Jct: The UNILETS Time Standard of Money has already been endorsed in the Millennium Declaration. See my own home-made timebank account at http://johnturmel.com/unilets.htm
Rudimentary but the algorithm is applicable to many platforms. I tried a yahoogroup where my credits sent out in acknowledgment were registered on my group and on the earner account.
And an Hour of unskilled labor cannot be fudged and allows a free market to determine how many Hours you can command for your hour.

Jct: There is no temptation when everyone is watching. It has never happened in any LETS that unauthorized credits were transfered into your account without someone else authorizing that payment. Imagining problems where problems cannot exist.

Jct: The new method of preventing this is to tie money to labor by way of time acknowledged at work. The LETS software needs no yellow rock to operate optimally.

Also… to those who do not trust the Fed… if the US dollar is such a crummy idea, why is it that so many other countries peg their currency to it?

Just because you can’t trust someone doesn’t make them unreliable… it just makes them predictably corrupt. Which is better (in many cases) than unpredictably uncorrupt. That is, I’d often trust my money to a lawful/evil character than a chaotic/good one. He may try to f’ me over if it’s in his best interests, but he won’t sell my donkey for magic beans and try to pay me back his loan in hugs and rainbows.

He sees a future that has people literally reprogramming their economic systems…

No kidding? I just saw a decade and a half of that. The beta versions were rough, but the vaporware was the real killer.

Money is an insanely complex interdependent shared system. I’m happy to have Doug Rushkoff speculating about the monetary system, but I don’t want to see the system itself subjected to “do it fast, see if it works, change it if it doesn’t” experimentation.

Srsly, had enough of that.

As soon as it’s about money, which is just information really, BoingBoing loves the idea of a billion closed systems with no guarantees of interaction or transferability.

Jct: Transparent internet credits cannot be counterfeited. As for physical tokens of time, King Henry I solved counterfeiting the Kings Chips with Tallies:

From my http://johnturmel.com/poembank.htm

The record most successful case was in the British Isle,
Where “Tallies,” sticks of money, left King Henry I with smile.
Accountants in the Treasury would split the stick in two,
One half would be the money and the other half its due.
A tally worth a pound of gold to pay the King’s expense,
The other half amounted to taxation that made sense.
The tax collectors through the land all had an easy way,
Since people had their tallies and enough the tax to pay.
The tallies funded projects and could pay for everything,
With tallies matching tax, a hero, Henry I, their King.
For over 700 years, the tallies were in use,
But having lost control of money now is Crown’s excuse.

Jct: So counterfeiting is no problem when we use ecredits or split popsicle sticks as our tokens.

Jct: I urged Bill Gates to save the planet with Microsoft Money 10 years ago. See my Richest Pauper’s Prayer To The Richest Man at
http://turmelpress.com/praybill.htm

Jct: Because they are not lending out any money at interest so why not borrow some community currency interest-free? You can stop using your own interest-free community currency as soon as the FED offers you interest-bearing loans again. But until you can access interest-bearing loans from the FED-connected banking system, why not accept interest-free loans from your community-connected banking system? You always have the option of getting back into exponential debt as soon as the loansharks will let you but why not use an alternative while they will not let you have any debt-enslavement money? It is a free choice whether to use the available community currency or wait for the not-available FED currency. No one is forcing you to join the community currency lifeboat if you want to stay with the sinking ship.

Is this an art project? At the very least, you’ve used up your allotment of links to your blog.

Essentially, that’s what this would be. I could sell $1000 worth of used couches and car rides and whatever for real dollars, or I could sell them for “craigbucks.” These “craigbucks” would exist on the Craigslist servers, available to any hacker who can get around Craigslist’s protections, available to any Craigslist admin, and hostage to the server’s uptime.

Obviously, some Libratarians are going to respond to this with “well, you can’t trust Benjamins either, because something something something gold standard blah blah blah.” That’s all well and good, but, sorry, I trust the Federal Reserve more than I trust Craigslist.

