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[theqse-blog]

MONEY AND ABUNDANCE - EVOLVING EXCHANGE MODELS FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

FOR CASSE

The movement in looking for new ways to evolve out of unsustainable systems is prolific, introducing collaboration and purpose with increased philanthropy, mindfulness, and gratitude inside current competitive business culture, creating the best for love than growing obsolescence for money; that through doing what one loves, abundance though money comes. It’s an interesting chain of thought meshing the abundance of creating quality with an measure that only has value in scarcity. We focus on the weakness of human nature as the cause of growing problems in society, founded on the belief that we live in a scarce environment where we fight for survival.

Certainly, time and resources are scarce, but unlike the animal survival culture we stem from, we have leveraged our creative capacity to offer the abundant diversity of experiences that have evolved life to what we have today. It may seem to be because of the quantified mechanisms of trade we use, and on the surface, it is, but the parameters of money affect the direction exchange follows: what is created and why. It is not human nature itself that is the issue, but rather the scarce-driven social environment we have created that perpetuates problems, rather than resolving them, and that the debt-based exchange model we use today is the cause of this perpetuity.

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

Before the journey of understanding currency, it is important it understand human nature as this will help understand not only how adaptable we are in overcoming diverse parameters for survival, but also how we have accepted debt-based money over other models as we have. That we do successfully adapt drives cultural diversity, just as nature does.

We are innately trusting beings. When we are told something is good for us, we err towards trusting that the proposal has our interests, our empowerment, at heart. Only time tells if we are correct, or we learn better from the experience. Our environment demands we must be forever wary of our connections, but hope they will support us, they   do.

Watch children in their search for learning, connection, and love, and will to express this. Dr Bruce Lipton’s(Lipton 2015) work on what a cell will choose to become perfectly illustrates how important the environment a cell is in affects what will be created. Like all of us, we value the synergy in collaborations we make as nothing is solely created alone.

While competition is an inevitable part of evolution within species, it is not across species as the evolving cycle to survive is lost. Both evolutionary theorists Charles Darwin (Darwin 1898) and Albert Russell Wallace knew that that co-evolution is the key to nature’s survival, not the dominion of one species destroying all others. We could think that our current money culture is a tool to establish intra-species competition, but really, it is the current species of money that is compromising the human race, not the other way around.

For some reason, we have fallen into this trap of competition as the primary means of survival, assisted by the systemised unequal  mono-culture money has create, to the point that inequality is inevitable. We may not be equal in our capacities, but we do not have to establish it as a negative. Piketty’s (Piketty & Goldhammer 2015) latest book on the inevitable increase of inequality misses the point of where to truly focus our energy in changing systems for the better, not accepting current systems that exacerbate it.

How we practice capitalism contradicts the intrinsic motivation we have to create. Richard Ryan’s work Self-Determination Theory, eloquently communicated through the presentations by Dan Pink, demonstrates that we are far more empowered within an environment that values our creative autonomy over mechanical systems that demand being motivated by external reward. Any currency design must not only leverage sustainable innovation, but also be a vehicle to empower to create the highest quality without wasting people’s time and Earth’s resources, as current knowledge allows. Tim Kesser’s work The Dark Side of Materialism further validates the see-saw argument between money and intrinsic sustainable reward.

FOUNDATION OF CURRENCY

It is not clear how the idea of debt to create money ever caught on, but no doubt we trusted that it was a good idea, and now that we have used it for so long, have accepted that people have authority to distribute money, we are embroiled in it like the slow boiling frog that can’t get out. Nothing is further from the truth. We can make our exchange model whatever we want it to be for the benefit of all of us, as it has to be.

David Graeber’s book ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years’ (Graeber 2009) succinctly illustrates the violent history of money based on debt, beginning with the Sumerians in 3500 BC. The model was so disempowering it created debt slavery, which was only resolved by rulers periodically cancelling all debts. This became a historic ritual in Israel where debt was cancelled every seven years, known as Jubillee. It is highly possible that civilisation cycles are caused by the greed of not letting debt go, which questions why be so dependent on an exchange system that requires forgiving debt to occur in the first place.

Many believe money and abundance are connected together, but within what parameters do we understand this to be the case? We readily accept that money is simply a means of exchange, store of value, and possible measure of wealth, but neglect to question the type of money we use in establishing that. We have grown used to the idea that money must have a cost of some sort, be it in fees or interest, like we have accepted governance as we know it today, but this is an extreme failure of understating the full scope, and consequences, of money design. Bernard Lietaer aptly describes in his book The Future of Money(Lietaer 2013) that different exchange models change social behaviour. Debt-based money does not distribute abundance to everyone, nor should abundance be exclusive. Current designers of complementary currencies, local or otherwise, still incorporate debt of some sort in their models to sustain existing paradigms of social norms, but this must be questioned, go back to first principles, and ask what objectives do we want money to achieve, and what type best facilitates this. This is much simpler than we make it out to be.

