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.
I suspected for a long time that our civilisation wasn't viable. When the banks crashed in 2008 I paid attention to a lot of apocalyptic reporting that said we came this close to economic Armageddon - whatever that meant.
As climate change inevitably rises up the political agenda, the shame of being seen not to act on it increases. Climate concerns everyone, even the rich, even the unborn, and everyone is invited to participate. Unlike with race, gender and class struggles, no one group can claim to own it. But what about those non-human persons, corporations? A few days ago, an initiative for businesses to join the rebellion started, but after objections from within the movement, it has been dropped - for now.
The usual mechanism of exchange in daily life and in cryptocurrency markets is using an intermediate commodity called money. If you want to swap the goods and services (G&S) you produce for other G&S you put your G&S on a bilateral market and swap it for money with whoever wants to pay the most for it. Then you take your money into another market and swap your money for the G&S that you want. Since money is a commodity like any other, you don't have to swap G&S for G&S but can move money in and out of the exchange.
The Credit Commons is my design for a financial exchange based on the principles of mutual credit, and autonomous communities voluntarily and trustfully collaborating. As such it differs from the more common exchange architectures in fundamental ways.
It is easy to do mutual credit or any accounting inside one organisation running one software instance on one server. Accounting between organisations on different software on different servers is much harder though.
I've learned in the last decade just how hard it is to work outside the money system. Its like trying to work outside of Facebook - there just isn't anything else equivalent, and all your connections are there. If you drop out of the money system you lose all your trading partners and may struggle to build a new network in a field which is narrower and has less powerful tools.
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Holochain is being talked about in my circles as if it were a magic bullet, and the nat
Selling tokens is now an accepted way to raise investment capital for IT projects, at least for speculative blockchain ventures. Tokens are not like shares an a company; they do not pay dividends or confer voting rights. Sometimes they can be used to buy the product or service, on the off-chance the company ever gets it to market. But sometimes it is neither of those, and issuers come up with creative ways to assure investors that success of the venture will somehow translate to demand for the tokens.
Over the years I've come across a few proposals that any person or entity should able to issue their own currency, and I've always struggled about what that would mean and how it would work. This is relevant for recursive currency systems like the Credit Commons in which theoretically any member could create a currency as part of a larger monetary ecosystem. Recently I've been thinking these through and I think the benefits are outweighed by the drawbacks.
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