Adventures in mutual credit

This week I was honoured to be part of the Money & Society Summit, organised by Jem Bendell. It was a chance to bring some unusual monetary thinking to newcomers and especially some Bitcoin enthusiasts who have a stronghold here in Bali! During the final Panel, Gary Dykstra, host of the Bitcoin Filter, asked the panelists, me included, what the Bitcoin movement could learn from its elder sibling the complementary currency movement.

As part of a sustainable leadership course i've been given at IFLAS, I'm required to thing about my theory of change. A theory of change is a specific methodological approach to social activism, involving mapping out how you think the world works and how your actions are intended to improve it.

Here are some of the ideas that recur to me, in conversations, reading and thinking about how change happens.

Lucas Huber suggests that the Interledger Protocol would be a suitable technology for implementing the credit commons. This post is a space to explore that more fully.
Credit commons was originally conceived as a ledger between the all the ledgers on all the separate platforms of the complementary currency movement, and the actual function of the interledger protocol is the same, to ensure that one transaction in one ledger is equivalent to another transaction in another ledger, thus that money/credit are not created/lost by mismatches in ledgers.