Trying to find solutions within a monetary model that doesn’t want one wastes a lot of time and energy. The startup bubble is testament to the waste competing creating the same thing is creating. Many may feel empowered in exploring new avenues of innovation, but the scope is very limited, further demonstrated that proposals are more interested in the valuation for an exit, not what is actually created. It also leads to huge repetitions of development that competition, and scarcity, encourages. It is hardly sustainable and an immense waste of resources. We are so far down the line in trying to sustain debt-based money in a world that is becoming open to collaboration and purpose that we are incorporating philanthropy and venture capital as an alternate valve release to cancelling debt. This keeps those that own money in perpetual control.

AN EXCHANGE MODEL DESIGN BRIEF

As in any design brief, we must define the central idea of what a currency is intended to achieve, and build from there what best fits around those fundamentals, that support what would best support humanity and the earth in a sustaining cycle, inviting empowering creative input in the experiences we create? This is the obvious central idea from which parameters of a currency design have value.

Currency means ‘condition of flowing’. An exchange system must promote flow, and not have bottlenecks that restrict this. One would think that the current debt-based money we use has huge bottlenecks that are perpetually unresolvable, and when they are, it is only for a limited number of people; blatantly obvious that the design does not work.

A free market is essential to drive innovation, valuing sustainable practices: creating high quality experiences with as few resources and as little time as possible, on demand. Only producing on demand saves time and resources and also offers greater opportunities for customising for use. The increased emphasis of trade partnerships to keep things going in the current money model questions if we are really in a free market, creating the wrong type wealth, money, than diverse experiences accessible to all that was them.

Focusing on creating experiences sustainably demands collaborating over competing, with as little conflict as possible. Different experiences and expertise lead to better solutions, affording that such innovators will win resources and time from supporters to make the product. This values the time and resources of all involved.

Currency must also be stable. Making it unstable gives energy to the currency itself, not what the currency is for. Stability is encouraged by keeping the volume of money consistent with what is produced. At present, the total value of money far exceeds that of what is available to buy, yet is distributed scarcely, making it the jewel everyone wants, forgetting what real value is: the experiences people create. Only a stable exchange mechanism can achieve this.

There is a lot of energy wasted on security against obtaining data. We fight for privacy agains those fight to sell us something. There are also many people pirating against payment options to offer products for free. It would be far more advantageous to evolve an exchange model that supports that we would be happy to be more transparent with information to get what we want as easily as possible.

Above all else, whatever is created must empower all involved, promoting evolution in creating new experiences. If we empower as many as possible in our actions, there is little need, if any, for conflict; at least not in a destructive way. Conflict is a waste of energy, and our current model promotes this.

So what type of exchange model best supports a flourishing economy where people are willingly involved in creating accessible sustaining value collaboratively and peacefully? I believe this is what we would all want, whether we think it is achievable or not, but lets see how close we can get to this simply by changing the way we exchange, and the roll-on effects of that.

PARAMETERS AND CONSEQUENCES OF CURRENCY MODELS

Designing currencies has become a business in itself, fiddling with nuances of debt-based currency without looking at fundamentals of how currency can be generated and flow with stability. Many look at local solutions without looking at connecting ideas together, creating soloed communities that, by default, limit the diversity of experiences. It’s important to look at how a currency functions at a global scale, as this will define if it is suitable locally to use. If the fundamentals of a currency can’t work globally, then there is no point using it locally.

Designing a currency is not complicated when looking at the objectives one wants to achieve, and ultimately it focuses solely on the cost to use the currency and it’s stability. Local or global, centralised or decentralised, even ownership, doesn’t matter. It is an exchange model of wealth, not wealth itself.

Let’s look at the fundamental designs of currency we have at the moment, and where they are likely to lead to.

1  DEBT-BASED CURRENCY

The consequences of debt-based money are clearly apparent, and has been for some time. Look at the destruction around you at the expense of money. The discussion, and industry, around climate change is a perfect case to illustrate the maligned direction money takes us: irrespective of whether climate change is real or not, it does not define whether it is OK to burn scarce resources when renewables offer far more opportunity for abundant energy that value highest quality with minimal resources in the shortest time. Instead of driving sustainable production, we are developing technology that requires long-term maintenance for the sake of jobs, all to keep the current usury driven exchange model running. Further, there is no way for what is created to pay the debt off, as those in power to cancel debt knew.

The amount of total money produced from debt far exceeds the total goods and services produced at any one time. It is designed as a commodity itself, not just a tool of value for commodities, as many believe it just to be. If it was just that, there would be no need to build a commodity market around it as we have. It is revealing that only money is sold at interest, and that so few people are given authority to do this. The burgeoning currency market is certainly testing this limitation with banks mobilising in new ways of using blockchain technology to maintain market share but really changing as little as possible. Either way, even if one institution lends money with usury, it will reduce money to the commodity it is today and not drive sustainable quality as available innovation can allow.

