= free currencies embody this fundamental and universal claim that any citizen, any community, any organization has the right to create tools for wealth to flow. No individuals, no community should be dependent on monopolistic and private currencies, unless they have decided so. [1]

This section's theme are generally the monetary aspects of P2P trends, and more specifically, aspects of monetary reform, that aim to make the monetary system into a participatory resource that more broadly benefits larger sectors of the world population.

Human and social wealth is never reducible to its translation in money, see the Wealth Typology.

Introduction

The P2P Foundation supports the direct social production of money, such as for example through Open Money and other P2P Exchange Infrastructure Projects systems. This marvellous presentation by Robin Upton explains how this can work.

Key distinctions: Currencies ; Free Currencies ; Wealth

For starters, read Eric Harris-Braun key argument: Why Monetary Design is Important

The following guide has all the essentials on Open Money and Complementary Currencies and is really recommended, for beginners and practitioners alike:

• Community Currency Guide. by Bernard Lietaer and Gwendolyn Hallsmith. 2006 [2]

It explains the following basics: 1) The Function of Money; 2) the Purpose of Money; Cost Recovery Mechanisms for Complementary Currencies‎ ; Currency Issuing Procedures, and much more.

Introductory Articles

1. Read this excellent introduction to the negative role of interest-based money by Charles Eisenstein
2. Best current report on the topic: Creating New Money: A monetary reform for the information age. By Joseph Huber & James Robertson. New Economics Foundation
3. Arthur Brock: Differences between Open Source and Open Currencies
4. Kevin Carson introduces the Peer Money debates
5. Michel Bauwens on the Importance of Peer Money
6. Alan Rosenblith: We need P2P Architectures for Money!!
7. Jean-Francois Noubel: Economics of Flow vs Economics of Accumulation

Hot Topics:

1. The historical experience of the Worgl Shillings
2. WIR Economic Circle Cooperative: this 70-old Swiss mutual credit clearing system is getting traction as a model for the rest of Europe
3. The creation of the Open Source Hardware Reserve Bank. Details here
4. The Metacurrency Project: the tci/ip platform for diverse currency creation: see the Flowspace project as first attempt to establish sucn an infrastructure for Free Currencies
5. Open Coin: an actual published open specification for creating distributed digital currency
6. The Swedish interest-free JAK Bank [3] [4]
7. The Common Good Bank initiative [5]
8. The Resource Based Economy, a system in which money and barter serve no purpose
9. Banco Palmas, in Brazil, emits a local currency and supports the local economy

Goals:

1. Better redistribution of the existing money
2. Transformation of the monetary system through the social production of money
3. Alternatives to money: Peer Production ; Gift Economy ; Sharing; and other ways to assist in a transition to a more Resource Based Economy through Peer to Peer Exchanges and P2P Exchange Infrastructure Projects

Tools:

Tools to create People-Produced Money:

1. Community Forge
2. Community Exchange System
3. Cyclos
4. Under development: OSCurrency, Cclite, [ GETS] (commercial), Ripple and Regenerosity, Local Exchange

Also:

1. Comparison page at http://www.communityforge.net/compare
2. Software overview page: http://www.complementarycurrency.org/software.html

Our P2P Open Money Network

Jean-Francois Noubel	Thomas Greco	Fernanda Ibarra	Michael Linton	Georg Pleger
Twitter: @jfnoubel and @thetransitioner Blog: http://www.noubel.com	thg at mindspring.com	Twitter: @fer_ananda and @thetransitioner Profile at: http://people.thetransitioner.org/profile/FernandaIbarra	michael dot [email protected]	georg at pleger dot at

Citations

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

I think its important to distinguish "currency" from a reputation measurement. Implicit in the term currency is the idea that it can be exchanged for something.A system for "recognition" is only a currency if that recognition is exchangable for something.

