Adventures in mutual credit

Last month I expressed personal alarm at the weather and the unexpected speed of change. Since then the global weather continues to break records, and I've thought of something slightly more constructive to say.

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 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.