Adventures in mutual credit

In my travels I've met many activist software developers like myself, overflowing with energy and idealism for communities in general, but no community in particular. Many of them were creating a new kind of platform that addressed the concerns of the moment - privacy, security, sovereignty, serverless architecture etc. I don’t mean they were collaborating, I mean each was building his own platform. Once the platform was ready they embarked on a quest for users, or, which is harder, whole communities of users ready and able to migrate to the latest platform.

#CoFi is now not only a thing, but a community with rich internal connections, conversations and, yes, collaborations. This year we returned to the Commons Hub after last year's smaller retreat in Belgium, and the fruits of the last two years were revealed. Our regular attendees have built a common vocabulary and trust and are starting to appreciate each other more. That means we spent less time introducing ourselves and more time deep-diving!

The Bristol Pound was the golden child of a local currency movement that twinkled across western Europe in the 2010s. Few of those had much thought or rigour in their design and implementation. How hard can it be to print up some notes and sell them to the public? Not very hard, it turns out, but don't expect them to drive inward trade and benefit small businesses!

The idea we could build an alternative economy is hubristic, to say the least. The economy is how the material world is organised, and that system is defended by the powerful with military force where necessary. Economies based on exploitation will always provide better value for money and can never be outcompeted by an economy based on justice. The best I can hope for is to build an economy in the cracks, and wait and hope that the internal contradictions of capitalism will be its undoing, and that that will happen without too much violence.

Most writings about monetary theory are rather abstract and most academic writing on complementary currencies feels too far removed distant from the projects under scrutiny.

Intent/Audience 

After five iterations of the mutual_credit module for Drupal over 12 years, I developed the Credit Commons API and reference implementation for recursive mutual credit accounting, and last year also implemented it in version 6 of the mutual credit module.

 Today I'm releasing this paper which discusses how a stable unit of account is created without the resources of the state (of elites) to back it. There are two ways, when there is sufficient willingness to share risk, mutual credit is the way, otherwise much more complex and costly infrastructure is needed.