THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

In turn, the rise of commerce On the Net is sparking off a whole
new wave of money applications. The expected bonanza is huge. By
the end of 1997, 70% of the Fortune 1,000 corporations were ready to
do business on the Net. The 1998 e-commerce Christmas season
boom confirmed that the cyber economy has all the makings of the
fastest-growing economy in the world.
Price Waterhouse estimates that by the year 2000, the number of
Netizens will have soared to 168 million, and that they will buy some
8175- 200 billion of goods and services on the Net. Forrester
Research's survey of business executives resulted in forecasts that the
Internet trade among businesses alone will reach $300 billion by 2002.
The market research company International Data estimates that the
Internet economy which includes on-line shopping, business-tobusiness
purchasing and advertising reached $200 billion in 1998,
and will soar to $1 trillion by 2002. No wonder everybody is
interested in creating cyber-payment services.
The implications of all this is hard to fathom. For some businesses,
the Net has already become their biggest single distribution outlet.
For example, Best Western's website generated 48,000 hotel nights for
a value of $3.5 million in 1996. The website for Dell Computers
registered a daily sales volume of over $1 million from 1997 onwards,
with peaks of $66 million per day during the holiday seasons. Cisco's
website cashes in on over $2.3 million on an average day. Such a
website is a distributor's dream: a retail wonder everybody is
interested in outlet with no rental costs, no employees, not even a
light bulb is needed; the customers fill in their own orders and prepayment
slips; and orders roll in 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. In
addition, corporations can skip all intermediaries and eliminate the
cost of keeping inventories of finished products they manufacture
and ship directly to the specifications of the order placed on the Net.
New Money