Adventures in mutual credit

Luisa and I toured Portugal in September 2018 to find out the best places to build a resilient life.

William Stanley Jevons described the four functions of money in 1875:

• a medium of exchange,
• a unit of account,
• a store of value,
• a standard of deferred payment

For some time I marvelled at his clarity, but this week it all unravelled for me. So this post is an attempt at a sanity check.

Most Greeks will tell you that the Exarchiea quarter of Athens is a dangerous and dismal place, in desperate need of gentrification - because the establishment media tells them so.

The Bancor Protocol is a mechanism that sits on top of a financial market (like a Bitcoin/Ethereum market or a GOOGL/USD market) to guarantee liquidity.

Lets unpack that.

Eyal Herzog learned a hard lesson when his world-beating online video site was overtaken by Youtube. He learned that the internet, by lowering the barrier to entry, enables a 'long tail'. In other words if you want to own a sector, you shouldn't worry about the leaders in that sector, as much as supporting the 99% of others who want to be in that space. Eyal and his team understood that if the kind of democratisation that YouTube brought to video happened to money, then there need never be a scarcity of money again.