Topic: Circular Multilateral Barter<http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/t/e429b3ea9d617e3> Evgeni Pandurski <[email protected]> Apr 11 01:32AM +0300 ^<?ui=2&view=bsp&ver=ohhl4rw8mbn4#12f44bcd4e5605b3_digest_top> Hi. I found a very interesting discussion about circular bartering: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/500c91... So, I think you might be interested in the open-source project I've been working on for the last 2 years: "Circular Multilateral Barter". You can check it out at https://www.multiswap.net/about/ You can download the source code here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cmb/
From my experience, it is kind of hard for people to wrap their minds around the way multiswap.net (and circular bettering in general) works. But for sure, there is a lot that it can provide, which is not obvious at first glance.
For example, one thing that is not obvious at first glance is that multiswap.net 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). The current implementation (which you see at https://www.multiswap.net/) a fully centralized one, but this is simply because it was easier to program it this way. There is nothing that prevents it from being partially or fully decentralized. I think you will find this paper interesting: http://www.multiswap.net/doc/cmb-general.pdf I am currently tying to figure out if multiswap.net can help real-world communities, and eventually what should be improved in the software, so that it works better for them. If you have the time to explore it, I would be happy to hear your opinion, and of course, I will gladly answer all your questions. Regards, Evgeni Pandurski -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens