Metacurrency resources

Critical to expand perception of Currencies

A conversation on Skype spurred some thoughts on why you may find it useful to broaden how you see currencies.

The Footprints of Flow

There are some fundamental shifts that must be made in currency infrastructure for us to break free of the constraints and dysfunctional patterns of the past, and I don’t believe that any prior platforms provide for these necessary shifts yet.

Value, Values and the New Economy

[Reposted from New Currency Frontiers]

Currently value is primarily associated with scarcity. Things like breathable air and drinkable water do not become valuable until they are scarce. This is clearly a problem if we want to have values which reflect the real value of things within a living system.

Currencies as DNA of Social Organisms

In this post I’m elaborating on a central metaphor I use a lot helping us understand currencies.

We use currencies to keep records of currents…

Understanding currencies as means by which to facilitate the flows, which are more important than the currencies themselves.

Differences Between "Open Source" and "Open Currency"

Drilling down into the murky depths of definitions and designs of openness.

Currency Quips for Later Development

Discussing money and power pathologies, gift economies, and money and anti-inflation.

Gift Transactions vs. Commercial Transactions

A lot of people seem to struggle with the concept of gift economies. Over the recent few hundred years, we have gotten so acculturated to market economies that we tend to project tit-for-tat exchange onto every interaction and into every motivation. However, I believe this is erroneous. My goal in this blog entry is to remind us of our deep familiarity with gift economies and to provide a clear contrast between them and market economies.

The Central Covenants of Successful Economies

Our commercial economy is headed for destruction. There are many contributing factors, but in the end it all boils down to the fact that we’ve broken the core covenants, contracts or agreements of successful economies. These rules exist for a reason and you can no more avoid them than you can the principles of mathematics or the laws of physics.

The real possibility of Occupy Wall Street is not about physical occupation of a street, but about replacing the role that Wall St. plays in wealth creation.

We spoke at Re-Visioning Money Day on October 24, 2011 at 60 Wall St.

Thanks to Katie Teague for filming!

Wealth, a living systems model

Here’s one of the foundational maps we refer to all the time in thinking about current-sees. You can see us explaining it in this talk we gave at Occupy Wall Street.

Currency Design Training Materials

The combination of the blog post about designing reputation currencies and a conference call with the Earth Benign team to plan for upcoming currency design workshopping with their team had me working on documenting more currency design stuff today.

Ceptr revelation

This document is our first attempt to share Ceptr and its underlying design principles. It is meant for builders and seekers of tools for enhancing collaboration on all scales — people seeking to upgrade our collective intelligence. We hope it will help you find out whether these are the right tools for your needs, and if they are, provide ways you can help improve the tools or implement your own solutions with them.

We gave this presentation at the invitation of MIT’s Kerberos and Internet Technology team. “Just a Spoonful of Ceptr” is an introduction to Ceptr , a low-level system for organizing computing and communications. Ceptr emerged from the MetaCurrency Project’s efforts to build platforms that enable systems to be resilient and distributed at the lowest level.

Matthew's talk on Privacy and Transparency

In which Matthew discusses the tradeoff between two crucial features of open systems.

Beyond jobs

Matthew describes how it will become possible and necessary to circumvent top down systems of social welfare.

Towards an Intelligent Network for Matching Offer and Demand: from the Sharing Economy to the Global Brain

Jean-François Noubel gives a presentation at the Global Brain Institute in Brussels on Ceptr.

Katie Teauge Interviews Eric Harris-Braun

Katie Teauge interviewed Eric Harris-Braun in the process of making her movie Money & Life. Here’s the full interview.

The Ceptr team at Decentral Commons in Vancouver

Currency Map

This is a mapping tool that’s useful when thinking about currency design. It presents a taxonomic-like tree of decisions that currency system designers will encounter both when thinking about the currency system, and the currency token.

As the notion of community is further understood as the a foundation of wealth, and as we understand that this is the message embedded in the structure of the living biological systems of nature itself; ideas like those that +Ferananda Ibarra speaks of here will become more common. She does a magnificent job outlining this foundation at her TED talk.

Joe Carter ‘The Community Principle”

New economy, new wealth

This is a self-guided tour that explains why the current economy is ending and how a more holistic idea of wealth can complete the historical puzzle of human economic systems.

Understand patterns of flows in nature. How life builds upward spirals of increasing possibilities, and how to stop erosive downward spirals.

Here’s a talk that Arthur & Eric gave at the Strategies for a New Economy conference June 10, 2012

Currency System Life Cycle

Currency as a “Current-See” — A shared, formal symbol system to shape, enable and measure flows.

A full life cycle for a currency system takes into account the ongoing, iterative evolution of design of the system, including ways to evaluate success, get feedback from participants, and a plan to phase out the currency when its purpose is fulfilled.

Currency Token Life Cycle

The path of a unit of currency, from birth to death.

MetaCurrency Project Vision & Strategy

This is a presentation of the long term strategy and vision for the Metacurrency Project and related ventures.

When we speak about ‘Commons’ today, what do we refer to? Many of us feel inspired by the spirit of collaboration implied by the concept. Most of us have had meaningful experiences sharing and managing common resources within our social circles. But at what point do these experiences begin to collect into a shared phenomenon with implications for our governance and economic practices? Is it even useful to look at this all through one concept? “Patterns of Commoning,” an anthology of fifty original essays edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, answers these questions by weaving together examples from multiple disciplines and lived experiences.

Challenging Broken Assumptions of Governance

I believe we need to do a reset, and stop limiting next-gen governance by the tools and assumptions of our past approaches. To meet the huge challenges confronting us, we need more than incremental digital tweaks, we need a breakthrough in large-scale collective wisdom. I hope to provide a sense of how that is possible.

Intro to Currency Design

A transcript of the “Intro to Currency Design” conversation between me and Ferananda

We tend put a lot of focus on watching the flows of a currency as if that is the important portion of transactions. But maybe we should focus more on the flow of value (goods, services, resources, knowledge or participation) which flows in the opposite direction of money in an exchange. It is the fact of shaping and enabling those real-world currents is what make currency so powerful.