Open source currency?

[skyfaller]

Also, I completely fail to understand what Douglas Rushkoff is suggesting here: open source currency.

Do I need to read his books or something for this concept to make sense? He seems to be suggesting that we need money that isn't controlled by the government, and that a model of money that is based on abundance rather than scarcity will enable an economy of collaboration rather than competition. What? Can someone point me to articles that will give me more specifics? (Naturally I will also be trying to Google this myself.) This article is just too vague for me to make sense of it.

Comments

[moon-orchid.livejournal.com]

I didn't read the article you're referring to (but I will, and I probably should have before I respond, but...yeah), but I can point you in the direction of other people that are talking about similar concepts.

There are two books that are decent in describing 'alternatives' to the national monetary currency that almost all economies are based on today. They are: "Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender" by Thomas Greco. The second is: "The Future of Money" by Bernard Lietaer (Which is only available thru Amazon.uk) Both of these books are rather academic in their approach to understanding the current monetary system and other approaches to monetary currencies. Lietaer was a world banker and co-designer of the Euro, so he is regarded as knowing a thing or two about money systems. Greco tends to be very passionately against the current system, and that is communicated in his book - which is still quite good.

Those two tend to be considered the best reading about the faults of our current monetary system and possible alternatives.

So, to briefly address the things you mentioned above:

Almost without exception, all national currencies are debt-issued currencies that bear interest - meaning that for every dollar in circulation, there's at least another dollar (sometimes 2) owed back in interest. Because it's a fiat currency (created from nothing by the Federal Reserve, in the case of the US), it is designed to be scarce to keep its value. There's not enough money to pay back the debt owed by everyone participating in the system. This is what he's referring to about scarcity.

There are those (like myself) that believe that currencies have very specific characteristics - there design creates specific behaviors (like the behaviors of a market). We operate in a monetary system that has to be scarce, by design. I think the author is referring to behaviors of greed and competition as being the natural effects of using a scarce currency. So, if you create currencies of abundance (in the case of monetary currencies, you could use "mutual credit" or "zeroed" currency, where the currency is created at the time of the transaction through debits and credits to individual accounts and the overall total balance of the currency within the system is always "0") a natural result will be more cooperation.

I think that's the shortest explanation I've ever tried to give on this subject, but there ya go.

If you are really interested in this, you should read one of those two books. The Future of Money has a cool 'money primer' in the back which elegantly explains our monetary system, who actually controls it (it's not the government) and why it's not necessarily the best option for creating a free flowing market, among other things.

:)

[moon-orchid.livejournal.com]

ACK! I misspelled "there" there! It should have been "their!" I hate people who do that! I can't edit it! ACK! ;)