On Disrupting Wall Street
Chris has a good point early in his post on the topic: current “disruptive” innovation amounts to nothing more than a new UI for Wall Street – Mint, Square, Paypal, etc.
The rest of his post, however, assumes that individuals/groups who want to break out of the Wall Street system (read: corrupt plutocratic, isolated system), will still participate in that system… just without the gaming. That’s precisely the wrong play. (Simply put: You don’t want to piss off a parasite and then sit around where it can get you.)
Instead, you need to address the core problems with the gamed system, in this case, scale. (Scale is a function of complexity.) Bring it down, to the almost informal level, where financial services are exactly that rather than products, and you’ve addressed most problems.
There’s a lot of precedence for this kind of thing in the developing world in the form of cooperatives – much of which has tragically been hijacked by economic hitmen.
Interesting coincidence to read your post and this from another of my feeds… http://tipit.to/
Awesome, that’s a real service rather than a product.