CommunityCurrency

Community Currencies

"Community Currencies" are an exciting possibility for the future.

If you live in a city, imagine that your neighbors, in your large apartment building, or in your larger neighborhood, had a currency of their own?

At first, this sounds kind of silly- "What's the use of play money?" But it's actually very useful. People in Ithaca, NY, pay their rent entirely in "Ithaca HOURs," the name of their currency.

Why does this work? Because people have a hard time coming by "real" dollars. You have to go through a difficult process to get those dollars. But Community Currency money, usually tied to a free shared services and advertising board of some sort, are easy to come by. If you know how to play the piano, and woulnd't mind teaching, you don't have to set up a formal studio. Just give lessons to your neighbor every Wednesday for an hour or so. They might not be willing to pay you in "real" dollars, but they'd be willing to pay you in some of the neighborhoods "play" money. Then, if you want someone to help you with your computer, you can similarly pay them in "play" money.

The "play" turns real when grocery stores start accepting partial payments in the "play" money. Many grocery stores in Ithaca, NY, say things like, "You can pay for everything here with 20% play money." They use the play money to hire temporary labor, or give it away in promotions, and who knows what. They're finding some use for it, since they accept it.

Online Community Currencies

Edward Castronova says the Everquest economy is *already* larger than China's economy, nearly as large as Russia's economy. See "Game Theories" by Clive Thompson http://collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/000838.html

Apparently some people are taking game currency seriously enough to buy and sell it just like national currencies. ... "futures" and "options" and other financial terms ... See Ren Reynolds on February 22, 2005.

Global Possibilities

One of the main economists behind the Euro believes that we should have levels of currency.

That we would have a very local level currency, then a city level currency, then a state level currency, then a national level currency, and finally a global currency.

The countries of Europe converted to the Euro, and relinquished their individual currencies. This was necessary, because if they didn't, nobody would trust the Euro. But it would possibly be ideal if there were both national and state level currencies.

That's because if a bunch of money were to leave one state, that the state wouldn't be impoverished. It'd just switch to relying more on it's national currency.

When people don't have enough money to work together, that is quite literally the problem: Lack of money. There's no shortage of people actually being able to work. If they print and use their own money, then they have the money that they need to trade again.

Lack of money doesn't generally happen overnight. Generally it's a gradual process. If there's a local currency to rely upon, as the larger money leaves, people make more use of their local currency. This makes for stable communities.

When the Argentina economy collapsed, and the public money wasn't good for anything, the individual communities started bartering. Bartering is pretty inefficient. If they had community currencies in place, they would have fared the collapse of their national economy better.

other wiki discussing alternative currencies

I'm on the lookout for someone to make a "Money" wiki. When that day comes, we can focus more on the future possibilities here, and just delegate the introductions to the concept to over there. -- LionKimbro 2004-05-27 18:49:32

It looks like that day has already come:

wiki about money in general

: I have a wiki specifically for Optimaes (Open Project To Investigate Money and Economic Systems : http://www.nooranch.com/synaesmedia/optimaes/optimaes.cgi) which is ready to take any money related stuff you care to throw at it. -- PhilJones

wiki about some specific currencies

http://oddwiki.taoriver.net/wiki.pl/ETerra/HomePage

wiki that have a page or two relevant to alternative currencies

Elsewhere: * CommunityWiki: ModerationEconomy, MarketBasedAttentionAllocation * Ward's Wiki: GoldBackedElectronicMoney, WhereDoPricesComeFrom

: I also discuss money quite a bit on ThoughtStorms. TheTransitioner is also heavily focused on Alt.Money) -- PhilJones

( If no one else gets there first, I plan to add a link to all those pages to "the" money wiki. -- -- 199.245.163.1 2005-03-25 20:54:41 )

micropayment systems

Some people claim that micropayment systems will reduce friction and have all kinds of other benefits.

Other people are skeptical:

• "BitPass will fail ... Micropayment Systems Don't Work" -- Clay Shirky http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html

(EditHint: Should I split this off onto a MicroPayment page already ?)

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