Adventures in mutual credit

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 natural platform for any radical initiative to

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.

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.