As I will lead a nomadic lifestyle, the system should be useful within a global network of friends and acquaintances. Not restricted to any local area, neither formally nor by informal expectations or average location of members. My detailed requirements, in order of importance: On the pragmatic side, I desperately need a system to track neighborly help because when doing that in larger-than-usual amount (say, 50 hours per month and more) and without payment of course, you better track what time you invest and what you get in return or you might eventually end up poor and exhausted. My interest in alternative economy is both at the theoretical and pragmatic level. “The Forum urges overnments o make serious commitments to restructure the global financial architecture based on principles of equity, transparency, accountability and democracy, and to balance, with the participation of civil society organizations, the monetary means to favour human endeavour and ecology, such as an alternative time-based currency.” Choosing a time banking service or software Interestingly, the proposal for a time-based currency even made it into a United Nations document (but note that the document was compiled by members of NGO’s when meeting for the Millenium Forum, so is no official UN resolution or anything): And there is a list with many more articles on alternative monetary systems.An economic theory that seeks to value goods just by the amount of labour / resources needed to produce them, thus eliminating the concept of capitalist “gain” (price above cost) altogether. Alternative currency by simply writing some numbers on some paper. Examples of such systems include the German portal Bambali. before reaching a critical mass of offers. These severe limitations of direct barter make these platforms look quite unusable, esp. That is, they work without intermediate units of accounting, which would eliminate the need that (1) supply and demand are matched for every party at the same time and (2) somebody can only be part of a deal by both demanding and supplying something, as none of these can be replaced with currency. But always so that a deal happens only when all parties at the same time have something that they can offer that another party in this deal wants. By these, I mean systems that are based on direct barter between two parties, or circular barter between three or more parties. Currently, timebanks are normally local organizations just like LETS. For an interesting early experiment from 1827, read about the Cincinnati Time Store. This can, but needs not, be used to build egalitarian systems, where everybody’s contributions are valued equally. While the bookkeeping is very similar to LETS, the difference is that noarbitrary unit (or a unit aligned to legal tender) is used to measure service contributions, but the man-hour of work time. Time-based currency (see also time banking).How do you transfer your LETS credits when you move, and even worse, how do you use LETS if you have a nomadic lifestyle? Also, the island-type of LETS, with no standardized infrastructure between them, severely limits its public visibility as one movement or system. This is, in my view, their biggest shortcoming. this LETS list from 2002), as the credits are backed by just group trust (omnidirectional trust from one to all other LETS group members). In principle, all LETS systems are confined to one city or small area (see e.g. The value of goods and services is something to be agreed by the members, that is, normal market mechanisms of supply and demand apply. All members start with zero balance, and go below that by paying with credit points which means, they have the role of a bank that does bank money creation. Effectively, these are complementary currency systems on a local scale, where members exchange goods and services for LETS credit points. LETS, the Local Exchange Trading Systems. For example, in the area of trade mechanisms and finance, I found several concepts that run for being a basis of an alternative economy: Interestingly, many alternative economic concepts have been developed long ago at concept level, but failed to receive public attention or achieve widespread application. by being self-employed and having only “poor” customers). in an economic crisis (that is, by being separated from any high-capacity money source of the society, e.g. For example, one would search for grassroots ways to organize mutual service and exchange of goods without using legal tender, as the latter can be a scarce resource due to “personal deflation”, esp. A financial-economic crisis (like this or this or this) makes us think what’s wrong with our economic systems, and search for alternatives.
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