2  CRYPTO-CURRENCIES

Crypto-currencies have exponentially grown the currency commodities market since the launch of Bitcoin (BTC) (Franco) in 31 October 2008, with more than 700 in existence and counting. They are unique as effective alternate units of exchange, such as Ripple or Stellar, or just prized elite possessions, like 42Coin. Most are the epitome of the speculative currency market, potentially inviting everyone to create their own illusory value; an argument in itself for just having one currency. It is the parameters of that one currency to either support the people, or not, that make all the difference. Blockchains are being used to drive trustless transactions, but this is hardly human, let alone possible. Instead, it would be better to develop blockchains to promote more trustful exchanges, which value what is being exchanged with respect more than forced obligation. This in itself would resolve so many conflicts.

Bitcoin is an ingenious phenomenon. Of course, in the short-term, it is considered a commodity currency like almost every other, but forecasting its long term game offers a different picture. What would happen to the velocity of money, and pricing, if everyone used Bitcoin? Bitcoin perpetually deflates because it has an absolute volume limit: 21 million. It is set to hit this at around 2140. Its diseconomy of scale, meaning using resources to mine Bitcoin becoming redundant, is expected to hit within the next decade. As this infection point approaches, there is less need for infrastructure, nor desire to charge a fee for mining, as it restricts the money supply. Either way, the volume of currency is depleting anyway as people use the blockchain for other purposes such as smart contracts. Even if Bitcoin was solely used for transactions, prices would perpetually fall to keep it in circulation. How it flows becomes dependent on population numbers. Even if the population reduces, differences in pricing narrow and stabilise to keep it in flow.

Supporters of Bitcoin, who predominantly see it as a commodity, are looking at splitting the coin to increase its volume as it’s infrastructure is so big. Instead, we could look at the other message that it is trying to tell us: that the price mechanism can never value quality, and that all quantitative currencies are inherently redundant. What is so captivating is that Bitcoin hedged the commodities market to build infrastructure to run itself to the point of illustrating its irrelevance. I do not think this endgame escaped the designer, whoever that may be.

3  DEMURRAGE

Demurrage currencies are quite different. They totally devalue the exchange model for any value as wealth, and so afford buying objects of value to experience as one chooses. It is an extraordinary model to facilitate production, as proven in The Worgl Experiment (Mark 1938) in 1932-33 during The Great Depression. Amid the turmoil of people demanding work, Mayor Michael Unterguggenberger created the Worgl Schilling, a negative interest (demurrage) currency, whereby unspent money lost value at 2% a month. That lost value would in essence be an advanced payment of taxes to the city which were aptly applied to building infrastructure. It was so powerful the Bank of Austria banned its use and expansion to other areas. There will always be a need to produce, but demurrage does not stop or stabilise growth. While it offers an engine to apply creativity, it does not leverage it to shift to sustainable growth as this demands less production and more experiences to drive an economy.

To balance this in demurrage, like usury, is extremely difficult. It also does not adapt political structures toward the most sustainable, most efficient, forms of governance. Governance around usury currency has proven to be hardly efficient, with vested money entrenched in supporting governance to its will, making corporates the new definition of culture. Demurrage does not change this concept, as money for the community is filters to be governed by a central body that has the opportunity to be persuaded to perform works beyond the needs or desires of the community.

Whether taxes are gained through usury or demurrage, the social and political structures change little and neither drive status in creating sustainable abundance, so why bother to try using either model?

4  COST-FREE CURRENCIES

Quantitative currencies are at their most powerful when there is no cost on currency at all. This means whatever is borrowed is paid back in full, with no interest or fees. This was initially the intention of borrowing money under Islam law, but in the usual way that debt corrupts, so has this practice acquiesced to some kind of higher payback to keep up with the ever-disempowering nature of debt-based currency. After six years of trial and error, complementary currency Sardex (Littera et al. 2014), in Sardinia, decided to become an interest/fee-free currency to incentive it’s use. Currency designer Thomas Greco (Greco 2001) marvelled that this contradicted all the basic parameters that currencies are usually designed around, and yet it is so successful. It does have some costs to buy into using it, but loans are totally free of charges, and is supported by existing governance. The Tumin (Orraca & Orraca 2013) is another, but more organic, usury/demurrage-free currency in Mexico. It works in a similar way to other complimentary currencies, like the WIR in Switzerland, where a portion of a payment can me made in Tumin with the balance in Mexican Peso (MXN), but as it is cost-free, there is a great incentive to use it; it has spread to 22 regions in the country with 300,000 participants. And counting.

