Social Currency Project - Briefing for RSA Fellows

If you think about it, the “social economy” of duty and favour is still bigger than the “real economy” of profit and loss.

Community currencies in your context has tended to mean community of price. We include as our definition of community, community of vision. So that when a youth corp. for instance seeks to create, a peer culture that values contribution and mutual respect and that rejects violence

I believe there are about 140 TimeBanks within the network and outside of the network, we obviously can’t have a certain knowledge but we think up to 20 more.

This site was put together mainly by Bernard Lietaer in the mid-1990s. It is still the clearest and the best. However it also indicates that the topic has not ‘advanced’ much since then. On the other hand, it could suggest that what needs to be known is known. People just have to do it

“fiat” currency (as in Ithaca HOURS)–issued, managed and guaranteed by a central authority; mutual credit (as in LETS, ROCS, and Time Dollars); or commodity-backed money or scrip that may be redeemed for a particular product or service.

Backed currencies such as e-gold can be issued (or barter exchanges completed) by whoever owns a commodity or service. These systems thus do not require a central authority to guarantee the currency and manage its supply. Money created as mutual credit (like LETS, ROCS, and Time Dollars), as well as fiat money that does not bear interest (such as Ithaca HOURS) is in sufficient supply, thus encouraging cooperation among participants. Demurrage currencies also discourage hoarding and encourage longer-term planning and sustainable investment.

An alternative currency, created to keep small companies afloat during the 1930s recession, is still thriving as it marks its 75th anniversary milestone.

The term WIR derived from the word "wirtschaftsring", or "economic circle". Wir is also the German word for "we", signifying togetherness and solidarity.

SMEs subscribed to the organised bartering system – backed by an unofficial form of currency – to enable them to trade with one another in the absence of real cash

When a large city depends on one kind of money, it’s like depending on one kind of vehicle - cars only or one bridge. Community currencies aren’t Monopoly money - they’re anti-monopoly money.

Printing our own cash is all-American. During the Great Depression, 400 U.S. cities and towns issued scrip. More recently, in Ithaca, N.Y., thousands of residents and 500 businesses have traded millions of dollars of colorful local paper money featuring children, waterfalls and animals.

These currencies are real money - backed by real people, real goods and real services. By contrast, dollars are funny money - no longer backed by gold, silver or commodities but by less than nothing

Haiti’s history is based on sharing and cooperation—expressed with gifts and solidarity toward those surviving on the margins. These displays usually go unnamed and unnoticed.

Some are formalized systems. One is called konbit—collective work groups in which members of the community labor without any expectation of compensation or even return.

In sòl—revolving loan funds—a group of women puts a certain amount of money into a common pot each week or each month; the total is given to a different member each time. That way, each woman can, at some point, have enough capital to allow her to make a significant expense:

Sacred Economics describes this new money and the new economy that will coalesce around it. It also explores the metamorphosis in human identity that is both a cause and a result of the transformation of money.

A sacred object is one-of-a-kind; it carries a unique essence that cannot be reduced to a set of generic qualities.

Social media PLUS community currencies EQUALS Economy 2.0?

We know with certainty that different types of currency create different tendencies in the types of collective behavior human social organisms exhibit. A currency design cannot predict this collective behavior in the sense of a blueprint, but rather it sets up a series of possible discrete interactions that, when taken as a whole, manifest as a collective behavior.

Open source currencies will do for social DNA what sexual reproduction did for biological DNA. They will radically increase the ability of the social organism to adapt to new and changing circumstances.

I wonder if there is a market for trading apps? What are the copyright implications?

“The app is the new 99-cent single – for kids, it’s the new currency,” says Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, maker of a US music app that has been downloaded on to 13m iPhones.

The dollar may be doomed, but the real value is wedged between your ears.