Alternative currency An alternative currency (or private currency) is any currency used as an alternative to the dominant national or multinational currency systems (usually referred to as national or fiat money). They are created by an individual, corporation, or organization, they can be created by national, state, or local governments, or they can arise naturally as people begin to use a certain commodity as a currency. Mutual credit is a form of alternative currency, and thus any form of lending that does not go through the banking system can be considered a form of alternative currency. When used in combination with or when designed to work in combination with national or multinational fiat currencies they can be referred to as complementary currency. Most complementary currencies are also local currencies and are limited to a certain region.
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. As one person put it to me recently, “community building is a truly 21st century problem.” If gifts define community, it might be because they encourage feelings of generosity and gratitude, and hence bonds of kinship. It may also have something to do with the fact that the informal gift economy presupposes an ongoing relationship. Game over, Bitcoin. Long live human-based currencies! While being a tremendous proof of concept, the distributed cryptocurrency Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed as an alternative money system, critics say. It is now time for truly radical monetarists to build on this technical experiment and move to the next level of the monetary revolution: a truly human-based digital monetary system. Since its launch in 2009, Bitcoin has turned from a crypto-anarchist project into a hype topic in the worldwide web community and beyond. From London’s squats to Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood: not everyone uses Bitcoin, but everyone is talking about it. Bitcoin can be described as a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, in other words a distributed monetary system that enables anonymous and relatively secure transactions without any centralized authority.
In One Month, Everyone In Iceland Will Own Cryptocurrency The cryptocurrency craze spun into a new realm of ridiculous with Kanyecoin, Dogecoin, Ron Paul Coin and the bounty of other clone-coins that sprung up to ride the Bitcoin wave. But the latest altcoin to enter the market, Auroracoin, wants to take the futurist trend back to its cryptoanarchist roots. The altcoin was designed specifically for Iceland, and the creator plans to give every citizen of the Nordic country a digital handful of Auroracoins to kickstart their use. Auroracoin is the brainchild of cryptocurrency enthusiast Baldur Friggjar Odinsson, and he'll be the one distributing pre-mined coins to the entire population of Iceland at midnight on March 25 in a countrywide "airdrop." Each Icelandic citizen—all 330,000 of them—will receive 31.8 AUC through a digital transaction.
#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. Bitcoin 2.0: Can Ripple Make Digital Currency Mainstream? It has been a nail-biting year for people who hold Bitcoins, an open-source digital currency that has quickly gained traction in the tech community. Last June, Bitcoins were worth $5. By April 2013, they were up to $266.
Metacurrency Collabathon: a wealth system After Sibos, Q4 is usually the period of the year when I try to re-boot, to refresh my sources, to be a sponge and take-in new knowledge. It’s when I start painting for the next year. When the themes and trends for next year start emerging. I wanted to get a much better feel for what this world of alternative and complementary currencies was all about, and decided to join a week-end “Collabathon” organized by Art Brock (@artbrock) and Eric Harris-Braun (@zippy314), the founders of The Metacurrency Project. In the slipstream of the Contact Summit, they wanted to gather the minds to work on NextNet ideas and tools.
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. The idea is to use this post to define what I think is the most pressing question in the future of money debate: how to create genuine, decentralised and abundance-based peer-to-peer money. If that sounds like a mouthful, bear with me, as I try to try to convince you that it’s the shape of things to come…
The LETSystem Design Manual 1.1 Money and Community "Give someone a fish and they'll eat for a day, teach them how to fish and they'll eat forever." The problem with money Many of us are active in creating and maintaining a sense of community amongst our friends and neighbours. But more and more our hands seem to be tied: the world is in serious trouble, both ecologically and economically. Local currency See Emissions Reduction Currency System for community based initiatives aimed at emission reduction In economics, a local currency, in its common usage, is a currency not backed by a national government (and not necessarily legal tender), and intended to trade only in a small area. As a tool of fiscal localism, local moneys can raise awareness of the state of the local economy, especially among those who may be unfamiliar or uncomfortable with traditional bartering.
Debt: The first five thousand years - David Graeber Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt's potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors. What follows is a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call "the economy".
Dieter Suhr, Neutral Money Network Prof. Dr. Dieter Suhr (+)