The Loom Model: The New Generation Of Digital Value Transfer

When money became digital, it also became much more complex. Conventional banking and legacy payments do not mix well with credit card fraud and identity theft.

At Home Security With In Store Convenience?

Today’s digital money is extremely complicated. The fight against fraud, money laundering, terror financing and the bird flu….has greatly extended the time and information required to log in, sign up, set up & authenticate a user. In fact, some banks in Europe are even sending account holders personal card readers to use from their homes. To access that account the user actually has to take out their card and insert it into the ‘home card reader’ to authenticate his access while still in the privacy of their own home!

When I heard about the Loom model (www.loom.cc), I was thinking eye scans, fingerprint checks and maybe even a chip in my arm – just to access my account. I was wrong. Many times in life the greatest ideas are the most basic of inventions.

Introducing Loom Gold’s Open Source Model

Here is my very simple explanation. The Loom model not an online payment system. Loom is similar to its complicated cousin ‘digital currency’ in some regards as the units are exchanged via a third party independent agent and can also be swapped for other digital currency.

No ID or personal information is required to buy, sell or exchange value. Loom is simply one very large step beyond ‘digital currency’ or anything else out there on the Internet. The great thing about Loom is that the ’system’ used for the exchanges is pretty generic so it can be copied, cloned or leased out for use on multiple URLs without too much technical hassle. In fact we can say its open source.

Here is what the developer recently said in a comment on DigitalMoneyWorld regarding the Loom System,

Loom is a general purpose content management system, somewhat like a Wiki, except it is *not* open to the public. It was developed specifically to provide rich, dynamic content to a variety of users with different permissions and privileges. Its design was inspired by the needs we faced in our accounting business, where we publish a plethora of dynamic and sensitive financial data and reports to users. The design is founded on accounting and economics. It is not a “public utility.”

Think of the Loom Model like this…

The ’system’ is a big checker board with almost an infinite number of squares. The ‘Loom’ is an easy to use interface which allows anyone to pick a square from the checkerboard and place value on it. You can place a stack of gold coins, pile of bills, box of doughnuts etc. on any one square. Then simply give that square’s location your own personal name (access info). From that point you would make contact with your receiver outside of the Loom system (email, skype, IM) and tell them where your square is….then the receiver interfaces with Loom and visits your square (access info) finds that value and retrieves it leaving the square empty.

The Loom system is a large book entry spreadsheet. The drop point or as I have called it ’square’ is the only shared information between users. Unlike typical ‘digital currency’ systems where a user or account holder identifies himself with an ‘account number’ the Loom system is totally different. There are no accounts to track, you can’t get my account number and trace all my payments. Each transfer is has unique identifier and can be numbers, words, phrases or any combination. The only person who would know the final location of the value is the recipient. The funny thing is, generally account holders can say, “Give me the account number or numbers and look at the history of spends or receipts” but with Loom each transaction is its own separate account. In this case, technically and physically there is NO client account.

To interface with Loom a user needs a folder. However, the folder is not labeled with any distinct identifying information. Its not a name, address, SIN, SSN EIN or even a STD! It is simply anything you want it to be, and its recommended to use a 5 word randomly generated phrase.

The working tutorial is next…