Dear Apostolis, Below are the links to my websites, and the title of my latest book. Clearing circles have been operating successfully for many years. It is an old idea. Now, the challenge is to optimize the procedures and protocols and take it to scale, then network local exchanges together to provide an means of payment that is locally controlled but globally useful. A debit balance in a credit clearing exchange can be looked at as a loan. It is a draft upon a line of credit that is extended by the collective membership. In a clearing system some accounts must be allowed to be negative. The total of negative balances (or positive balances) can be looked at as the supply of internal currency. Savings and investment, or *finance *is a separate function from *exchange*. Yes, they are related, but require different mechanisms. Thomas Thomas H. Greco, Jr. [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop. On 06/21/2011 7:35 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
Thomas has written a few books and is in touch with many local credit commons initiatives ...
he's in cc,
Michel
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working.
Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house? Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system?
Why do we need to see the global network?
Well, in order to be able to make investments. New investments about a specific product can have indirect consequences to the whole network. We may then have to compute what percentage of the investment will have to be paid by each peer.
We need to know about the global network in order to decide to which persons we can store our savings and the ability of those currencies to be transfered into goods that we will want in the future.
It is important to think of each peer as a producer, a seller, an investor. Investors need information.
2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
> What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you > what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
We're probably using the term "free market" in a different sense. The market can refer simply to the cash nexus, or the arena of commodity production for monetized exchange.
But it can also be used, by market anarchist like me, to describe the entire spectrum of voluntary transactions and relationships -- including cooperatives, gift economies, communal property, informal barter, mutual aid, etc.
>> I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the >> very >> old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as >> currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant >> that >> Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for >> them. >> This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange >> for >> something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to >> exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
That sounds a lot like Tom Greco's mutual credit clearing networks, which I'm a big fan of. Every member runs a balance that looks a lot like the balance in a checking account. When you sell a good or service to a member your balance goes up, and when you purchase same it goes down. And the system allows people to run negative balances, so long as the negative balance is limited to some value relative to their average monthly sales and the account continues to be active and turn over. So "money" is essentially backed by the goods being traded; rather than being a store of value from past production, it is simply a unit of account for denominating trade of present-for-present or present-for-future production. Nobody has to have a store of money from past production in order to trade, so there's no problem of economic stagnation for want of liquidity ("there's not enough money in circulation"). People create money by trading.
-- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
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Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
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