Thanks Michel, this sounds really impressive indeed. Especially reading these lines from Greek finance minister in parallel to the recent critics of bitcoin by Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens, and the practice of faircoin around faircoop, and ECB action - the heat and richness of experimentation, exchange, and action seems to be accelerating! I would guess, this must be helpful for John to bring about commons and p2p issues to the fore, directly to the attention of Yanis Varoufakis, since it seems he is very well aware of the situation, right? Orsan
On 17 feb. 2015, at 18:54, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> wrote:
this outlines a potential action that Varoufakis could propose if the negotiations break down,
http://p2pfoundation.net/FT_Coin
Yanis Varoufakis: " Bitcoin is too deflationary by nature to act as a widespread currency alternative to the dollar or the euro, its design can be used profitably in order to help the Eurozone’s member-states create euro-denominated electronic payment systems that help them, at least in the medium term, overcome the asphyxiating deflationary pressures imposed upon them by the Eurozone’s Gold Standard-like (and, indeed, Bitcoin-like) austerian design." (http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2014/02/15/bitcoin-a-flawed-currency-blueprint-wit...) [edit]Description
A proposal for an alternative currency, by Yanis Varoufakis: "Is there something that the peripheral countries can do to give themselves a chance to breathe better and to act as a bargaining chip that will make Berlin, Frankfurt and Brussels take notice? The answer is yes: They can create their own payment system backed by future taxes and denominated in euros. Moreover, they could use a Bitcoin-like algorithm in order to make the system transparent, efficient and transactions-cost-free. Let’s call this system FT-coin; with FT standing for… Future Taxes." (http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2014/02/15/bitcoin-a-flawed-currency-blueprint-wit...)
[edit]Characteristics
Yanis Varoufakis: "FT-coin could work as follows: You pay, say, €1000 to buy 1 FT-coin from a national Treasury’s website (Spain, Italy, Ireland etc. would run their separate FT-coin markets) under a contract that binds the national Treasury: (a) to redeem your FT-coin for €1000 at any time or (b) to accept your FT-coin two years after it was issued as payment that extinguishes, say, €1500 worth of taxes. Each FT-coin is time stamped i.e. in its code the date of issue is contained and can be used to check that it is not used to extinguish taxes before two years have passed. Every year (after the system has been operating for at least two years) the Treasury issues a new batch of FT-coins to replace the ones that have been extinguished (as taxpayers use them, two years after the system’s inauguration, to pay their taxes) on the understanding that the nominal value of the total number of FT-coins in circulation does not exceed a certain percentage of GDP (e.g. 10% of nominal GDP so that there is no danger that, if all FT-coins are redeemed simultaneously, the government will end up, during that year, with no taxes). Once in possession of an FT-coin, you can either keep it in your FT-coin e’wallet or you can trade it. To make sure that the system is fully transparent and that transactions are completely free, FT-coin could be run by a Bitcoin-like algorithm designed and supervised by an independent non-governmental national authority. Just as in the case of Bitcoin, the total amount of FT-coins can be fixed in advance, at least in relation to a variable not in the government’s control (i.e. nominalGDP), while every single transaction (including the tax extinction using FT-coins) is monitored fully by the community of FT-coin users on the basis of the blockchain pioneered by the infamous Mr Nakamoto. As an FT-coin is about to ‘mature’ (i.e. to reach two years of ‘age’), the demand for it will obviously rise from those that do not possess FT-coins of that vintage (as it allows for a major reduction in their current taxes). FT-coin owners with equivalent tax liabilities will have no reason to sell (as they will want to use it themselves to extinguish their own taxes) but those who have ‘stocked up’ on FT-coins (to a tune beyond what they need to pay their taxes), as an alternative to putting their money in the bank or in the stock exchange, will be selling; possibly with a view to buying freshly minted FT-coins.
The great advantages of such a scheme is that it creates: a source of liquidity for the governments that is outside the bond markets, which does not involve the banks and which lies outside any of the restrictions imposed by Brussels or the various troikas a national supply of euros that is perfectly legal in the context of the European Union’s Treaties, and which can be used to increase benefits to society’s weakest members or, indeed, as seed funding for some desperately needed public works a mechanism that allows taxpayers to reduce their inter-temporal tax bill a free and fully transparent payment system outside the banking system, that is monitored jointly by every citizen (and non-citizen) who participates in it.
While the Eurozone’s most stressed governments get much needed degrees of fiscal freedom, taxpayers are offered an opportunity to reduce significantly their long-term tax burden and to make electronic payments in euros that bypass banks altogether. At a time of ultra low interest rates, large tax bills and high bank fees, these are benefits not to be scoffed at. Moreover, a liquid new market for FT-coins is created, with zero transaction costs, and good prospects for gains for those who participate in it, on the back of the underlying tax savings and the state guarantee of convertibility at par." (http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2014/02/15/bitcoin-a-flawed-currency-blueprint-wit...)
