Circular Multilateral Barter

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= "a novel system for trading goods and services. The basic idea is that we can use the global network, and the enormous computing power we have nowadays, so as to dramatically lower our dependence on money". [1]

URL = https://www.multiswap.net/


Description

"Circular Multilateral Barter (CMB) is a novel system for trading goods and services. The basic idea is that we can use the global network, and the enormous computing power we have nowadays, so as to dramatically lower our dependence on money. We do not pretend to be the first to have this bold idea. On the contrary: we believe that the solution we propose is a quite straightforward one, but nevertheless it was technically infeasible until very recently."

CMB is aimed at supplying local enterprenours with a way to exchange goods within a p2p-network, without using money or any other currency, overcoming the "double coincidence of wants" problem, inherent to traditional barter.

What distinguishes CMB from other credit commons is that all debts in CMB are person-to-person debts. There is no central political/administrative unit to decide who deserves to be trusted and who does not. Because of this, CMB should be able to scale-up very well, so that local communities can be seamlessly aggregated into larger ones.

One thing that often is not well understood is that CMB allows everybody to issue their own trade-backed currencies, which others can use to pay each other with. So, one way of thinking of it is as a "multi-LETS", plus there is a open market place for exchanging one currency for another (via circular trade).

CMB is a fully-functional, user-friendly, open-source implementation of a more general idea . The ultimate goal is to encourage various business communities over the world to set up their own CMB-sites, giving a boost to their commerce. (https://www.multiswap.net/about/)