MyCHIPs Digital Money
Capital Investments
As you have probably realized already, MyCHIPs opens the door for several kinds of debt-based capital investments as well. Having accumulated CHIPs in the network, you could choose to lend them out at interest. This may differ mostly in semantics from the insurance and credit certification models discussed above. Still, the idea of lending money is familiar to most of us and we should recognize how the network facilitates it.
If you hold credits that are in high demand, and someone else has, or can create credits with a lower demand, they may have an incentive to borrow from you. You are providing a valid service, and are entitled to earn a fee for it. If you can find a way to get more secure with the borrower’s debt than the rest of the market is willing to recognize, you have found a valid niche to fill.
While MyCHIPs is clearly not designed to be an equity market, there should be nothing to prevent you from investing credits say, in a startup company. The distinction of whether you are buying debt or equity is not really in the nature of the kind of money you are contributing, but rather in the nature of the commitment you are receiving in return from the company.
There are also possible niches for companies to manage the credit holdings of others. Say for example, you are saving CHIPs for retirement. One of the things you like about CHIPs is they don’t lose their value due to inflation. If you save up 20,000 CHIPs today, that should still be worth about 10 person-years of unskilled labor even in the future.
But you worry that all your CHIPs are issued by the same company: Wal-Mart. As good as that sounds, you would still like to be even more secure. So you might process your CHIPs through a service provider where your holdings would get diversified among 100 or so well performing companies, each with their own great quality ratings. Now, if the worst happens and one or two of them fail completely, you will still retain most of your savings value.
Alternatively, you might want to trade your corporate CHIPs for other credits backed instead by real-estate and serviced by long-term repayment schedules.
This could provide an even more secure way to save for the future.