My Drupal package was designed with local LETS groups in mind: a few hundred people, no more than one order of separation, trading a few times a month. I realised that an integral zero balance system would use transactions at its base - not user balances. If balances are re-calculated after every transaction by adding up all the previous transactions, then theft is impossible, all errors can be logged and reversed and the data cannot contradict itself.
But I soon realised that I was designing in limits to how big the system would go. What would be the limit if ALL the transactions in the system need to live in the same database table, which has to be interrogated every time a balance changes? Well, modern databases are pretty fast and robust, I think balance caching and load spreading strategies could improve their potential by many multiples, but where would the limit be? A town? a country? the world? Is it be possible to spread one database table over several computers? And you know, I think it probably is. I suppose a system could be designed to run the whole world on one mutual credit database, processing and storing, say 60 Billion transactions a day. I would of course in principle question any system so dependent on the centre.
It might however be a better idea than the current system, in which shady individuals can use shady banks to legitimise their activities, launder money which was obtained illegally. The system is about how much money you have, not about how you get it. A running balance is however a much easier piece of data to manage than a whole transaction history.
In other systems, those for which the user's balance is primary, all you have to do is change a number in the database and you're rich! Or steal some pieces of paper. This is a major problem with money today.
But there's another problem with too large mutual credit systems, which is what Michael Linton calls sloshing. A mutual credit economy is like a sealed water bed, with ripples on the surface, but the average level always the same. However the larger the bed, the easier it is for someone to sit on a part of it (depress it), and to create a region which is starved of credit. Extending this metaphor, he says that is why better waterbeds are often compartmentalised; and we can do the same with mutual credit. We can make systems of 'appropriate' scale, and scope, and then limit the (money) flows between them. If this is the answer to scale then we need to think less about how big a mutual credit system can get, and more about how decentralised systems can work together as part of a national or global economy.
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