Adventures in mutual credit

Many activists that I know recognise that small town currencies are simply not very useful in a globalised economy. One current response response in UK is Bristol which is soon to launch a regional currency. It's very conscious that most celebrated project in Germany, Cheimgauer is regional, and perhaps less conscious of the role of regional banks in that endeavour. Otherwise the strategy sounds to me like a host of other projects which aren't thriving. Insanity has been defined as repeating the same action and expecting different results.

It has been my pleasure to hang out with Collin Ferguson and the Xchange Stewards team in the North West USA. After some changes of direction over the last few years, Collin and the XS team now have a clear idea of what needs doing, a strategy, and two hardcore software engineers on-side.

Individuals

I was just privileged to spend some time with Arthur Brock and, to a lesser extent, with Eric Harris-Braun. (less time, not less privileged!).

After some years of failing to properly explain it, and many prototypes, they reckon to have nailed down the mechanical details of metacurrency, and are starting to build in ernest!

While the problems faced by Western economies can be thoroughly explained through monetary policy, the solutions clearly do not lie in simply promoting economic alternatives. People don't want to engage with economics, they don't understand it, especially when experts disagree. Only the disenfranchised - the least influential people - will listen. CC Advocates need to be more strategic than to talk about economics - the world and his wife is talking about economics. Instead, I propose, they should be working more closely with those who are already building communities.

Guillaume Lebleu worked for 8 years in the banking system and he really understands how credit creation works, and why the system is like it is. Most of my economics education comes from things like 'The Money Masters' and 'Money as Debt', which paints an alarming picture of a corrupt system ravaging the earth and indenturing its people using debt instruments. Guillaume understands why the currency system is the best of all possible worlds so far, although it has its faults.

Sergio Lub was doing social networking long before facebook or anything in that ilk in 1997. His network, Friendly Favors, has over 50,000 members, but needs to migrate to a more modern platform if it is progress. Faceboook and the barter networks have a damning deficiency, in his opinion, which is that they fail to capitalise or value trust. Ebay does trust, but ebay isn't actually about relationship building or barter, and the trust is not based on relationship, but only on the trading experience - it is completely impersonal, and no credit is extended.

Humans, their composition, their history, their behaviour seem (to them) the most complex and interesting entities in the universe.
I'd love to explore this complexity with you, but time is short; my species is in the throes of an existential crisis.

Mutual credit accounting is very easy because you just store all the transactions in one table with

• a payer
• a payee
• a quantity

, and then add up all the transactions per user to get the balances. However once a mutual credit system gets larger, it becomes expensive to add up all these transactions. So a caching strategy is needed.

The easiest and most obvious caching is on the member balances. But there are two other main needs:

Can you feel it? That moment after Coyote runs off a cliff, his legs stop spinning, only his uncomprehension that the road ran out is keeping him the air. He looks down, looks to camera and....