author Rank (sometimes expressed as “AuthorRank” in homage to Google’s PageRank) is a
community-created term for something Google has talked about, in patents and elsewhere,
for several years now. The idea of Author Rank is to use Authorship to trace the social signals
pointing at a given author’s content on a given topic and score the author in that topic by the
amount of social trust signals directed toward it. Most importantly for our reputation credit
discussion here, more important than how many people engage with a given piece of content
is who does. If a person who also has a high trust ranking for “Google search” often interacts
favorably with my Google search-related content, that will count for more for me in that topic
than a lot of non-authoritative people doing the same. The resulting score would serve as a
boost to the author in the search results when people search for the topic
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By Mark Traphagen
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14. Trust Is The New Currency
Building Wuffie in a Reputation Economy
If reputation is the currency of the new economy, how does one build up such capital. Some
of the ways should be obvious from our current experience. Create a high-quality product or
service. Provide exceptional customer service. Deliver more than is promised.
But there is another factor which I think will be many times more powerful in the connected
economy than it was in the industrial economy: the power of giving it away.
In the connected economy, giving away will be a major way of directly earning capital. Not
the old-style capital of money or money-related credit, but the new capital of reputation. By
giving in ways meaningful and helpful to others in online communities, they begin to send
major wuffie your way as they share your content, rate you favorably on rating services, and
recommend you to their friends. And as we saw above in the Google example, the web is
maturing in a way that can rapidly expand and spread the capital value of such good
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By Mark Traphagen
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15. reputation.
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By Mark Traphagen
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16. Trust Is The New Currency
A Trust Economy Fosters Abundance
What are you doing right now to build your reputational capital in the emerging connected
economy?
(This Haiku Deck is based on my more extensive article "Trust: The Currency of the New
Economy" at
http://newmedialeaders.com/community/trust-the-currency-of-the-new-economy-423/)
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By Mark Traphagen
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