What should Peer-to-Peer Money be? Thinking about debt outside the twin intellectual straitjackets of state and market opens up exciting possibilities. For instance, we can ask: in a society in which that foundation of violence had finally been yanked away, what exactly would free men and women owe each other? What sort of promises and commitments should they make to each other? This post is more about principles than detail; though I intend to follow up with more information about Pebble, a project I am collaborating on to create money around trust, soon. Money matters First of all, a detour. However, I want to look at a different question, which I think is fundamental to the future of money. Given this, I can return to peer-to-peer money. 1. Peer-to-peer money should be radically decentralised. It follows that, in an ideal scenario for peer-to-peer money, such decisions should be pushed out to the edges, to take advantage of local intelligence. 2. 3. 4. Why build it?
#PunkMoney: How to Print Money on Twitter NB: For a more up to date post on #PunkMoney, go here. In the Middle Ages, producers created their own money as a promise to deliver goods and services in the future, and spent it with people who trusted them. The promisee, who became the bearer of a new credit note, could transfer it to a third party as payment, by signing it on the back. If a note ever came back to the issuer, it would be redeemed for whatever it was a promise for. Personal currencies were effective forms of trust-based local money when bullion was in short supply. Today, as we face another shortage of sovereign money, why not revive the old practice with new technology? So here’s a proposal on how to literally print money with Twitter, called #PunkMoney. To make #PunkMoney work best, I’ve put together a set of minimal rules for money issuance, transfer and redemption. My suggestion is to make promises you feel you can actually keep, as this makes it all much more fun for everyone else. Print money Transfer money
GiftPunk: A Twitter Tool for Giftcasting Recently I’ve been thinking about communities, and how to build them. Communities are in some sense defined by the flow of gifts, rather than market-based transactions. Perhaps the kinds of behaviour encouraged by the market is one of the reasons communities have been in decline in recent history. If gifts define community, it might be because they encourage feelings of generosity and gratitude, and hence bonds of kinship. After experimenting with #PunkMoney, a promise currency based on Twitter, I’ve been exploring how Twitter can be adapted and repurposed to do new, unexpected things. How it works A community sets up a central account, for example @OccupyLondonGifts. For example, if Alice wanted to offer legal advice, she could tweet: @OccupyLondonGifts I offer an hour of legal advice. – Alice GiftPunk can find Alice’s tweet, interpret it and tweet through the community account: [Offer] @Alice offers one hour of legal advice – @OccupyLondonGifts – Bob Gratitude currency – @Sally Try it out
The Special Logic of Gift Economies The gift is inherently unquantifiable: to count its worth too closely is to destroy its status as a gift. This might explain why it will never be possible to scale a gift economy beyond small social networks, even with the help of reputation measurement technology. Goods and services haven’t always flowed through market exchanges, and neither do they entirely today. Tribal societies most commonly exchanged value in the form of gifts. Such gifts usually carried obligations to accept and to reciprocate, either directly or indirectly, with the group. Today, the market has replaced gift flows as the predominant means of resource allocation in society, but gift economies still exist in parts of the economy where the market cannot enter. Underlying such patterns of exchange, an informal quid pro quo exists. Abundance and empathy Gift economies are indeed personal, and offer benefits of relationship and community which impersonal, market-based transactions do not. Measuring reputation Read More:
Matslats - Community currency engineer | "Blessed is he who has found his work. Let him ask no other blessing" - Thomas Carlisle webisteme This is my second post on defining a trust metric for Ripple, or in fact any peer-to-peer credit network which relies solely on trust. In my last post, I looked at a simple approach based on measuring the average ratio of credits and debts for a user. While this wasn’t a bad start to thinking about the problem of trust in general, it suffered from being too simple (I’ll explain why.) First, let’s revisit the reasons why a trust metric is so critical for any peer-based credit network like Ripple to scale. Background Ripple is a system to create money out of credit relationships between peers, rather than between individuals and banking institutions, or the state. The critical difference between Ripple and more traditional types of mutual credit circles is the reliance on pairwise relationships between nodes, rather than relationships between nodes and a centralised book-keeper. This sets the context for why Ripple needs a trust metric. Trust as Credit Ratio Perspectival Trust An outline
The Future of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free | Magazine Cash in the clouds—neither paper nor plastic.Illustration: Aegir Hallmundur; Benjamin Franklin: Corbis A simple typo gave Michael Ivey the idea for his company. One day in the fall of 2008, Ivey’s wife, using her pink RAZR phone, sent him a note via Twitter. But instead of typing the letter d at the beginning of the tweet — which would have sent the note as a direct message, a private note just for Ivey — she hit p. Money Over Time A brief history of currency technology. —Bryan Gardiner 9000 BC: Cows The rise of agriculture made commodities like cattle and grain ideal proto-currencies: Since everyone knew what a heifer or a bushel was worth, the system was more efficient than barter. Just a decade ago, the idea of moving money that quickly and cheaply would have been ridiculous. Ivey got around that problem by using PayPal. But perhaps nobody is as ambitious as PayPal. PayPal is just the latest company to try to harness the creative powers of the open Internet.
Transcript Ira Glass This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, "The Invention of Money." We've arrived at Act 2 of our show. When the United States was on a real gold standard, it was clear what money was and how much money there was. If you have any cash in your pocket right now, pull it out, you see the name right at the top of the bills, Federal Reserve note. Though the Federal Reserve does that, and though the Federal Reserve's chairman is appointed by the president. With me so far? Since 2008 when the current financial crisis took hold, the Fed has done all kinds of things that central banks just don't do. Alex Blumberg Up until recently when the Federal Reserve did this dangerous and magical thing of creating money out of nothing, conjuring money out of the void, it happened in a kind of solemn ritual. David Kestenbaum Gerald O'driscoll Now this question has huge ramifications. Yeah.
Eka-People.doc Description of the system of mutual relations "Eka-People" Key ideas of the system : humanity and balance. Financial relations must become humane, and human relations - balanced. The first can be archived by following the Gold rule of morality - do not "act in relation to other how you would not like, that they acted in relation to you". The second comes from understanding that even the best internals of people, appearing in the field of defective rules, involuntarily become on service to this system of rules. Base of relations: Single the measure of all things. To be able to organise relations of people and put them in balance we need find way to measure these relations and set proper rules. Most social and balanced forms of organisation of relation are Mutual Credit systems, like LETS and Time Banks. To choose right measure is very important, because since it is set it becomes value it self. Mutual credit system which using hours as measuring of value is called time-bank. 1. 2.
The Monetary Future