No-cost currencies are inherently stable. No charges on currency takes out fractional lending, something Ben Dyson (Jackson, Dyson & Daly 2014) from Positive Money is advocating for. It also stabilises, and can even lower, pricing. The wide amplitude in pricing for various services is dramatically reduced, as deviating too far from market medians will not buy you sales. The argument that higher quality will vastly cost more regardless is a misnomer as resources will naturally follow the most sustainable quality creator. There is no incentive to increase cost for quality dramatically. There is even incentive to reduce price if it can be created more cheaply, because status has less to do with money and more what you are feeling that people would want to buy from you. There  is a greater emphasis on creating sustainable efficiency as a marketing tool, something that debt-based money can’t support. Exchange, hopefully, becomes more efficient, as producing for its own sake, as we do in debt-based economies, has little meaning.

Cost-free currencies also offer the chance to change governance. There is no way possible for a government to have taxes to build things, but it can be a conduit for deciding what the community wants most, and then outsourcing the project to the best contractor in the community. As this is a case of promised work, that contractor is either loaned, but probably given, the money required directly to fulfil the project, and it will be done in the most efficient way possible, as reputation and transparency would demand. The government becomes the tool for direct democracy that communities desire so much, to truly empower people to sustainably create what they wish.

Of course, this will take some serious planning, although the Tumin could be the foundation for how to plan a cost-free currency at scale. A steady-state economy could work around a cost-free currency, but this is more an inflexion point for change, not the endgame. There is something human-centric possibly lacking in a cost-free currency: an effective way to measure status. There is certainly a shift towards status in quality creation, but perhaps not enough to fully subdue the temptation of manipulating the money market for quantitative gain.

5  GIFTING + QUALITATIVE EXCHANGE

This is where qualitative exchange comes into it’s own. This is not barter, which again is based on scarcity, but gifting, valuing sustainable abundance. Gifting does not mean not getting anything back in return, but knowing that people are creating their best to give back to you in kind, and that they are the best to given the resources to create what they wish. This reframes competing for owning wealth, that being what is actually created, from the accumulation of money to collaborating, creating experiences on demand as sustainably as possible. There is no focus on units of production to sell, but on the customised quality of what is created. The potential diversity is immense in comparison to quantitative exchange. The competitive factor that money drives is not lost in qualitative exchange, but instead of focusing on survival against each other, it changes to collaborating against scarce resources to create sustainable abundance. This focuses status on what we do in the time we have, not owning for use at a later date. Owning itself slows down innovation. Instead, having inserted parties create the best by recycling what came before is far more efficient than creating obsolete articles that depreciate over time to the point of being valueless. Ultimately, the energy wasted in price becomes time and energy for the best sustainable innovations to be applied, and experienced, continually improving. This is where status lies.

Qualitative exchange games sustainability. It flips status from a destructive competitive money game totally over to a constructive collaborative qualitative one. There is still a competition of ideas, but status demands connecting these together, sharing knowledge, transparency, creating highest quality with minimal resources in the shortest time, excellence without limitations to price. Resources are not wasted making less than the best. That is sustainable abundance. Instead of searching for funding to buy people to fulfil projects, it is about finding those who see the value of what you wish to create, all choosing to give their time and resources to make it happen, and gifting it, as you will. As everyone is doing this, the ROI of gifting far surpasses that of money, and totally supports and expresses our intrinsic need to create, and be respected for that.

Open source platforms like Wikipedia (Reagle 2010) and GitHub are perfect examples of how empowering creating, and gifting it, can be. Timebanking (Collom, Kyriacou & Lasker 2012) Australia have also discovered that people earning time are gifting their time amounts to other people to further support causes they already would support without time currency. Gifting also totally supports a free market that requires little governance as there is no status compromising sustainability. Protecting ownership of resources becomes redundant, as does wasting resources for civil action. Colin Turner’s book ‘Into the Open Economy’ (Turner 2016) holds that the majority of social, economic and environmental problems are caused by the limitations of the market system, and that honouring reputation is a far more inspiring way of awarding excellence. The energy playing with pricing is an incredible waste of time compared to validating reputation. This is part of where we put our money anyway, but within qualitative exchange, this is not compromised.

Tesla is also a great example of how a transition to qualitative exchange would benefit everyone. Elon Musk (Vance 2015) has cracked the energy mould by offering electric power and transport at scale. He could maintain profits by licensing, but this reduces competitive innovation, instead offering his patents open source. Taking advantage of this is very hard when one needs crowdfunding and other sources to move forward, for a profit one way or another, probably why no one has taken his patents on board. Introduce crowdfinding, and the objective changes. There is so much capacity for work, yet little money to pay for it, but reframing a business plan to award people giving their time by not just a vehicle, but by all the networks that made creating the vehicle possible. That would ultimately be food, clothing, shelter, technology, transport, healthcare. So for time spent doing what one loves, etc is returned the best of these other sectors. Such development would start with the best auto engineers coming on board to build a car for themselves, but this would spiral out to the rest of the community as transitioning to electricity becomes the norm.

Naturally, governance to accommodate this will far more receptive to sustainable innovation as their status in managing this is completely dependent on it, not a regurgitating model of reparations around scarcity, which usually target those that can least afford it. As a sustainable quality facilitator, backing the most sustainable creators is the only option to move forward. Acting against sustainability lowers reputation, but further, there is no incentive to. It is impossible to work against empowering sustainable production with a qualitative exchange mechanism.

