The Metacurrency project

Hi Fernanda,

Thanks for putting this up. Nicely produced video and I’m especially glad to have the transcript.

I’ve been thinking about this in the last couple of days because I’m reading Paul Krugman’s very lucid story of how and why economies fail. In most general terms economies fail because people lose confidence in the economy and that then takes down both responsible and irresponsible businesses, and individuals.

I’m wondering, do we need a ground-up new currency system? Or do we mostly need more readily accessible transparency, along with better accountability based on better reputation data so that the “fix,” when the economy breaks or stumbles, can reward ("stimulate") the responsible companies and not reward the irresponsible ones.

I very much like the ideas here about open economies. But maybe the “metacurrency” is really better systems for transparency and reputation, so that we can better track “who is earning their keep” and playing the game in a way that benefits everyone else, rather than feeding on everyone else. That would be a big job, but it may not be quite as big a job as creating a new (layer in) the currency system. It's also something that takes advantage of the direction that the Net is already taking.

Having made this comment, I’ll go look at the metacurrency.org site, and actually learn more about it. : )

Thanks,

Duncan
edited 00:09, 5 May 2009

Very welcome Ducan. In the conversations with some people around currencies we envision a world that would need no currencies. Some believe that millions of currencies can be the intermediary step, the transition to NO currencies.

Reputation currencies are all around us now, as well as other currencies to aknowledge wealth. I just learnt that flickr gives hearts for people to congratulate the work of photographers and facebook is about to launch its own currency soon. Though currencies for aknowledgement is not all we need. We also need to be able to trade (exchange) and measure wealth. The best information I know in this regards is in http://openmoney.info

Hope this helps in your explorations and see you around! :-D