Chris Cook's Page

Hi Chris,

I think if you take the idea I've been pushing of 'adding meaning to each transaction to bring money flows in sync with people's conscious values' and combine that with RipplePay and the Swiss system you've mentioned then you have a model that's both egalitarian (in a new way) as well as fully functioning.

One thing with barter is that people look at it and say it's so ancient. Less people will say that now that our current system has shown it is not perfect. The emperor's new clothes are gone and the emperor is bare naked to a lot of people now. So they will be more receptive, but for a stronger pitch to open minds, adding something new as proposed with the buyer-seller affinity matrix (i.e. adding social meaning to each transaction) may work to balance out the perception that barter is a thing that people did before money was invented. In other words, if you have a smart egalitarian spin (or feature) it may help resurrect barter... people will say hhmm this is different, this makes sense, I can influence producers to be ecologically and socially conscious, and the barter side of it simply works.

I've always been interested in sparking people's imagination because that is the primary instrument for change. Fear doesn't work. Hope is basically the ability to imagine a better state, but hope has to be specific not just rhetoric. So it goes back ultimately to sparking people's imagination with a new idea that gives them hope.

That's really what I believe in.

More about the 'adding meaning ...' model can be found here:

http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/p2p-social-currency-money-20/

as well as on this forum under P2P Social Currency (Drafts Only) and (Images Only)

Thanks again for your comments...

Marc

Thanks Chris, I saw your note and have e-mailed you. I don't manage the wiki though so can't help directly.

Cheers,

Josef.