Quotes on Open and Distributed Money Systems

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Quotes

"What we are being asked to reconsider is our perception that money runs the world exclusively. While it is “the one metric to rule them all”, it isn’t actually – and never has been – sufficient for running functioning societies or even markets by itself. Consider the emergence of labels like “organic”, “free-range”, “GMO-free”, “grass-fed”, etc. in recent years. What are these? Through that lens we just introduced, these are nominal currencies, or complementary currencies to money. Clearly, for many people price is not enough to determine whether they want to purchase a good. They rely on other symbols to inform their choices every single day, and so do you."

- Moritz Bierling [1]


To survive and thrive, human systems *need* a not just a network view, but a multi-dimensional, multi-scaled view and definition of systems. this will help us see how many, many people can operate and multiply many forms of wealth within systems that previously seemed easily depletable. Peer networks are vital to creating the multi-dimensional maps and models and views that will allow all of us to see the cornucopia of options that now exist, provided we can shift out focus from exploitation and control, to existential symbiosis with everything that is around us, on as many scales as possible.

- Sam Rose


”That which is for me through the medium of money – that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) – that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my – the possessor’s – properties and essential powers. (…). I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of the women. Therefore, I’m not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money."

- Karl Marx [2]

Short Citations

"Current attempts to develop new kinds of cryptocurrencies must be judged, valued and rethought on the basis of this simple question as posed by Andrea Fumagalli: Is the currency created not limited solely to being a means of exchange, but can it also affect the entire cycle of money creation – from finance to exchange? Does it allow speculation and hoarding, or does it promote investment in post-capitalist projects and facilitate freedom from exploitation, autonomy of organization etc.?"

- Tiziana Terranova [3]

Long Citations

On Open Money

You treasure what you measure, and you measure what you treasure. Open money provides the tools to implement this maxim. What should we be treasuring in our culture and on our planet that we so far have no way to measure?

- Open Money [4]


Money is making a fundamental evolutionary step into community currencies. Conventional money as we know it has a built in architecture that leads to scarcity, centralization, concentration, secrecy, proprietarization. This conventional monetary system is not appropriate to dealing with today's global systemic challenges (harmonizing local and global needs, creating ecological sustainability, enabling the information economy, leveraging the open source paradigm, etc). Just as there are now millions of media outlets today, currencies will follow this same evolution by shifting from centralized authoritative models to distributed ones that allow better sustainability, distribution, transparency, and regulation mechanisms.

- Open Money [5]


How to best transcend the current economic mess? Put Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, Tim O’Reilly, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Nathan Myhrvold, and Danny Hillis in a room somewhere and don’t let them out until they have framed a new, massively-distributed financial system, founded on sound, open, peer-to-peer principles, from the start. And don’t call it a bank. Launch a new financial medium that is as open, scale-free, universally accessible, self-improving, and non-proprietary as the Internet, and leave the 13th century behind.”

- George Dyson [6]


The Necessary Ecological Function of Money

“If we say that money comes from ecological function instead from extraction, manufacturing buying and selling, then we have a system in which all human efforts go toward restoring, protecting and preserving ecological function. That is what we need to mitigate and adapt to climate change, to ensure food security, to ensure that human civilizations survive. Our monetary system must reflect reality. We could have growth, not from stuff, but growth from more functionality. If we do that and we value that higher than things, we will survive.”

- John D. Liu [7]


Depression Economics

"During periods of so-called economic depression, societies suffer for want of all manner of essential goods, yet investigation almost invariably discloses that there are plenty of goods available. Plenty of coal in the ground, corn in the fields, wool on the sheep. What is missing is not materials but an abstract unit of measurement called ‘money.’

- Tom Robbins [8]


Leakages from the local economy

"Poor liquidity and leakage (money flowing from the local economy) are key causes for floundering and/or disappearing regional economies. To overcome these shortfalls local communities should be increasing local liquidity and plugging the leakage through the introduction of complementary community currencies thereby re-building their respective local communities in the coal mining area of Wales. When local residents within their respective communities changed the agreements they had about conventional money, by creating and spending complementary community currencies locally instead of spending only diminishing amounts of federal currency with giant corporations, it commenced re-birth in the local communities. Molly used the term local multiplier when she discussed how local liquidity increased proportionately to the amount of complementary community currency being circulated by those who were choosing to participate."

- (from a summary of) Molly Scott reporting on complementary currencies in Wales [9]


Aristotle on unnatural wealth

"There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural."

- Aristotle [10]


The Disintermediation of the Banks

"First, the distribution monopoly of the Postal Services was hit hard by the Net as people discovered they didn’t need to buy stamps. Then, the copyright industry’s distribution monopoly was flatly and unceremoniously run over. As a third and fairly recent victim, we find the old centralized journalism with its tightly controlled news distribution. As fourth and coming victim, there’s an information distribution few people have thought of in terms of information: the money in our society."

- Rick Falkvinge [11]


On the End of Banking

“There is no reason products and services could not be swapped directly by consumers and producers through a system of direct exchange – essentially a massive barter economy. All it requires is some commonly used unit of account and adequate computing power to make sure all transactions could be settled immediately. People would pay each other electronically, without the payment being routed through anything that we would currently recognize as a bank. Central banks in their present form would no longer exist – nor would money.”

– Mervyn King – Governor of the Bank of England [12]