Implementing Values
Now four years old, Bitcoin is the celebrity of the complementary currencies world. It is currently trading at over $800 after two US senate committee fact-finding sessions heard last week. Political opinion is still divided, but for those investing … Read the rest
Time banking, business-to-business currencies, local payment schemes: community currencies such as these are rapidly rising to prominence in the wake of the financial crisis, in Europe and elsewhere.
Thanks to feedback from Bernard Lietaer, Marco Sachy and Gael van Weyenbergh and learning from Thomas Greco during his UK tour in November 2012, I would like to change the proposed structure of the “Representational Charge” dimension as follows (original article here).
The unit of account (as the only necessary and for some currencies sufficient porperty) is placed in the middle of the “representational charge” dimension with “means of exchange” going towards one end, and “store of value” going to the other.
new “Representational Charge” dimension:
some <—– none ——-> full
<—————————————————————————————————>
Means of Exchange Unit of Account Store of Value
A reminder from the Natural History Museum in London:
“There are many ways of organise things. But while there are no correct and incorrect ways of classifying them, some are more useful than others. Would you sort these by age? Shape? Colour? Beauty? Value?”
Often complementary currencies seem to be treated like the contents of a kitchen cabinet and get categorized and presented along some common attributes, like: Continue reading “Currency typology: The Trusted Third Party”
Trying to understand complementary currency often comes down to trying to sort them into a typology. Many attempts have been made towards that (see for example Blanc, Martignoni, Lietaer/Kennedy/Rogers) but none has so far satisfied theory and practice.
This article won´t fill this gap, but explores the matter propaedeutically from the traditional perspective of the functions of money 1 and proposes a one-dimensional classification of the different forms of currencies accordingly. Continue reading “Currency Typology – exploring the “Representational Charge” dimension”