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've been talking about mutual credit for well over a decade now and it has become apparent that different people mean different things by it. Up to a point, that's okay because everyone I talked to understood well enough that it meant the units for payment between members of the group were 'created' and 'destroyed' as members spent below a balance of zero, furthermore that going into 'commitment' was not a privilege reserved for an issuer, but that any member could do it.
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 was privileged to attend the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) 2019 Congress just now where I drew attention to the role of complementary currencies and attempted to dispel any fantasies about the role of blockchain in transferring wealth.
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.
At the Basic Income Earth Network 2019 Congress I had a chat with Kang Nam Hoon, designer of the Young Person's Basic Income in Geonggi, in the Suwon province of South Korea. This Basic Income is not paid in the national currency, won, but in a token issued by the regional government and 100% backed by won. Each young person is given a plastic card, and their balance is topped up every month.
Last month I expressed personal alarm at the weather and the unexpected speed of change. Since then the global weather continues to break records, and I've thought of something slightly more constructive to say.
The cryptocurrency world is reeling this week from the white paper of Libra, a coming cryptocurrency with so much corporate buy in, it threatens to change the payments industry.
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