Adventures in mutual credit

For the first time I have helped to design a currency! With LETS and Time banks, the currency model is pretty straight-forward mutual credit with minimum and maximum account limits. Then more often than not there is an issuing account which gradually runs out of control and they are running a fiat system more than a mutual credit.

1. how trade is affected by the availability of money
2. how outside control of the money supply may be counter productive to a local economy
3. how money is separate from real value
4. how using debt as money can obstruct the economy

The Rolling Jubilee campaign is raising money to buy up cheap debt and forgive it.

I wrote to them asking
1) Who will sell you debt for pennies on the dollar?
2) Who's debt will you buy?
3) Don't you think the price will go up if the campaign gets traction?
4) is there a way that we can buy the debt of people we care about?
5) By purchasing the debt, you legitimise it, and the whole system that created it.

Why not a campaign of solidarity and support for debtors and people who default?

Bitcoin is a super way for frictionless transactions and for disassociating ourselves from the fraud, waste, and centralised control of commercial credit and legal tender monies. Most techies working on monetary solutions seem to think that the ideal currency is a globally uniform, frictionless unit in which transactions are quickly settled, with anonymity an arguably desirable trait.

In hope that this installation profile may be of use to others, I write here a description of the architecture of this profile. My hope is always to make discreet, reusable components that other developers can modify or build on. The architecture is deliberately simple because my first interest is module development more than site design. Also LETS groups are not very ambitious with technology.

So now you understand that national currency is toxic, and that banks profit from all the money in circulation. You've written to your MP and received the standard response - now what?

In my capacity of voluntary open-source-money-=system engineer, I just returned from a month deep research in Valencia and Catalona, Spain, the country allegedly next in line after stricken Greece, for the proverbial chop.

Transition Network aims to make necessary, large-scale, pervasive changes to the infrastructure of our civilisation and to our society while appealing for funds from charitable organisations and grant-making bodies, much as a donkey sanctuary might.

In a period of capital squeeze, small business, local businesses have less access to captial than ever, because the monetary runes dictate that large, asset stripping organisations make better investments than local, productive, resilient, enterprises.

Had three very productive visits last week to actors in transition towns.

After 18 months developing (since Drupal 7 was released), I can't wait to put Community Accounting version 3 to reach production. The need for this software, I believe is more than ever, and awareness of it too, is growing. In four years dedication I've seen the competition fall away, and the main obstacles to implementing grass-roots exchange systems is no longer technical, but political. In Drupal 6 the following has been achieved: