P2P Social Currency (Money 2.0)

[Evolving Trends]

Hi there,

I would like to present the ideas in this article below for discussion with folks on this forum.

The article itself is something I put together over night but I have been sitting with the ideas for a couple years now.

I could be a lot more elaborate in my presentation of these ideas, but I thought I'd run it by other curiously minded folks, to have some critical feedback points, prior to putting significant energy into it...

With that said, please enjoy and comment as appropriate.

Original URL: http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/p2p-social-currency-...

P2P Social Currency (Money 2.0)

October 21, 2008 at 7:18 pm

Premise:

One of the foundational elements of society is the definition of money.

Changing how money is defined will change society.

Dialog:

If we had a networked, programmable currency then I could tell my money to exchange itself only for goods/services that are made by vendors who care about the planet AND who have donated to my chosen candidate for President.

I can be as particular as I want and my money should do the figuring out of whom to pay itself to, based on rules I supply, and based on information it can access about the parties I’m trading with.

Another example for networked, programmable currency is to enforce rules on the spending of money that I give to my kids (luckily no kids yet) so they don’t buy food that contains unhealthy ingredients.

The new networked, programmable money should abandon the idea of paying interest on borrowed money. There is so much debt in the system that it would take decades to get rid of it and return the economy to normal functioning. The interest on debt is like bad cholesterol. While it fattens the economy, it ultimately clogs the global economic arteries and can lead to economic failure, as it has done (see: global economic meltdown 2008.)

In my opinion, the concept of “credit” and “credit rating” is good but the concept of interest is not. What I mean is that people and businesses should have a credit rating but it should be tied to something other than their ability to pay interest on money borrowed.

If you lend money to someone, where that someone is chosen per the particular criteria you’ve programmed into your money, you should be able to get your money back and get “good will” points that would replace today’s “hamster wheel” concept of credit rating, which was designed to encourage people to buy money with money, which is not only retarded but gives value to money from nowhere. Instead of being rated on your timeliness in paying back money borrowed + interest, you should be rated by how much you’ve lent others and how much time you’ve given people to pay you back, and this rating, e.g. your “good will” points, becomes your credit rating. This way people can dictate that their money is to be exchanged for goods/services only from providers with N “good will” points or more.

Maybe a good place to try this P2P Social Currency (or “Money 2.0″) would be in an online virtual world?

[Dante-Gabryell Monson]

Thanks Marc.

Glad to share such views and feel some connection with some strong and determined dis-approval about the way the society is structured ( while having empathy towards victims of its bad design ).

I feel more and more a feeling (or beyond feeling, a energetical state of being) that is very peaceful yet extremely powerful in its determination, resembling some kind of rage of love that fills me with some feeling of detached invulnerability (which paradoxically is aware of the vulnerability of the body, but finds its strength into some kind of greater body), letting through some interesting healing feeling that feeds me even in conditions of nothingness, extreme cold and tiredness, ... through surrendering... allowing to feel the strength through the vulnerability ( as experienced in my last years of hitch hiking)

and,

Yes , it is interesting to identify a variety of practices/lifestyles/reflexivity processes that facilitate emancipation.

I d like to share this graph and short text
( I tend to use some of my own definitions of certain words)
trying to illustrate the relations between an increase of complexity,
detachment, contemplation and shared initiative into increasing levels of mutually empowering and non-linear emergent intentional cocreativity :

http://www.registeredcommons.org/view/167/0/8836

http://oikoumene.coforum.net/ProgressiveReflexivity

http://oikoumene.coforum.net/EngineeringOfMeaning

I am also looking forward, in connection to the complementary alternative (trust!) information systems that can be imagined,

to the development and use of (still to develop?) tools for visualization.

some little collection of links

http://delicious.com/deliciousdante/visualization

http://delicious.com/deliciousdante/referencemaps

http://delicious.com/deliciousdante/metacortex

which I hope can be useful in further understanding what kind of tool we actually want to develop/use to see relations between processes, ...

Some other brainstorming :

http://oikoumene.coforum.net/abstractobjectdimensions

///

your "self aware text" text

http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/2007/01/13/self-aware-text/

seems to connect very much with some of all these thoughts that use me to try to express themselves.

Will take some time to read it more carefully soon!

