Adventures in mutual credit

Recent currency innovations like Bitcoin and an economic recovery now dragging into its seventh year have led many people to question what money is - and more importantly, what it should be. Answering this question is fundamental to any attempt to transform society.

Just heard Matthew McStravick today talking about Economy of Hours, his widening of timebanking to include local businesses.

In 2011 after second deluge of Quantitative Easing in the US, congressman Ron Paul challenged Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke asking him, "Is Gold Money"?

Do you know what money is? Have you noticed that there are competing definitions? How could money have become so pervasive in our minds and relationships without being properly defined? How can we improve the technology of money when we don't even know what it is?

In the process of writing and researching for the forthcoming Money and Society MOOC, Jem Bendell and I learned a great deal about the subject we to were teaching. In Lesson 1 in which we investigate the very essense of money Jem introduced me to Georg Simmel's The Philosophy of Money. Simmel was not an economist, but a sociologist, and his understanding of money runs far deeper than any economist I've read.

[One condition for my GEN ambassadorship was a writeup at the end of the year. This is it, though I've written up a handful of individual ecovillages previously in this blog]

I've had the honor of spending a several days in several ecovillages, but I didn't manage to write economic profiles of all of them!

• Valle Sencaciones
• Lakabe
• Amalurra
• Los Portales

Evgeny Fedorov, from the Russian Parliament, explains what Russian Central Bank's role in the currency war, and then outlines how the USA is planning a coup in Russia.
It is 20 mins of subtitled Russian, so I took notes...

Thanks to Trade with Dave for bringing it to my attention.

Is it a good idea to start a LETS in 2014? The brand is 30 years old, and has a track record littered with poor governance, currency collapse, low participation and high turnover. The domesticated hippies of the 80s and caring sharing consumers of the 90s are not the same as the Occupiers and Transitioners of today. The existing LETS projects at least in UK are failing to thrive even in recession. The movement preferred decentralisation over software coordination, and slicker projects emerge every week.

Of course I'm jealous. People tell me every other day that my work is important, but much funding flows to demonstrably stupid projects.

I no longer seek funding or material support or even volunteers for my work. I no longer worry about funded projects overtaking mine. I have understood that what I'm doing is antithetical to money, and unlikely to be funded by any reasonable plutocrat or angel. Just as states and banks simply can't see moneyless people, projects which neither beg nor boast are invisible to donors.

Reality check: Functions of money

A typology of money

Last time I described several solidarity economy networks and a bit about their software situation and needs. Today I want to look at some solutions which could help them work in a more integrated way.

This article starts from the specific problem of accounting, and widens out to whole-platform approaches.

For full interoperability the accounting needs to be abstracted out of the community portal into its own service, and made accessible with an API.