Mutual credit money systems need the next net

[Matthew Slater]

Big hello from Belgium.

I'd like to take a few minutes to inform you about my work on local money systems using Drupal.

http://drupal.org/project/mutual_credit

There are various kinds of money systems which need to be tried at scale, but the one I'm absolutely dedicated to mutual credit.

This is not conventional money, nor is it some scarce resource like bitcoin, nor is it commodity money. Mutual credit accounting is simply a list of transactions between members of a system who agree to honour each other's debts. This is the mechanism used by B2B barter systems, LETS and timebanks. 

The beauty of mutual credit for me is that it is very suited to localised econonmies; the mechanism is proven, it is inherently stable, and there are many users of such systems already.

A mutual credit economy, as described in The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, is decentralised, or cellular. There is no one monetary authority, but each currency's worth reflects the successes and failures of its users, and the goods and services they produce.

At the moment I'm giving one Drupal instance per community and one currency per Drupal instance, then training the communities to work together and manage their own Drupal instances. It is a lot of work for these kinds of community groups. But it's not ultimately appropriate that each of these tiny communities should have its own currency. The scope of the currencies needs to be larger in order to be useful. So I'm working towards

• automating transactions between communities.
• putting many communities onto one drupal, where they can share technical resources
• providing more support for different levels of engagement, according to the tech resources each community has available.
• outsourcing the accounting to another location, so that many communities can use one set of accounts (currency)

One feature of mutual credit and of local currencies in general is that security isn't a top priority because the unit of account has no intrinsic value and theft isn't very meaningful in a context where money exists only as accounting entries - this money is by nature, tracable, (although there's no reason why there can't be untraceable subsystems, like paper notes). In addition, the smaller the community, the harder it would be to aquire unjustified high balances without anybody noticing.

With reference to Charles' post about security, then, we are not concerned with P2P theft and fraud. Consider instead the the Liberty dollar prosecution and the panicked reaction from the International Reciprocal Trade organisation, rushing to clarify that the Liberty dollar was not, as Von Nothaus said in his defense, a barter currency. Rightly so. The barter industry has compromised absolutely with the US government on the question of taxes, and Von Nothaus was stoking quite a different of barter system. All this shows that the people with the dollar monopoly intend to retain control, and continue to extract value from the unconstitutional IRS racket. They will go to extremes to prevent sound money systems from succeeding. So far, they haven't had to. Before the internet, mutual credit systems were extremely inefficient and the pioneers were dogged, idealist, uncooperative types who did sterling work themselves, but kept the movement fragmented and retarded.

Mutual credit systems are not digital or internet currencies per se, but before the internet they were extremely cumbersome, and I would say they need the Internet absolutely in order to function efficiently. Everything I'm doing is vulnerable to the internet kill switch. So I'm shouting out for a decentralised internet that can't be shut down so that normal people have access to the technology to determine their own money systems. Very important!

Back to immediate concerns. My Drupal module needs a good hacker to test it and make recommendations on good practices for deployment. I need to better understand about distributed social network platforms and would like to work closely with people who have the skills and the passion to support pioneering mutual credit projects on other platforms.

My organisation, Community Forge is hosting over 40 sites for community groups around Europe http://communityforge.net/members/communities, and there are many other users of the Drupal module who want to see these technologies more available and useful.  I am working to Drupalise many more communities and then connect them together so they can have the best of both worlds - local, connected currencies.

I have been absolutely dedicated to this for the last 3 years and I welcome more engagement with committed, skilled individuals.

Thanks for your attention,

Matthew

http://matslats.net

[Devin Balkind]

Hi Matthew.  Happy you introduced yourself on the list.

I've been organizing the components necessary for the introduction of a 'land-backed' currency in the Northeastern US.  The system would allow people to redeem their currency for products from participating farms through a network of coworking spaces in the region.  I've looked through communityforge.net but am still not sure if your system would work for our use case.  Could you point me to relevant resources or maybe we could connect over skype?

Thanks for helping people free themselves from the currency monopoly.

--
Devin Balkind
@devinbalkind
vitamindwb.com