[Evolving Trends]

I understand all that you mean by being "part of a greater body" and I understand this "detachment" you mention and when I'm in that state, as part of a greater divine body (or the universe as I think of it), all I can hear and all that I sense is the sound of my breathing... some call it being present with oneself or the universe.. but to me that's an altered state of consciousness... and when I'm not there i'm having to deal with the flawed structure of this greater body we call society, which we're trying to take to higher ground through our thinking and doing.

So I went to one of the links you've posted:

http://www.registeredcommons.org/view/167/0/8836

And I found this:

"What is a mirror ?

- Taking consicousness of certain objects
- makes it possible to posiiton various objects between themselves and to requestion them continually.
- Mirror permits creation of a relation "

With respect to the Multi-dimensional, Programmable Money (or P2P Social Currency) what I've proposed is to make money a more conscious object, and free it from the limitation of the 1-dimensional value system it's been placed in.. give it a new character.. and ability to make decisions based on what the consciousness of its user (in terms of what the user likes and does not like, i.e. program preferences or rules), build reward rather than punishment into the design of its value system (the design being separate from the individual user's values but consistent with the values of humanity) and to tie it to a practically infinite resource such as energy rather than a limited resource like gold or to artificial scarcity.

In other words, to turn the system upside down, in a good way.

I like to improve things both radically and incrementally, at the same time. In other words, each increment in design/awareness is radical enough, but it's not reflective of the entire awareness we have about the problem, only incremental awareness, a step into the higher dimensions, not a home run... to make the task easier, more readily feasible, which maybe an expression of my own fear re: the size of the overall task.

But even a small step as imagined in the original post on P2P Social Currency is a HUGE and tremendous step, so I think that's what I want to focus the discussion on now once we've gone through expressing in terms of feelings why the current system is bad, even if that task is boring. Most people will ask why we'd change the definition of money? Most people need to have their emotions stirred as you said, their pains brought to the surface, their conscience engaged, in order to empathize with the idea of defining new money

Maybe a well thought out series of podcasts or youtube segments to stir those emotions, leaving out the intellectual/thinking side till after we have managed to get empathy for our struggle as it relates to how money is defined and how it causes great injustice in society......



...

[Evolving Trends]

In other words, Dante, the new money becomes a mirror of our evolving society, in the same way you described the concept of "mirror", which I think is great.

As to the definition of our evolving society which would be reflected in the new money, I am sure I share these ideals with others here: a society that is more gentle, more forgiving, more rewarding of good deeds, and, by the same token, more resilient to and more tolerant of bad behavior, not more intolerant.

Those ideals are consistent, IMO, with the model I had outlined for P2P social currency, and which I'm sure many others have considered, including Geof, as the model in itself is pretty basic and has probably been on the mental horizon of many folks for a while now.

[Michel Bauwens]

Marc,

you may want to investigate also the work of william pensinger, author of the novel of last century, the moon at hoa binh (but only known to a few cognoscenti)

see http://www.geocities.com/m_valuedlets/tranche4.html

if you send me an email, I'll forward it to him,

Michel

[Evolving Trends]

I hope Pensinger is the white-breaded man (with no internet access) who can show me the way!

(this is in humorous reference to what I had wrote in my reply to Dante's reply to Josephine, somewhere in this voluminous thread)

[Evolving Trends]

Michel,

From the page you referenced:

"m-logically-valued monetary units, 3-logically-valued money units being the likely first application of such m-logically-valued currencies."

He's talking all the way back to Incan times I believe...

I was frozen in shock for a moment.... now I'm seriously curious.

I think I need a rewrite my assumptions and dig deeper as to the creative foundation of ideas in general. I had thought the creative basis was some classical self-organizing process of neuronal interactions in the brain (and that's the premise of my Master's thesis two years ago :-) but maybe the basis is like he says some kind of quantum self-organizing process in Penrose' spacetime.. those 'blisters' (see Penrose Objective Reduction) maybe the higher level abstractions of our neurons :-)

Maybe

I'm experiencing waves of epistemological truth every few second while exploring his meditative narrative

The time *is* upon us.

[Josephine]

As someone who has tried to make a living in one of the "helping professions," I have been appreciating this topic very much, and wanted to piggyback on something you mentioned Dante: "...to stir up emotions, and then listen to these emotions."

