Open Tabs -- Decentralized Money Coming This Week!
Melvin Carvalho
dependent on abusive banking fees. Private alpha launch is this
Saturday!
Imagine you owe me money from, say, a train ticket that I bought for
you. We then have two options: if it was a small amount, we can decide
to forget about it (gift economy), but if it was any noteworthy sum,
then we would probably end up using the Plain Old Banking System to
settle this little peer-to-peer transaction. People use banking
between friends, between house mates, and even between family members,
and abusive banking fees play too big a role in our day-to-day life.
This has to stop. With Opentabs.net there will be a third option: just
tab it!
You can tab amounts of money, beers, hours of work, bitcoins, books,
whatever you want to leave unpaid. Just like when you tell the waiter
in a bar to put a round of drinks "on your tab", Opentabs.net is a
tool for having tabs open with your peers, until it cancels out
against something else.
How it works
The Opentabs.net web app does not make actual transactions. It is not
a currency, and it is not a bank. It just helps you to
cryptographically sign open tabs ("IOUs") between peers, as an
alternative to actually executing a bank transfer. This way we can
both forget about that train ticket you owe me, and strike it off
against other transactions, until maybe at the end of the year we
clear the balance once, and settle the tab. Just like tabs in a bar.
We will launch in private alpha this Saturday, to coincide with Bank
Transfer Day, Mozilla Festival, and Guy Fawkes Day. We're working
around the clock to get everything ready for you, just sign up above.
More info will become available during the launch.
Paul B. Hartzog
MONEY
wants to force people into an accounting system that is mathematical
i.e. rigid and unflexible.
PEOPLE
are capable of being very flexible in spite of money's internal drives.
TABS
is one of the ways PEOPLE got around having to be forced by MONEY
into a state of constant cost accounting.
Furthermore,
tabs don't have to be monetary. IOU a favor or a hug or a cup of coffee.
Looking forward to seeing how Opentabs develops.
thx, Melvin.
-p
--
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http://www.PaulBHartzog.org
PaulBH...@PaulBHartzog.org
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The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
~ Muriel Rukeyser
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
~ William James
Perceive differently, then you will act differently.
~ Paul B. Hartzog
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Kevin Carson
<melvinc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This has to stop. With Opentabs.net there will be a third option: just
> tab it!
>
> You can tab amounts of money, beers, hours of work, bitcoins, books,
> whatever you want to leave unpaid. Just like when you tell the waiter
> in a bar to put a round of drinks "on your tab", Opentabs.net is a
> tool for having tabs open with your peers, until it cancels out
> against something else.
>
> How it works
>
> The Opentabs.net web app does not make actual transactions. It is not
> a currency, and it is not a bank. It just helps you to
> cryptographically sign open tabs ("IOUs") between peers, as an
> alternative to actually executing a bank transfer. This way we can
> both forget about that train ticket you owe me, and strike it off
> against other transactions, until maybe at the end of the year we
> clear the balance once, and settle the tab. Just like tabs in a bar.
>
> We will launch in private alpha this Saturday, to coincide with Bank
> Transfer Day, Mozilla Festival, and Guy Fawkes Day. We're working
> around the clock to get everything ready for you, just sign up above.
> More info will become available during the launch.
>
> http://opentabs.net/
Excellent! It sounds like a digital version of Greco's
credit-clearing networks, where everyone maintains a balance that goes
up with sales of services and down with purchases, and negative
balances are allowed. So it allows liqidity by "borrowing" against
the system when you have no stored value from past transactions.
--
Kevin Carson
Research Associate, Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Super-Empowered
Individuals http://desktopregulatorystate.wordpress.com
Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
Paul B. Hartzog
and integrated into trust networks that also
track other kinds of trustworthiness
like the espians' trustmaps (by Tav)
-p
--
Melvin Carvalho
<PaulBH...@paulbhartzog.org> wrote:
> this could be used as a community credit value
> and integrated into trust networks that also
> track other kinds of trustworthiness
> like the espians' trustmaps (by Tav)
>
> http://www.trustmap.org/#/
Nice find!
Need to scale it to more than twitter in an open way e.g. with HTML5 semantics