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Kurt Laitner

On Voles and Openings « flow - 2 views

eric.harris-braun.com/...id-225

*ericharris-braun flow *money wealth design

shared by Kurt Laitner on 28 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • “A falling tree makes more noise than a growing forest.”
  • Once I’d stepped through, there was no going back, because suddenly I understood three things: 1) money was a human invention 2) this particular invention is foundational to all human social patterns 3) we can change it, and there-by change our social patterns.
  • Namely that 1) money is information, 2) the pattern of flow of that information in relation to communities should be circular, i.e. issued within the community so it would flow around it, not through it as happens with moneys issued outside of communities.  3) That there must be a rich ecology of currencies appropriate to each communities circumstances.  4) That these currencies must exist in the context of a network that emerges out of an interplay between communities of function (what people do together) and communities of identity (how people see and name themselves).
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • He had realized that money is a tool that focuses on building tradable wealth, but that tradable wealth is just a small subset of measurable wealth, which itself is a subset of acknowledgeable wealth.
  • But it wasn’t until I came to understand Art’s deeper definition of currency, as “current-see” or formal information systems that allows us to see and interact with currents, flows, that the things really came together.  These different levels of wealth, corresponding to the levels of systemic integrity, also needed corresponding currency types, to manage the different types of flow that are taking place at those different systemic levels.
  • wanted to build a generalized “wealth acknowledgement” system.
  • Regenerosity, which used the idea of laying down what amounted to a social network graph to record the changing relationships in a community, which is essentially what monetary transaction are.
  • But what I realized, is that money is still very concrete, and just like pictographic writing. It’s not abstract at all because all moneys so far use the same encoding mechanism they always have for value: relative scarcity (just like all pictograms use the same encoding mechanism for meaning: shape)  And that encoding mechanism is only really appropriate for tradable wealth where scarcity is a true for parts and products of systems.  It’s not appropriate for the wider levels of wealth.  What I saw is that we have no “alphabet” for encoding all the levels of value, and that’s what the open money system I’d been working on could evolve into.
  • It appears that the greatest leaps in “novelty,” i.e. increased possibility that we know of, all arise because of the emergence of new embodied information encoding systems, what I like to call “expressive capacities”.
  • Our current day money is to that new expressive capacity as the coordinating hunting grunts of some proto-hominids is to language.
  •  What we can it evolve toward, is, for the lack of a better term, a language of flow.  
  • Expressive capacities are all built out of fairly simple nested composable units.
  •  The rules for composability at each level are fairly simple, yet the variety of that which is expressible is infinite because of the combinatorial explosion.  
  • a small vocabulary of composable parts, mixable with definite meaningful grammatics.  
  • “Composition requires creation of a negative space, i.e. receptors for an as of yet unknown interaction.”
  • Kurt Laitner on 28 Jan 12
     
    excellent romp through the issues
Kurt Laitner

The End of Money and the Future of Civilization | Reality Sandwich - 3 views

www.realitysandwich.com/end_money_future_civilization

shared by Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10 - No Cached
  • separation of money and the state
  • Legal tender laws and banking regulations endow the banking cartel with the exclusive power to issue money (as debt), which we are forced to use (through legal tender laws)
  • money evolved as a reaction to the inconveniences of barter.
    • frank smith
      frank smith on 31 Jan 10
       