In my experience, a great many more people know how to do the former v a s t l y better than the latter. Nowadays it seems we have to pay other people to truly listen to us about what upsets us most (if we are lucky enough to have friends who can handle most of the rest of the stuff). This is what I get paid "cash" money for, though it doesn't even come close to compensating me for what I give most of the time. How can we begin to more adequately and creatively compensate for this? That's what I wanna know.

Chances are that in at least one of the roles you play in your life, unless you are a recluse I guess, there is a spoken or unspoken expectation that you will listen well to "them" (and where you probably expect "them" to listen well to you too)...maybe a Spouse, Mentor, Developer, Manager, Employee, President of the United States...So to all of you I highly suggest Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D. For the new era, it is just makes for better business strategy. I agree with Marc that a revolution with our monetary system has to build it's foundation here.

So ultimately, our "experiments" should not just be in radical action to stir things up, i.e. questioning the status quo, but should be in radical listening as well to help make meaning out of that which has been shaken up.

[Evolving Trends]

You're absolutely right.

Without this "radical listening" no amount of stirring up emotions is gonna do any good.

I have been reading NVC and the part I love the most so far is on page 88, where the author gives an exercise on listening that seems very trivial but is everything but trivial. However, I've spent a whole week trying to digest the wisdom of what he's saying on that one page. So it's definitely one of those books that require a lot of commitment, to get the most out of.

If we were to take an example from the recent Obama Infomercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtREqAmLsoA) we will have to listen to stories from people who have lost their house or lost their dreams as a result of the terrible way society is set up, and more specifically, as a result of how money is created, how it lends itself to unconscious use, and the value system it forces on society as a whole, where society rewards those who care firstly and foremost about their own survival and who are skilled at playing the survival game and punishes those who care about the whole and who are not as interested n playing the survival game and are more driven by their instinct for discovery than their instinct for survival.

SPECIFIC EXAMPLES and stories (borrowing hint from your other response under Gender Bias topic) are definitely needed to replace what I just said so logically, in a dry intellectual way.

Let's try to map the logic of the argument for re-defining money (and as a result redefining society) into real examples...

:)

[Dante-Gabryell Monson]

In terms of moving on further into co-creation,

I realize it works easiest with other individuals that already share an intention in common,
beyond freeing themselves from certain specific expectations,
beyond contemplating while using contemplation further into intention, beyond staying isolated with an intention.

I feel this is what we are doing now, through this post initiated by Marc, through the p2pfoundation, through some of our daily activities.

Trying to manifest the presence of the awareness of our shared intention into a module/object/tool external to us

( in this case a trust information system that can be used ( and further developed ) by anyone )

is from my perspective the next step in bringing the awareness/consciousness at a larger brane / dimension,

as it will allow anyone to use it without us needing to be present - we can physically die while the presence of the intentional awareness/consciousness can continue living through the used tool -.

And at the same time allowing for such module to mutually empower itself and other intentional modules with similar (rhizomatic?) characteristics...

There is off course also another strategy in which we can invest our energy in, and that is to listen to others as to help themselves listen to themselves, and by doing so extending the number of individuals that are in a state of intentionality,

it can be done individually, or through the creation and spread of practices and tools that can manifest the presence of such intention beyond our own physical presence.

I do not feel there is so much of a need, at some point, to discipline any effort into reducing availability to other mutually empowering potentials of potentials into being focused only on listening/staying stuck into a stage of contemplation,

as I feel that the more we evolve into intentionality , contemplation is there at every moment too, so at some point it almost comes by itself ( even though there are times where we may forget for a while, when some other addictions/crystallization we still did not overcome show up, but this process, from my experience, usually becomes easier and faster as the learning process evolves),

and I sometimes take it as something that is normal/granted,

even without needing to use verbal language, as the presence of a greater being ( or opening to a brane at a large energetic level of abstraction ) through ourselves naturally tends to de-crystallize structures that may be holding back such emancipation in ourselves and in others, through the "the power of inspiration" ( including the one that is not visible in acts or in explicit knowledge : we are connected to the tacit knowledge of the grid and through our mutual presence can open channels for each other )

So I feel both happen at the same time, and to better support emancipation of others through our presence, we can support our own emancipation by connecting with other intentional agents whom can further be mirrors for reflexivity at more abstract branes/dimensions (and/or open channels for),

at which , as I see it , complexity becomes more simple to grasp/allowing for an increase in our ability to deal with complexity.

( I hope some day we can visualize all this better - http://delicious.com/deliciousdante/visualization )

The question I now ask myself is the same as you asked in your last post: what already exists?