THE NEXT STEPS

There are many people looking at more qualitative solutions to decision making, collaboration and purpose. Governing the commons, arguably originating from Elinor Ostrom with her book Governing the Commons (Ostrom 1990), and more current works by David Bollier (Bollier 2002, 2005), offer some solutions towards more community-centric solutions to resource management. The resource-based economies (RBE), particularly the natural law version is increasing in exposure and popularity and offer some constructive direction for resource allocation.

Decision-making platforms are helping bridge the gap of resource management and collaboration, most notably Sociocracy 3.0 and Enspiral’s work, of which Loomio is a part.

Sites like Sustainable Human, Hylo, Ecobasa, and Freeworlder are platforms that strive to leverage reputation by connecting qualities together and reaping the rewards. There needs to be a large enough network to achieve this, but their advantage is while are registered communities are local, the globe can see what everyone is up to and not waste time and resources reinventing what others already have.

If going straight to qualitative exchange is too difficult, connect with currency creators that have no debt in their model. The Tumin is an excellent platform that is scaling rapidly.

Look to your networks and each of you offer what you want to create most for free. See in what sever it its in: food, clothing, shelter, tech, transport, healthcare. Connect your network, and find others with similar mindsets, on platforms like Sustainable Human, not so much as to track what you have done, but more to advertise what you really want to do, and to see who offers what you need. If there are sectors missing for which you need money for, find them in your area and invite them into your network, offering them the network’s capacity for free in exchange for what they offer in return. Look at models that reduce their need for debt to survive, and offer expertise to shift their production line from units of lowest quality at a designated price to a highest quality production on demand line. Leverage this to all sectors to obviate the need for debt. Thinking that the powers that be will not allow this to happen, such as in Wörgl in 1932, is a misconception. They are all disempowered by debt, and even if they think they are not, the infrastructure that supports that is falling down around them and there will be no place to turn but to be able to do what they really wanted, and be supported to do that. Without compromise.

We are not always rational and hang onto fears and beliefs that contain us for so long. Whatever the logic and benefits of changing to a qualitative exchange currency, what is most important is that people feel safe and empowered to change, supported to accept the challenges ahead, and not be held back by misconceptions, inevitability, or delusion, for change to happen.

ENDGAME

A scene in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig 1974) tests his theory that value is devalued by quantifying it, the author does not give his students marks for one semester. Previously students craved to have the status of the highest mark in the class, attained by rote, usually doing the bare minimum to pass, but in refusing to allocate marks the teacher  empowered the students’ search  for new information. Everyone’s concealed grades improved, with the brightest understanding the full ramifications of the experiment: that quantifying value devalues it.

As a currency, reputation is unlimited, decentralised, has no cost, and based on all work produced. And the only exchange model that truly supports reputation in creating customised sustainable experiences, that are possibly automated, on demand, is qualitative exchange. To fully realise the empowerment of this will take some time to get used to, but inevitable if we truly want to move past fear as a driver of motivator to create.

What will be created is a fully supportive, collaborative, connected, diverse experiential society. This follows the rules of nature in every way, except that we would be living in a state of abundance. The need to compromise others for one’s gain becomes completely redundant in qualitative exchange. by default. Managing resources shifts from ethics based solutions to excellence based ones – what solutions supports as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time.

This has been a very concise encompassing construct of many facets of life that many people look at separately to resolve, but the parameters to resolve them in is just as important, and like any good idea, these are very simple.

Understanding money is a great step forward. If it was as simple as simple a measure of energy exchanged, it would not be much of a problem, but it isn’t. It takes more energy to create it than what it produces, hence why all its debt can never be paid off, and so is not economical. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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—— 2005, Brand name bullies : the quest to own and control culture, J. Wiley, Hoboken, N.J.

Collom, E, Kyriacou, C & Lasker, JN 2012, Equal time, equal value : community currencies and time banking in the US, Ashgate, Farnham, Surrey ; Burlington, VT.

Darwin, CR 1898, The Origen of Species by Means of Natural Selection Or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, Appleton.

Franco, P Understanding bitcoin : cryptography, engineering, and economics, Wiley finance series.

Graeber, D 2009, Debt: the first five thousand years, Eurozine.

Greco, T 2001, Money: understanding and creating alternatives to legal tender, Chelsea Green Publishing.

Jackson, A, Dyson, B & Daly, HE 2014, Modernising money: why our monetary system is broken and how it can be fixed, Positive Money.

Lietaer, B 2013, The future of money, Random House.

Lipton, BH 2015, The Biology of Belief 10th Anniversary Edition: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles, Hay House, Inc.

Littera, G, Sartori, L, Dini, P & Antoniadis, P 2014, 'From an idea to a scalable working model: merging economic benefits with social values in Sardex'.