- Sam Rose

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 [6]

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 [7]

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 [8]

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 [9]

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 [10]

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 [11]

Introductory Material

1. Money is not the Only Value Measurement System . By Geoff Chesshire.
2. Why Peer to Peer Currencies will Grow
3. Bernard Lietaer: The Four-tiered Monetary System of the Future
4. In his landmark essay, Valuing the Ethical Economy, Adam Arvidsson explains why we need Wealth Acknowledgment Systems for the Ethical Circuit of Value
5. Must reading: Charles Eisenstein on Why Demurrage needs to replace interest (see the entry on Demurrage). Also: Money and the Crisis of Civilization on why the current crisis is also an endgame.
6. The case for open money. See also: Open Money Manifesto]
7. Ran Prieur: Fire vs. Water Economies, and the role of Demurrage in this tradition.
8. Essential theoretical and historical introduction to the long term history of money and debt, as rooted in social violence, by David Graeber at http://www.metamute.org/en/content/debt_the_first_five_thousand_years
9. Eric Harris-Braun on the necessary Difference between Multi-currency Platforms and Market Making Platforms
10. Thomas Greco: Why Exchange Alternatives Fail to Thrive
11. Robin Wood: Shifts in Value Exchange and Human Development: applying the spiral dynamics model to value exchange
12. The three modalities of Production Sharing, i.e. working together for a common pool, without individual exchange or barter: 1) Labor Quota System‎; 2) Fair-Share Labor System‎; 3) Anti-Quota Labor System‎

Also:

1. Rationale for Monetary Reform by Greg Martin.
2. Monetary Transformation, not Monetary Reform, is What is Needed. By Thomas Greco.
3. Why the Growth Imperative is Linked to our Monetary Format
4. Declaration Of The Universal Right Of Monetary Creation and the Open Money Manifesto
5. Peter Koenig's summaries on the History and Future of money
6. The Future of Money by Paul B. Hartzog
7. Capital, Profits, and Interest. Benjamin Tucker.
8. Chris Cook: a proposal for Open Capital

How-to:

1. Process of Designing a Complementary Currency System. How-to recommendations by Stephen DeMeulenaere.

Discussions

Via: http://groups.google.com/group/metacurrency

Key Resources

Funding for Open Money and Complementary Currencies infrastructures via: the Fund for Complementary Currencies

1. The Re-Inventing Money site, at http://reinventingmoney.com/
2. The Book: "Money; A Mirror Image Of The Economy" by Dr. J.W. Smith - full text at http://IED.info/books/money Applying Henry George’s philosophy across the economic spectrum transposes monopoly rent values into equally-shared use-values. Quality of life increases as working hours drop by half.
3. The consultancy: Value for People, helps local communities initiate complementary currencies

Key Blogs

Of key importance is the work by Eric Harris-Braun and friends on meta-currency platforms, see here

Also:

1. New Currency Frontiers: very thoughtful new money blog with Eric Harris-Braun and others working on the Metacurrency Project
2. Beyond Money: Thomas Greco's blog on monetary transformation and mutual credit
3. Evolution of Money
4. Open Source Currency
5. Coverage of social money trends in Guillaume's blog
6. Trust is the only currency: excellent analysis

Key Books

1. Future of Money. Bernard Lietaer.
2. Thomas Greco. The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. Chelsea Green, 2009
3. Money and Liberation. The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements. Peter North. University of Minnesota Press, 2008
4. Interest and Inflation Free Money. Margrit Kennedy.
5. Peter North: Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements. [12]
6. Creating New Money: A Monetary Reform for the Information Age, by Joseph Huber and James Robertson. New Economics Foundation (2001) [13]
7. The Ecology of Money. By Richard Douthwait

Guidebooks:

1. Community Currency Guide. Workbook by Bernard Lietaer

Also:

1. Money and Magic
2. Money in an Unequal World
3. Monetary Theory
4. 30 Lies about Money

Key Concept Pages to read

1. Abundance vs. Scarcity and Monetary Scarcity vs. Monetary Sufficiency - Non-scarcity based monetary systems
2. Monetary Reform, Demurrage and Seigneurage, the Credit Commons
3. Four conditions for Open Money: Open Data Currencies ; Open Identity Currencies ; Open Rules Currencies ; Open Transport Currencies
4. Wealth Typology,Because we need Wealth Acknowledgment Systems for the Ethical Circuit of Value