Cryptography. Sufficiently strong cryptosystems would – if implemented correctly – allow for controls that would prevent counterfeiting, and allow for privacy and security as well as appropriate legal auditability and transparency.

I have my doubts any such thing would be allowed by those currently in power – economic or political – to come about.

Oh dear sweet spaghetti monster, what have you done?

*dives into a bunker for the incoming explosion of libertarians and anti-semites, united in their hatred of central banking*

Jct: Timedollars is a beautiful system except that doctors get paid the same as floor-sweepers so there are few doctors who participate. Ithaca Hours allows doctors to charge more Hours per hour so they have a free market. Unfortunately, the Timedollars controllers have ordained that all labor will be credited equally in their controlled market. A fatal flaw that will be easily corrected when they adopt paper tokens and and can no longer control the market.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/turmel/message/2415 is my report on the 2004 Timedollar Conference in Canada where they were testing out paper timetokens I demonstrated how they could not control my worth by playing my accordion in the hall for an hour and earning 4 Hours worth of credits in contributions.
Of course, when the Timedollar controllers saw they could not longer keep their system ineffective if they lost control by permitting a free market with physical tokens, the killed the idea.
Remember, the banksters have moles sabotaging community currencies all around the planet. If they are running this poker chips wrong, the person who suggested including the flaw is the bad guy.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that what they were actually doing was pumping more money into the local economy, using a currency that was only accepted locally. The amount of currency printed was directly proportional the amount of currency spent.

Pretty neat, except at the end of the day you could only spend this currency on clothes and tchotchkes, and the store owners that accepted them could actually use them to feed and clothe their families. (They did get the benefit of increased spending of real Benjamins, though, which was the main point of the program, I assume).

Until you can pay the farmers who grow our food in craigbucks, or the Chinese workers who spin our clothes in craigbucks, then, such systems can only be used in fairly minor P2P goods and services transactions.

Jct: Bill has not shown any particular wit when it comes to understanding money. I could not explain this to him, maybe you should try.

Jct: You presume. A transparent interest-free time-based system of exchange is ideal says the only Professor of Banking Systems Engineering in the world. Anyone wanna bet

I’ve thought a lot about DIY currencies that exist outside of government fiat. What’s needed is an open standard and protocol for exchanging between these currencies. Then the market could handle value based upon trust. Local currencies would have the benefit of a local basis of trust.

Larger currencies would have trust based upon scale and momentum – basically the same reasons people trust the dollar, despite is being a fiat currency without real backing.

As I’ve found with developing a payments startup, the regulation in dealing with this space is huge. That would be a barrier for any real adoption, as cash from the establishment would only flow if there is a legit interface to the rest of the foreign exchange world, or if there were enough anonymity to protect the users of electronic cash from the IRS, SEC, et al.

That’s exactly what my government is doing right now. Printing up enough money to make the profits from bad mortgages match the irrational expectations of the bankers who issued them. To the detriment of anyone else who holds dollars.

The classic method of preventing this is to tie money to labor by way of metals dug out of the earth. The only way to “print” such money is to spend some time digging it up. It’s an idea we might be going back to.

Jct: And I financed the development of the first LETS software as my gift to the planet to demonstrate locally how a time-based currency system could work globally.

Jct: It was the original Dbase II LETS software developed by Michael Linton. Betting on Michael Linton’s LETS was the best investment I ever made.

I’m not a big fan of solving a problem by going back to a paradigm that had many, many other problems but solves the current one.

Most of those “other problems” amount to “Waaah, I can’t get rich as fast as I like!” But such wealth is illusory, anyway, so it’s not very convincing.

Yeah, those other things like massive brutal slavery, the near extinction of all native societies in the Caribbean, the continuing poisoning of the Amazon basin with cyanide, that’s pretty minor compared to banker angst, huh?

I’m not a big fan of solving a problem by going back to a paradigm that had many, many other problems but solves the current one.