      Money is not value, it is a symbol of value.
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • Money is a sub-set of exchange, a period in the evolution of exchange systems where exchange was mediated by value representations, either in the form of tangible commodities or instruments of various degrees of abstraction.
  • Exchange is not reducible to money and so when the history of money is abstracted from the history of exchange it appears to be linear, starting with commodity money, evolving through symbolic money, credit money and towards some kind of credit clearing system that Greco says is the highest stage of money.
  • tying knots
  • Nature itself provides all sorts of feedback mechanisms to regulate and control exchange but what is unique about human exchange is that humans developed their own systems to regulate and control it
  • mental
  • clay tablets
  • Exchange is a property of life on earth and not something special or unique to humans
  • the lack of an operational measure of value
  • notched bones
  • earlier form of the mutual credit clearing process
  • an abstract and portable representation of the real values that were being exchanged
  • The problem with "stuff" money is that it can be appropriated
  • It has to be created, distributed and controlled, and these functions always fell into the hands of the powerful who used it to increase their power over the rest of society
  • Today the money power is all-powerful, rendering national governments insignificant
  • Where bank credit is used the monetary output has to be greater than the monetary input because interest has to be paid on top of the principal amount borrowed. Since the difference between the output and the input was not created at loan time, the deficit can only come from further borrowing down the line.
  • This keeps the system in equilibrium as the full proceeds of production go to the producers and are not siphoned off by a parasitic class who play no part in the production/distribution process. The removal of interest from the equation not only removes the parasites, it also removes the expansionary imperative.
  • Greco is not talking about a complementary currency here, but an entirely new exchange system that excludes the financial industry as we know it, central banking, fractional-reserve banking, the political money nexus and everything else that flows from removing the concept of interest from the concept of money.
  • would nation states make sense any more? Currently nations map to the areas where their currencies operate
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      this is somewhat simplistic, not sure it is this simple, but nations are under threat to be sure, not from currency but from a shift from capital to mind as the source of power
    • frank smith
      frank smith on 31 Jan 10
       
      Yep that's the real relevant shift.
  • tally sticks
  • This means the decentralization and democratization of the exchange process.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      and what of taxation, and our current land based existence?
  • Attempts to undermine that basis would result in class warfare in the form of "currency wars." The ruling class would appeal to its allies in government to quash any attempts to "undermine the economy."
  • In an information-based exchange system when there is a transfer of value from a seller to a buyer there is no agreement between the two and no direct obligation on the part of the buyer to the seller.
  • Another way of putting it is that traders must agree to sell in order to buy and buy in order to sell. Everyone has an obligation to the community to keep their mean balance as close to zero as possible. Clearing is the process of ensuring that balances remain at or near to zero.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      hmm interesting, not sure I agree, this enforces consumption, value should flow freely and is truly 'social' what does default look like in this situation, is this not a 'banking' function to constrain negative value from becoming more than a party can 'afford', not a zero balance necessarily.. more thought needed
  • As there is no credit in an information-based exchange system and certainly no physical currency, the term "issue" has no meaning as well.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      no, the issuer is just changed to the community
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      not really buying the straight exchange thing as some will always produce more than they consume, some consumer more than they produce and some will be eve
  • Information can neither be issued nor can it circulate
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      this is interesting, but I'm not sure if denying circulation is a good idea, having the ability to 'transfer balances' may be useful
  • When the exchange system does not have any tangible or symbolic representations of value (i.e. money) but only keeps records of the transfers of value, the concept of "payment" is rendered meaningless
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      if i open my mind this far, my brain might fall out
  • The "payment" here is the settlement of a social obligation, not a direct transfer of value to the seller in recompense.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      seeems to be standing on his/her head semantically for no apparent benefit
  • who enters the transactions into the system (records them on the computer)?
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      the computer of course
  • Sellers entering transactions is about as revolutionary as mutual credit clearing itself,
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      UoweMe instead of IOU? revolutionary? hmm
  • bad debts
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      how does it rid of us bad debt? the debt becomes mutually insured if you will but can still be unpaid by the particular counter parties
  • As buyers of labour, employers are greatly empowered by the fact that they control the supply of money in their businesses
  • When "employees" are enabled to credit themselves and debit their "employers" they are no longer part of a "workforce" but independent service providers with livelihoods.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      actually, there are no 'employees' and no 'employers' as these imply durable relationships and a certain measure of exclusivity, both durability and exclusivity will be far more rare
  • The Next Big Thing in Business: A Complete Web-Based Trading Platform
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      HALLELUJAH BROTHER AMEN
  • the money system of today was developed and adapted for the industrial age. It has always been able to generate practically unlimited amounts of credit, especially after it was delinked from limited precious metals.
  • It has also been able to produce more credit than is necessary for normal trading in order to cover the interest requirement.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      this added layer of leverage is in fact the problem
  • Growth has been possible while there has been the energy to power the growth, but as we enter the downward slope of the peak oil bell-shape and growth becomes more difficult, so it will become increasingly difficult to service the interest requirement. Because interest is contingent on growth, you could say that the "production" of credit also has a bell shape and maps on top of the energy production bell shape. We have thus reached "peak credit'"and "peak interest." This is a dangerous contradiction for a money system that can only work on the upward slope of the energy production curve.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      don't quite buy this energy -> growth -> interest -> credit argument
  • Until the computer revolution and the advent of the Internet it simply was not possible to have a purely information-based exchange system
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      key point
  • To be successful it requires four basic components: A marketplace A social network A means of payment A measure of value or pricing unit
  • We are not provided with any clues about how this can be achieved, but it is unlikely to be provided by any of the "big players" today or a new startup until one of them is prepared to provide the service without expecting any reward in conventional money.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      bingo
    • frank smith
      frank smith on 31 Jan 10
       
