Adventures in mutual credit

I'm proud to announce the Credit Commons reference implementation is now available. This is the result of a decade of working with community currencies, several false starts, a white paper in 2016, a collaboration with Dil Green last year, and about four months of coding.

There are many different ways of accounting and things to be accounted for; Despite its simplicity, I've had some difficulty in the past explaining mutual credit accounting, even to educated people, so this blog is an attempt to express it clearly, for the record.

We radicals have been dreaming of other social structures for decades, especially ones based on place, and on solidarity, but only very occasionally have we been able to build them.

I know many practical people doing amazing work but who hold and are held in disdain by the world of finance because of their small size and inconventional approaches. Conversely folk who accumulate a thousand Euros here or there have no standard ways to invest it in small projects in a way that is fair to both saver and producer. A different kind of finance is needed - so what would it look like?

My recent research into societal collapse (watch this space) lead me to John Michael Greer, who offered an uncommonly wise perspective, so I purchased this book to update myself on his post-peak oil thinking.

It describes progress as a 'civil religion' and examines how deeply ideas and more importantly assumptions about progress lie in our civilisation's narrative compared, say to other civilisations which reified the past or the unchanging nature of things.

I’ve always supported Basic Income (BI) in principle. It is probably the most direct possible strategy to address the perennial problems of poverty and inequality.