Mark, J 1938, Where is the money to come from? : With an account of the monetary experiments of Guernsey, Schwanenkirchen, Worgl and the scrip and barter groups of the United States, London,.

Orraca, M & Orraca, MJ 2013, 'Tumin, pesos, or wealth?'.

Ostrom, E 1990, Governing the commons : the evolution of institutions for collective action, Political economy of institutions and decisions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge England ; New York.

Piketty, T & Goldhammer, A 2015, The economics of inequality.

Pirsig, RM 1974, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: an inquiry into values, Morrow, New York,.

Reagle, JM 2010, Good faith collaboration : the culture of Wikipedia, History and foundations of information science, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Turner, C 2016, Into the Open Economy.

Vance, A 2015, Elon Musk : Tesla, SpaceX, and the quest for a fantastic future, First edition. edn, Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, NY.

[theqse-blog]

MONEY AND ABUNDANCE EVOLVING EXCHANGE MODELS FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

Have you ever thought about what happens around the earth at any one time? All the cycles of the day happening at once. I figure it would take 25 days to see what happens in one day in each time zone, including one hour to travel to that time zone (given that, it would make more sense to travel west, then lose your full day crossing the international date line). How many things will find to be the same, compared to those that are different?

People living, surviving, cultivating, loving.

If you really think about it, we live for loving. I do not mean just sex, I mean really connecting. Actually, I'd wager the quality of sex defines the quality of life one has. Really good sex demands being really open, free, creative, expressive. It's also the time we hope to aspire, reach, communicate, no fear. Being fully accepted and accepting. To express this is abundant. Limitless. Empowered.

Have you thought about how we sell empowerment to the world?

Now, in a scarce driven world, we'd want to keep our sexual expertise to ourselves or distribute at a price, but in an abundant world, this would be quite different. I can be a great lover all I want, but if I want to be really good, I want everyone not just to know, but to see what my knowledge has taught them and what I will discover though their experiences. This is never static. Being good always evolves. That's how we got to be so good now and how we can get even better. Forever.

Sharing spreads pleasure. You get that, right? You may not agree, but hear me out, because if you do think otherwise, you are reacting on your fear, not your empowerment.

See, to be the best, you need to share. This spreads your love much more than keeping it to yourself. I know you are thinking that systemising approaches versus your intuition gets you more lovers, but actually you are limiting yourself. Because sharing authenticity empowers everyone to discover, experience, and grow. Life is an evolving spiral, not a static circle.

What has this got to do with money? Have you ever thought about how we sell empowerment? Have you ever thought how pricing empowerment incredibly reduces its capacity for diversity and expansion? Have you ever thought how, in the current money world, pricing yourself actually devalues who you are?

Because the current currency we use drives scarcity. What we create occurs despite currency, not because of it. If we valued ourselves solely as the best quality creators, producing in the most sustainable way possible, on demand, price would be meaningless. Our unit of value would be our reputation, and we would exchange by gifting.

These are all bold statements, but let me back them up, and demonstrate how we can get there, and why this is so important if we are to save humanity on earth. I’ll do my best to cover this, different sections that point to the same thing. The waterfall that starts, and ends, as one, but has limitless trajectories to get there.

A friend of mine said there is always a balance of opposing sides, the ying and yang of life. I reasoned that if people are always, and encouraged, to follow their joy, to connect with no fear, this point of view would break down. I realised however, that I would be wrong. There will always be a balance, however, the parameters around what is in balance is different. Perhaps one present way we look at this is joy versus fear, positive versus negative, good versus bad, empowerment versus disempowerment. I find looking at it in these ways empowers fear as the dominant force to work against. However, from a foundation of empowerment, the balance becomes creativity versus sustainability. We can play with what sustainability is, but the crucial point is that without environment, we have nothing, so arguments about economic, social, or political sustainability will always be servant to the environment. To say otherwise is playing with one’s ego, and wanting to earn a price for it.

What creative ideas have enough value to be made in the most sustainable way possible? How many experiences can we create that really add value to people’s lives, respecting the earth at the same time? What unit of measure would satisfy our need for status in a more sustainable world that values doing over having?

And so we begin.

MONEY

It is interesting how people equate money with abundance. I find people who believe this do not know what money is; rather, the type of money we are using and how destructive it is. So many people say money is just a tool to overcome the limitations of barter. Listen to financiers talk about money, how liberating it is. and in it’s microcosm, it is. Grameen Bank is a perfect example of this, empowering many who would not have access to credit, but is money with usury the only way to access empowerment? Who said who can create money, be its master, while making others servant to it? Or are we all servants to it in one way or another, where the real problem lays?

If money were only a unit of exchange, there would be nothing wrong with it, but its design is insidious in ways people do not perceive. For instance, we mistake that money is wealth, when it is not. It is what money buys that has true value, why the quality of what we create is so important and should not be compromised.