      I like unconventional...
  • This will require a huge leap of faith because the provider will have to believe that its rewards will come from providing the service alone and not from extraneous sources.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 10
       
      amen
CASUDI ~ Caroline Di Diego

Cash and Transact « Emida - 0 views

www.emida.net/...cash-and-transact

shared by CASUDI ~ Caroline Di Diego on 12 Apr 10 - Cached
  • CASUDI ~ Caroline Di Diego on 12 Apr 10
     
    Cash and Transact™ is a mobile wallet solution - money in a subscriber's virtual mobile account. Account holders can load value to their Cash and Transact™ account and then transfer cash or pay for goods and services with anyone, anytime, from anywhere. The Cash and Transact™ vision is to create a borderless community connected by transactions via the Cash and Transact™ mobile wallet.
Wildcat2030 wildcat

It's all about autonomy: Consumers react negatively when prompted to think about money ... - 1 views

www.sciencecodex.com/_prompted_to_think_about_money

autonomy consumers money

shared by Wildcat2030 wildcat on 15 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Wildcat2030 wildcat on 15 Sep 11
     
    "Whether they are aware of it or not, consumers dislike being reminded of money-so much that they will rebel against authority figures, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "When consumers are reminded of money, do they conform, shrug it off, or react against others' attempts to influence them?" ask authors Jia (Elke) Liu (University of Groningen), Dirk Smeesters (Erasmus University), and Kathleen D. Vohs (University of Minnesota). The researchers found that money reminders lead consumers to react against people who would normally influence their decisions. In three studies, participants were subtly reminded of money by either working on a computer with a hard currency screensaver or by formulating sentences using money-related words. "Because money reminders boost the importance of consumers' autonomy, those subtly reminded of money perceived the authority commands and off-handed peer opinions as threats to their autonomy, which did not occur among those not reminded of money," the authors write. Specifically, the participants who were reminded of money reacted in opposite ways from authority figures or peers when it came to evaluating products. Conversely, participants who were not reminded of money followed commands or suggestions of authorities and peers. "This reactance to social influences only occurs when money-reminded consumers made decisions for themselves," the authors write. "When these consumers were asked to make decisions for a relatively intimate other, they were indifferent to social influences (i.e., the unsolicited opinion of another consumer)." "This research highlights money's ability to stimulate a longing for freedom, and has potential implications for interpersonal communication, advertisers, and markets," the authors write. "Money cues are frequently present in the social environment (e.g., televisions spots mentioning savings or discounts, in-store signage with dollar signs, billboards advertising the state l
Kurt Laitner

Home - Cyclos Project Site - 0 views

project.cyclos.org

Currency opensource cyclos Community banking

shared by Kurt Laitner on 23 Dec 11 - Cached
  • develop open source complementary currency software that is easy to use and maintain
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