... which I interpret also as "what can we further build on and inspire ourselves from to develop our shared intention?, who are the other individuals/projects with which we can further co-create on a common intention around trust information systems?",... and then ... "How can we better collaborate around our common intention, including this current point here, on this forum?"

I do realize the internet, and spaces/ecologies like this one through the internet, who are themselves the result of a number of mutually empowering intentions, are extremely powerful tools in furthering intentions such as, for example, co-creation towards alternative complementary trust information systems, or meta trust information systems ( and trust information system navigators?) that allow the visualization of all the relations between different types of transactions, their impact, our preferences, etc

So ... yes ...examples of already existing alternative trust information systems?

Ripple ? ... yet to further experiment further with ( for which we need a critical mass of users )

http://ripple.sourceforge.net

http://ripple.sourceforge.net/decentralizedcurrency.pdf

A number of local time bank experiments? ( but that do not necessarily use some technical tools some of us might like to look forward to develop - such as criterias programmed into "money")

... we might have made already some collections of information regarding such experiements? ( some of the ones I found may be on http://delicious.com/deliciousdante/currency - possibly there are some more clear references somewhere on p2pfoundation wiki? or on mbauwens delicious links http://delicious.com/mbauwens :

http://delicious.com/mbauwens/bundle:Economics

http://delicious.com/mbauwens/P2P-Money

On your blog? ...

When discussing similar topics with Michel ( and Sam Rose ) in the past, other projects where mentioned , such as http://openmoney.org ( with which you might perhaps be more involved in then me at present ? )

a quick look on openmoney deliciousbookmarks leads me to

http://www.openmoney.org/open/proceed.html

I also remember another project description given in this nice presentation around money :

http://www.feasta.org/documents/moneyecology/contents.htm

Box 6: A low-cost way to start a regional currency:

http://www.feasta.org/documents/moneyecology/box6.htm

It may not yet be programmable money, but combined with solutions such as ripple, it may inspire us and others into certain approaches.

I feel that using existing knowledge it is possible, when we have access to a certain critical mass of users, to experiment further.

What is still needed on a technical side? How close is ripple to what some of us would like to imagine as being a programmable (intentional) trust information system? ... or meta trust information system?

How ready are individuals in using such tools? Is there still a lack of access to ( mobile) hardware devices to run such kind of solutions? When will we be ready to use them with our mobile phones? Do we need to wait till everyone has small computer like mobile phones? Do we need distributed wifi networks, with mobile phones being relays for each other to facilitate such approach , etc...

The further I tend to go into questioning and exploring , the more I realize that it is all related, and many other "solutions/modules" with certain ( distributed?) characteristics seem to be mutually empowering each other,

as if it is all a great rhizome ( I try to define this in french - some of it in english - rhizomatic forms of consciousness : http://dante.ecobytes.net/2008/07/17/rhizomic-consciousness/ )

I do feel that our use of verbal language in itself is a limitation to such non-linear emergence, as this language still feels very linear,

this attempt to share interconnected ideas being a good example of how I sometimes struggle with expressing interconnected elements into a more linear form of expression.


(nevertheless as this text in itself will be searchable by google, it allows for non linear searchable connections with objects this text contains - I do look forward to develop in the near future, in complementarity with a meta trust information system, a post symbolic language based on mutual positioning of conceptual objects emerging into meaning dimensions : http://dante.ecobytes.net/2008/07/05/rhizome-post-symbolic-meaning-... , which relates to Marc s self aware text , and could use some visualization tools - and a navigator - imagine for example using tools that would offer the kind of immersive navigation - rendering visualizations a bit like http://seurat.ecom.arizona.edu/~ai_mwiki/index.php/WikiISI/Visuliza... ; some starlight pics - more : http://delicious.com/deliciousdante/referencemaps )

----------

To move on to experimenting programmable (meta) intentional trust information systems

with a critical mass of users,

I was asking myself where to start ?

Converging existing communities, locally,
and build up or reinforce local autonomous systems/communities?

Allow for such form of money to emerge through mutual empowerment with other intentional modules... ...

In that case, what are the other modules? And is there a way to use resources currently trapped into a consciousness of parasitic conditional economics,

as to build up the infrastructures/interconnected modules that have a intentional capability ( see also graph :
http://www.registeredcommons.org/view/167/0/8836 )

Can we use fear to open up trust ?