Key Delicious Tags

1. Abundance, http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/Abundance
2. Complementary Currencies, http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/Complementary-Currencies
3. Monetary Reform, http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/Monetary-Reform
4. Open Money, http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/Open-Money
5. P2P Money, http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/P2P-Money

Key Directories

1. Online Database of Complementary Currencies Worldwide
2. Global Resource Exchange Groups and Localized Exchange Communities
3. Peer to Peer Exchanges and P2P Exchange Infrastructure Projects

Key Documentaries

1. The Money Fix: video by Alan Rosenblith shown at PBS stations in the U.S. in 2009/2010 [14]
2. Money as Debt
3. The Wealth of Neighbors
4. The Money Masters
5. In Debt We Trust, remarkable documentary about personal aspects of debt crisis

Key Essays

1. Peer to Peer Lending, June 2007 overview report by Brad Slavin.
2. Raoul Victor: Money and Peer Production, a marxist perspective

Bernard Lietaer

• The Future of Payment Systems. By Bernard Lietaer.

Two key essays/proposals by Bernard Lietaer et al:

1. Is Our Monetary Structure a Systemic Cause for Financial Instability? Evidence and Remedies from Nature. By Bernard Lietaer, Robert E. Ulanowicz, Sally J. Goerner, and Nadia McLaren. Accepted for publication in Journal of Futures Studies Special Issue on the Financial Crisis (February-March 2010)
2. Options for Managing a Systemic Bank Crisis. Bernard Lietaer, Dr. Robert Ulanowicz, and Dr. Sally Goerner. Sapiens-journal Volume 2, number 1, March 2009

"The sustainability of any complex flow system can be measured with a single metric as an emergent property of its structural diversity and interconnectivity; it requires a balance in emphasis between efficiency and resilience. The urgent message for economics from nature is that the monoculture of national currencies, justified on the basis of market efficiency, generates structural instability in our global financial system. Economic sustainability therefore requires diversification in types of currencies, specifically through complementary currencies."

Thomas Greco

1. Thomas Greco: Why Exchange Alternatives Fail to Thrive: The State of the Alternative Exchange Movement, Excerpt from The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, Chapter 13,
2. Thomas Greco: Towards A Complete Web-Based Trading Platform Excerpt, End of Money, Chapter 17,

Key Podcasts

1. The Open Money Blogtalk Radio

Key Webcasts

Documentaries:

1. Money as Debt II: great explanation

Also:

1. Alan Rosenblith on Open Money ; Alan Rosenblith on Open Money Protocols and Agreements
2. Chris Cook on Peak Credit and Open Capital: excellent video presentation
3. Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Braun's Introduction to The MetaCurrency Project ; Arthur Brock on Open Data Currencies
4. Bernard Lietaer Interviewed on a New World Currency ; Bernard Lietaer on Complementary Currencies for Social Change ; Bernard Lietaer on Currencies for Cooperation ; Bernard Lietaer on Human Wealth
5. Christian Nold on the Bijlmer Euro
6. David Karsbol on Virtual Finance
7. David Korten on Monetary Reform
8. Douglas Rushkoff on Medieval Money
9. Ellen Brown on the Web of Debt
10. Giles Andrews on the Evolution of the Zopa Social Lending Project
11. James Robertson on Monetary Reform for the Mainstream Economy
12. Jean-François Noubel on Free Currencies
13. Mohammad Yunus on Microfinance
14. Peter Koenig on What is Money
15. Philippe Van Parijs on the Basic Income
16. Richard Douthwaite on Debt-based Money
17. Sarah Hearn on the Berkshare Local Currency Program
18. Thomas Greco on Monetary Transformation ; Thomas Greco on the End of Money ; Thomas Greco on the Importance of Mutual Credit Clearing ; Thomas Greco on the State of the Monetary Reform Movement

See also:

• Extensive collection of Videos on complementary currencies. More videos on the Network Economy YouTube channel

Deutschsprachige Ressourcen - German Ressources

1. Neues Geld