Pierre's logs - Filed under 'future of money'

The global money system no longer works in our best interests; we need a serious overhaul of money - and of our attitude towards it. Based on the four mega-trends of monetary instability, the ageing global population, the information revolution, and climate change, Bernard Lietaer looks at different scenarios of what the world might be like in 2020.
1. The Corporate Millennium: governments are disbanded, central banks become irrelevant, and the world is run with Big Brother control by huge corporations with their own currencies.
2. Caring Communities: after a monetary crash, people retreat into small, self-sustaining communities, like tribes.
3. Hell on Earth: in which the breakdown of life as we know it is followed by a highly individualistic free-for-all, resulting in an ever more obscene gulf between rich and poor.
4. Sustainable Abundance: envisages a world where we take better care of the environment, re-engage the poor and the unemployed in mainstream society and give back time and fufilment to the over-worked, while providing the elderly with a high level of personal care.
A society of Sustainable Abundance is achievable - but only if we are willing to re-think our money system and use money innovations that have already proven effective somewhere in the world today.

http://www.lietaer.com/books/futureofmoney.html

If the thought of eliminating money still troubles you, consider this: If a group of people with gold, diamonds and money were stranded on an island that had no resources such as food, clean air and water, their wealth would be irrelevant to their survival. It is only when resources are scarce that money can be used to control their distribution. One could not, for example, sell the air we breathe or water abundantly flowing down from a mountain stream. Although air and water are valuable, in abundance they cannot be sold.
Money is only important in a society when certain resources for survival must be rationed and the people accept money as an exchange medium for the scarce resources. Money is a social convention, an agreement if you will. It is neither a natural resource nor does it represent one. It is not necessary for survival unless we have been conditioned to accept it as such.

http://www.thevenusproject.com/anewResource.php

Advantages of open money
- Decentralized: no need for a centralized issuer like a bank, which means no threats from a centralized power.
- Free: no interest is practiced because there is no issuer that makes a business of it. The only cost is the one of the infrastructure, which is a flat marginal cost, not an exponential one like in the interest.
- Peer-to-peer: the total quantity of money in the community is determined in realtime by peer-to-peer exchange. There is no centralized authority that determines how much, where and when the quantity of money should be allocated. These can be seen as distributed fractal feedback loops to regulate the system and make it resilient.
- Controlled by the people: the rules of circulation, credit limits, taxes, decision making processes, etc, are controlled by the community itself. These settings can be configured via software.
- Sufficient: because based on mutual credit?, i.e. there's never a lack of money since it is created upon the needs/wants streaming.
- Holoptical: transparent between users, and users have access to the meta level of the system to understand and regulate its whole equilibrium.
- Adapted to all needs and all communities: whether communities are based on a local territory or a virtual one, each community exists because it has a circulating offer/demand within it. It can be time exchange, objects, services, knowledge... in a competitive or collaborative economy. Mainstream currencies only serve competitive markets, open money serves whatever market since it is sufficient and can be applied in any context.
- Connected to any "real" or "virtual" value: any community currency can be based on a "real" value (time, gold, kilowatt, kilo of potatoes, oil, distance...) or a "virtual" value (i.e. no relation to anything in the real world, it is just a unit of exchange used by the community)
http://www.thetransitioner.org/wen/tiki-index.php?page=Open+Money

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future of money

Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws

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The Future of Money