This question lead me to think about a "post-financial crisis" insurance, wich would combine a certain number of modules with distributed / rhizomatic characteristics :

http://dante.ecobytes.net/2008/10/30/post-financial-crisis-insuranc...

Michel recently also shared the following reference of initiatives that use such glocalization approach :

http://p2pfoundation.net/Transition_Town

http://delicious.com/deliciousdante/glocalization

and, well, a number of other individuals connecting themselves to the p2pfoundation ecology may be working towards such intention.

---------

Wow , so this is a big non linear puzzle ...

I realized that communicating through the internet is useful, and traveling to meet people is great too,

but at the same time face to face meetings, and the emergence of neo-tribes that share some form of intentional culture ( http://delicious.com/tag/neo-tribalism ; http://delicious.com/deliciousdante/neo-tribalism ; http://delicious.com/deliciousdante/tribe ) ,

and that can share a reality in face to face space , while communicating on the layers of shared context that may have been built and commonly understood over time.

This question is one of the reasons that leads me to currently give more time and attention into staying into certain physical space areas, as to build up local networks of mutually empowering individuals that share a common intention,

while staying open to connections, inspiration and mutual empowerment opportunities with intentional networks of individuals all over the world through the internet,

looking forward to build up my own sustainability while building towards broader sustainable solutions.

----

So if we want to experiment further, will we be able to do so while being distant through the internet?

I have been interacting with friends in relation to projects, for example, the development of hospitality network platforms, the latest one being http://bewelcome.org

There are real life gatherings, and there is a focus towards building real social networks.

I do not have the programming skills that some of the participant developers have, but each contributes with its own potential, and some participants even start to learn programming skills through experiential learning on the new platform and with the support of those that have some skills in programming.

For the moment, as it are individuals spread all over europe, such real life meetings happen occasionally at some persons house,

but there is also an interest in developing more permanent bases where we could live together and work together.

( I do notice that such approach is also being developed with Marcin and E-farm - he is inviting people to come and work on the project - converging people to build together along shared intentions : http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/?p=389 ; http://factorefarm.org/ ; http://factorefarm.org/view/pages/factor-e-farm-wants-you )


A lot of great materials and references have been collected, and networks of individuals with experience are converging here online.

I still feel that such kind of ( real social ) approach is still lacking in relation to the p2pfoundation ecology, although a number of us may be interacting at seminars, or meet in real life, and such face to face meetings around the p2pfoundation can develop themelves further into movements.

The next step ( for me ) is sharing living space to work together,

but I realize it is not so easy, as only a small percentage of the population is ready for this.

This is one of the reasons why in one of my first replies to this post I mention potential to data mine the internet to be able to map individuals that share common intentions and fully invest themselves in.

I sometimes feel that there are a number of interconnected priorities...

What do you start with in your life?

What strategy do you adopt?

I do not know each of you well enough yet to understand how perhaps our lifestyles can best complement each other?

What resources can we already converge at this present moment, and where would be a good place to converge these resources to?

[Evolving Trends]

You wrote:


There is off course also another strategy in which we can invest our energy in, and that is to listen to others as to help themselves listen to themselves, and by doing so extending the number of individuals that are in a state of intentionality,
>>

That's what I'm interested in.

In other words, I'm interested in defining the problem we have with today's definition of money in terms of stories to be told by people from all walks of life. Stories that show how the current method of money creation (via interest), the scarcity approach, and the 1-dimensional nature of the value system inherent in the current definition of money (or the lack of an explicit programmable criteria that can encapsulate each user's multidimensional value system at the single transaction level)... show how the current definition of money is bad for society and how it has affected us as people, in plain language, stories told by everyday people.

[Dante-Gabryell Monson]

That sounds like a precise definition of your intention.

Do you look forward in using video?

Discussing with various people?

Editing presentations?

Documentaries?

Are there people you shared this specific intention with and that may collaborate?

Where are you currently based?

[Dante-Gabryell Monson]

Thank you Josephine,
and thank you for the reference.
I have been introduced to Nonviolent Communication through dear friends of mine,
but did not read it yet myself.
In addition to such approaches, I also feel it is interesting to communicate through alternatives: as individuals sharing a common understanding and intention manage to collaborate to develop viable alternative solutions, such solutions can be presented and whoever is interested can be inspired, or at least use it to re question status quo.