Money is meaningless if it is not applied to something we create. Consequently, a price for the use of money is a farce, or a trick. Charge any price you want for your product, but it’s the cost of money that maligns that price, builds scarcity, and increases inequality. As banks become the masters of the market, money circulating with a cost kills the free market. The mechanics are not free or diverse. Look at the convergence of industry in their pursuit of profit, at the expense of quality and the environment. The news on DAPL and GMOs are perfect cases in point but hardly the only ones. Even how we decide to make things cheaply for a cheap price wastes resources to sustain a monetary economy, not an experiential one. Wherever there is a conflict to a solution, it is often parameters to the conflict that drive the issue, and these are particularly important when sustainability is compromised. Such projects easily demonstrate the maligned empowerment of corporations and governments, but also the pure disempowerment money truly is.

There are many people involved in currency design, and many egos wrapped up in how to do it. Like everything else, people do purposely complicate this in the same way we complicate buying public transport tickets in different cities (it would be better to make it free), but that is how currency icons, any icon, makes a living. If you offer a complete solution, no one needs you any more. Look at how many people sell books and programs to empower you but only within a parameter that empowers you against others, not with others. Money doesn’t afford total global empowerment. Qualitative abundance will.

Parameters for currency design are very simple. Money is servant to creation, so it can’t exist unless there work has been done, or a promise to be done, to make it possible. In kind, money belongs to all people participating in creating something a community finds valuable. The basic sectors that would fulfil life as we know it are: Food Clothing Shelter Technology and Energy Transport Healthcare Education

Obviously as creativity diversifies the arts, design, or science, humans need more than these basics;  but let us see how the dynamic works in these sectors according to the type of money we use. When money has a cost, we must always take away from somewhere else to cover the cost especially when that cost is centralised. If money were decentralised, such that we could all create money from will alone, there would be no incentive to lend money. Of course, there is no point creating money from nothing if there is nothing to buy. The usury of currency destabilises price, wealth, abundance. So much energy is lost in this game of money, energy that could otherwise create a greater choice of diverse, sustainable, experiences. How much time is spent searching for quality at a price, when we could spend time creating, and experiencing diversity at its best, at a stable price or without a cost at all?

If we must use currency, it is only at its most effective when it is free to use. This takes the focus away from the scarcity debt money creates, and shifts status to what we create. A free currency stabilised prices, reduces the inequality gap, and allows us to focus on how sustainably an experience is created, increasing quality across demographics and cultures. Two excellent currencies that are interest-free are Sardex and Tumin. Both are free currencies, based around mutual credit, without cost. While this may sound similar to time-based currencies such as LETS, it isn’t, as pricing is based on the market. Of course, this tempers the idea of abundance, and I personally speculate that is greys the connection between collaborating and competition.

This is where qualitative exchange, gifting, really shifts the value of competition to create sustainably, not reduce quality to any price. Creating experiences sustainably defaults to producing only on demand, which is a whole different beast to current quantified value-based economics. Orders are made in advance, or automated to be made at will. This affords customisation. Resources are allocated in the most efficient way, supporting the best in that sector. It affords discovering and creating new things. Cultural diversity. As nature intended.

Like tribes were, and still are, given trinkets for valuable resources, so we have been sold the glitter of money. Surprisingly, Bitcoin inadvertently proves the irrelevance of money. I can only assume, but am quite confident that from the beginning, its designers knew about this from the beginning, as the conclusion is inescapable, but I can only assume this to be the case. To understand the effects of a currency easily, look at what happens if everyone chooses to use it.

There is an absolute limit to the amount of BTC that can be created, which is 21 million coins, that become harder and harder to create. It’s very important to keep currency flowing, and support demand to use it. The only way to do that is to take all fees out of it, which is feasible since building new infrastructure to validate transactions becomes redundant. It also keeps as much currency out there to flow, but that will still not stop inevitable price devaluations to accommodate the velocity of money as everyone uses it. Therefore, the price mechanism, — that being whatever is of higher quality costs more — breaks down, leaving quality as the only way left to differentiate between one manufactured thing and another.

Money is such a poor measure of value, or wealth. Many think it is created in balance to what is produced but there are vast multiples of money in existence over what there is to buy with it. And this is increasing as most money that exists is mainly entries of debt. It’s distribution, however, has to be scarce to have value, but it is based on a maligned sense of motivating people to work, when we would do far better not having it at all. It validates that the actual numbers mean, and value, nothing. How we even chose to believe in such a warped currency to value our lives is extraordinary. Disempowering.

Money converges, demands quantification, and scarcity; real or contrived. Money creates scarcity, therefore war, yet we are attached to it like Stockholm Syndrome lovers. Reputation diverges, demands qualification, and inevitable, sustainable, abundance. Money has no concept of abundance in its design, even if it has no cost to use. We need a qualitative exchange measure that values sustainable abundance. That is human. And that is nature.

