Adventures in mutual credit

I just came back from the 3rd CryptoCommons Gathering at the Commons Hub in Austria. I was financed to create a course to introduce the notion of Collaborative Finance to the blockchain demographic. Perhaps a midsummer conference isn't the ideal setting for a daily one hour class, or mky time-slot wasnt't ideal, but around 1/4 to 1/3 of the participants attended each day. The four lessons were:

Report on the first Collaborative Finance Gathering at the Commons Hub, Austria, May 22-28, 2023.

It was an honour to be asked by the Commons Hub to design a conference and I took the opportunity to bring together crypto-people with some working on more traditional complementary currency innovations.

Just a short glance indicated to me that this would be worth recording, and I was right. With a flair unexpected in a PhD thesis, Drumm draws on English and classical history, much of it presented through Shakespeare, to show how history has been defined by the politics of liquidity, and how this politics is really the management of an unresolved dilemma at the heart of the monetary theory.

There have been a few half-hearted attempts to do mutual credit, or business barter on a blockchain, but the only one that has cut any ice at all with me so far is Resource. Founder David Casey was a social entrepreneur experimenting with mutual credit long before venturing into blockchain and he has assembled a team which seems to be committed to honest finance rather than shilling shitcoins.

This is a book about thinking about thinking, with a focus on anyone who would try, or presume, to be able to improve a complex system, say by starting a new business in the space. Can you know when there is a real gap or when you are being arrogant or over-optimistic?