On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 6:09 PM, Örsan Şenalp <[email protected]> wrote:
Guessing I.M. is someone in the Greek delegation from Syriza government? What would really be interesting is to hear whether they had any vision or plan for this moment expected to come, since this was obvious possibility. Since the email sounds like requesting for public support campaign to grow underground. This is partly similar to that we have been trying to think of, on these exchanges, like an emergency deployment force, commons action plan, so on.. the situation now shows that is rather an expressed need by the greek gov? It would be great to know if there is any preparation from syriza's side, for instance if they would support, or encourage, such a commons conference for instance for radical alternatives? Would it be an interest of them? Could anyone who received the above email in the first place, or close to Syriza inform us on that?
Ps: Cant access the original book, but from Kevin's below review of Pat and Mike's book, I got the idea that there is another transition perspective in the book:
"Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty. The Resilience Imperative: Cooperative Transitions to a Steady-State Economy (New Society Publishers, 2012) 400pp.
This book starts with a macroscopic analysis of where the existing corporate capitalist economy goes wrong — the pathological effects of debt-based currency, a GDP that counts waste as “growth,” etc. — and proceeds to outline a detailed blueprint for a resilient alternative. This latter blueprint, in a series of detailed chapters, examines the authors’ proposals for a sustainable successor society.
Most of the proposals are things readers in the green, decentralist and alternative economics communities are probably familiar with: basic guaranteed incomes, barter currencies, taxation of land value and extraction, community land trusts, employee ownership and self-management as the standard business model, etc. Each of them, by itself, involves the kind of fundamental structural change you could spend days imagining the effects of. Taken together, their cumulative effect is the a model of society that makes a “petty bourgeois socialist” like me salivate, and would make P.J. Proudhon and Henry George jump up out of their graves and shout “Hallelujah.”
In the course of each chapter, the authors examine the pathological effects of a particular structural privilege or monopoly — and in particular, it’s contribution to the cost of living. At the end of the chapter, they present the savings from the average family’s expenditures that would result from their proposed reform, along with a running total of the cumulative savings from previous proposals in the book. By the end of the book, that amounts to a huge portion of average household expenditures.
I have a few quibbles; I’m an anarchist, after all. Although the guaranteed basic income coupled with Pigouvian taxation would be a vast improvement on the present system, my preference is for
1) letting the full deflationary effect of technological progress and the abolition of monopoly run their course (with a much bigger likely reduction in GDP and prices than even Lewis and Conaty envision);
2) distribute the hours of necessary labor as widely as possible through a drastically reduced work week; and
3) support the elderly and incapacitated, and those whose productive activity is difficult to monetize, through cost- and risk-pooling mechanisms like communal primary social units (cohousing projects, extended family compounds, urban communes, intentional communities, squatter communities, and the like).
Second — a quite minor quibble — I’m skeptical about the authors’ claim that an end to the subsidized corporate food system would significantly raise household food costs. For one thing, I think a lot of food production would be shifted out of the cash nexus altogether, and into the informal and household economy. And even if it takes more labor to grow a tomato in a raised bed than on a mechanized plantation, I still think the total labor involved in growing it via soil-intensive cultivation at the actual site of consumption is probably less than that required to earn the money to pay the price of agribusiness produce (including all the embedded costs of long-distance distribution, high-pressure marketing, batch and queue processing, etc.). Ralph Borsodi’s analysis of the economics of home production is still valid, eighty years later.
Third — much more important in my opinion — is their treatment of the idea of “free markets.” For example, here’s their take on the neoliberal policies of recent decades: “When government got out of the way and the free market was unleashed, once again the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.”
No. Neoliberalism involved simply weakening some secondary restrictions on the state’s primary grants of privilege to big business and the plutocracy. These primary grants of privilege — the most fundamental structural feature of our economy — were left in place and strengthened. Without all the government-enforced or -provided subsidies, regulatory cartels, artificial property rights and artificial scarcities that now exist — subsidies to extractive industries, the state-enforced banking monopoly, absentee titles to vacant and unimproved land, and “intellectual property” [sic] among them — Fortune 500 corporations and the entire billionaire class would melt like garden slugs with salt on their backs.
One thing I especially appreciate is they grok the concept of resilience in its essence, not just some accidental features of it. Their seven principles of resilience on pp. 19-20 include things like redundancy, modularity, and tight feedback loops that should be familiar to readers of John Robb or John Boyd.
If you’re the kind of person who’s review in the first place, it’s a safe bet this is the kind of book you’d enjoy. I know I did."
best, Orsan
On 17 February 2015 at 09:55, mp <[email protected]> wrote:
On 17/02/15 01:24, Michel Bauwens wrote:
Ioannis requests to forward this message:
!!And requests that you delete email addresses!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In case you forward this, please erase previous e-mail addresses for privacy reasons.
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