This is an idea of how to redesign the financial system. Currently the main aspect of all offical financial systems is interest.
On top of interest people have built a range of financial products, all of which follow the same goal: making money from having money.
By accepting this, we quietly accept money to be a production factor just like land ownership or personal skills.
For parts of our social and economic system this is a valid idea. But only for a certain amount of time.
Due to the exponential growth of the overall sum of any currency induced by interest rates, after time most people owe money to a few.
These people cannot participate in the economic circle which is needed to keep the system running.
When this happens, we get a meltdown, just like recently.
Most probably there are many ways to renovate the way we make business, exchange goods, skills, time and ownership but there is one i would like to propose here.
In 1980 Dr. Edgar Cahn came up with the idea that every persons time is of equal worth and people therefore could be used a basic good for exchanging services.
Now timebanks.org is the starting point for everyone who wants who likes the idea. This and similar approaches are discussed in a variety of books, especially by Bernard Lietaer and Margit Kennedy.
I strongly believe in the timebank approach, it’s just not 21st century enough.
It is not efficient, having people download a bunch of Excel-Sheets to build their local bank upon.
Nowadays this has to be an open platform approach, accessible through all channels of connectivity.
What do you need to set up a bank?
- A dedicated person
- with the skills of adapting the concept to a neighborhood and
- with strong persuasive skills.
- Who is prepared to invest time in organizing and
- maintaining a community
Most of these points can be incorporated into a web-platform and thereby using the leverage of asynchronous and centralized communication of the internet.
What will go missing is the trust people have in each other when being organized by a known person and being in direct touch with the other members of the community.
Since several methods of building trust with and within web-platforms have been established and proven, this should not present a real obstacle.
Here is how it works:
It is an online “swap stop for time”.
The trust level of a user is measured by an algorithm that incorporates the amount of directly associated users, selling, buying, transaction, average time between transactions, and more.
Everyone may offer services. Services are measured in minutes.
Everyone may buy services.
Both parties are responsible for their transactions.
Both parties can rate each other.
The project will start in 2011.
Everyone is invited to join – preparations have begun.
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My belief is that we will use a variety of different currencies with different designs for different purposes, just like we use different tools to accomplish different things.(You wouldn’t trust a dentist with a 8mm drill, would you? – But that’s exactly what we’ve been doing up to now)
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Examples are:
http://kroonos.com
http://www.thewhuffiebank.org/
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