[Reposted from New Currency Frontiers]

I wrote these responses in the comments thread on this article about The End of Social Movements. There are some currency issues in them that I want to capture for later deeper discussion, so I'm reposting here so I'll know where to find them.

Money and Power Pathologies

Will – I think you make a good point that they’re ability to fool us, does not make them the same thing in essence. And I even like your lunch money metaphor.

So consider this: We start making alternative lunch money. It is only accepted at our own food carts, and participation is completely voluntary. The corporate thieves/bullies/thugs/raiders can only use it for lunch in that community and there’s only so much lunch they can eat.

However, if they can’t use it to buy up real estate, bribe politicians, make speculative investments, build their empire of power an anonymity, then it isn’t worth their time and energy to steal.

I originally posted this to the Complementary Currencies discussion group on Skype in response to a question from Christoph Hensch. But it probably merits inclusion here.

Christoph, I believe we are in the lazy habit of thinking that the flow of the currency itself is the one that matters instead of the actual flow of goods, services, resources, knowledge or participation which flows COUNTER to an exchange currency.

Those real-world currents shaped and enabled by currencies are what make them so valuable and powerful.

I just posted a reply to a post about currencies as the DNA of social organisms on New Currency Frontiers Blog and wanted to cross-post it here.

Many people seem to struggle with the "social organism" metaphor. I think that might be a function of two things: 1) loose boundaries which make it difficult to see social level organisms in the usual way we see "things" and 2) wanting to be individually more important than we are.

Alan’s most recent of posts (about P2P Currency and Currency Platforms) outline a trajectory that points in this direction, but I want to specifically spell out one thing that is so different about what we’re building than any other currency projects we’ve seen.

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.

I’ll let Eric write about how MCP and SGFL are also a complete departure, but I’m writing about the one that has been consuming my attention: Intrinsic Data Integrity.

A non-deterministic system is not quite the same as a non-predictable one. This is where probability comes into play and makes me think we're really on the right track with currencies as tools for expressing/modeling complex, living systems.



[BTW, I still can't post replies, so I'm making this a main blog post even though it started out as a reply to Alan's post "Do currencies describe living systems?"]

A non-deterministic system is not quite the same as a non-predictable one. This is where probability comes into play and makes me think we're really on the right track with currencies as tools for expressing/modeling complex, living systems.

[BTW, I still can't post replies, so I'm making this a main blog post even though it started out as a reply to Alan's post "Do currencies describe living systems?"]