I know what you are saying. This is conceptual theory, or wouldn’t it be nice if only human nature had so little fear to do this. The point is we are all selling no fear in some way, so let’s build parameters that afford this to happen, not simply hope for it, to not keep it an exception to the norm. Let’s look at current sectors and apply these theories in practice to see what systems, and empowerment, they support.

HUMAN NATURE + GAME THEORY + EMPOWERMENT

I must quickly, quickly, outline the parameters of human nature to establish grounding for my arguments. I can do this.

If you think about it, we often make decisions around people based on fear. Maybe this is based on trying to be immortal as a manifestation of power, which is not very present. The principles of scarcity demands certain types of leaders, but so, too, does abundance. They are quite different.

We may think we need external motivators to actually do something, and a lot of research derives from this premise. Even though civilisations have overcome scarcity many times, as we have today, money is the water that germinates this misconception. Money makes the many servant to the few. I personally think it is the scarcity that money drives that is responsible for the destruction of civilisations that offer so much abundance. we think that politics and ethics are the engine for stability and empowerment, but it is the tools they use that are their flaw. Most governance already knows this.

The research of Richard Ryan and Self-Determination Theory, wonderfully encapsulated by the work of Dan Pink, easily demonstrates that when our creative capacity is engaged, extrinsic reward is irrelevant. It is only when we are reduced to acting obediently performing processes that we look for some kind of external give back. Look at the number of volunteers who give their time for the value not just for their themselves, but for others, simply for the love of it. They are increasingly the bedrock of the money world. It is amazing that the work of fundamental services like Life Savers and Coastguard are predominantly volunteer driven, dependent on sponsorship. Look at the incredible value of Wikipedia, GiftHub, and open source platforms, leveraging not just reparation but fostering connection just to make things better. This is human nature in its most empowered state. From the perspective of a market economist for whom scarcity drives all, this behaviour is ludicrous.

Listen to people at work. How many are truly happy? How many are bitter over their disempowerment to flex their creative capacity? We idolise those who are the exception, those who’ve mastered a system that supports only a few masters; and yet we mostly buy what the system sells: that we each could be masterful. We objectify systems that perpetually disempower, for our measure of wealth built around scarcity. Now we see the shift to selling motivation and coaching - further connecting freedom to money. But this really only sells the support of creation –in themselves, neither coaching nor mentoring create. In the moneyed world, no matter how far down the line of empowerment one can go, the idea of systemised empowerment is based on fear and scarcity, and this is born of game theory of which economics is based.

I know an extraordinary man who gave up the logic of neuroscience to live it, experience it. He is extraordinarily happy. He plays fantastic peaceful music during his meditation classes. I asked him if he can tell me who it is and send me the links. He says these are his own compositions. Then would he give them to me? He replies he finds them very sacred and sharing it will diminish their value. It turns out that not all, if any, are composed and are really premixes off YouTube. So, they aren’t even his.

Leveraging scarcity is not uncommon. So, does love diminish in value when you share it? Only if you think it is scarce and will not come back to you. Although that is a fascinating concept to consider, in experience we may not share it openly and fully, with all, in the same way. I wonder what that would be like? Come to think of it, perhaps the most empowered people are like this, and I have met them. One is astonishingly beautiful, as close to a supernova as I have ever experienced.

There are plenty of theories with games. All games are competitive, but how competition is manifest depends on the parameters of the game. Most economic theory is defined around the Prisoners Dilemma, founded on the work of mathematician John Nash. The simple idea is if no prisoner snitches, nothing changes, but if both snitch, it is worse for both of them. Analysis shows that when the number of times the game is to be played between the prisoners is known, both betray, but when played infinitely, they don’t. The theory is very apt to describe usury on currency. When costs are planned, we play the costs of the money against what we would earn in exchange. However, if we understand that the debt never goes away, and that this game is infinite, we would probably not play. We may think it is too late once it has started, but we are already proved wrong by the changes people are already making to return to our native empowerment. Games counter to this are the Dictator, Ultimatum, and Evolutionary Game Theory. All these still leverage competition, but any outcome reflects the perception of the environment they are applied in; in essence, if self is best served by competing or collaborating. In the fundamental work of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, both concurred that survival of the fittest defaulted to co-evolution (evolutionary game theory), not destruction of one over the other (prisoner’s dilemma). It is how we have shaped the idea of the best surviving, built around fear and scarcity, that has cultivated the insecure need for money.

Theories around attachment to people are continually being discussed, in how we are connected or are we truly alone. We are always connected with each other, but that we make this scarce, with conditions, drives the insecurity of attachment, being less unless we are accepted by others. I propose that it is the conditions of connecting that drive the problem of needing people. If we lived-in an inclusive, sustainably abundant world, there would be so much constructive, supportive attachment we would not fear negative attachment, therefore are detached from this need.

Money has limited us tremendously, believing that it has been create for our benefit, when it has now become a tool to disempower more. We are trusting people that value fear, and so disempower ourselves in the process, giving our power to others that put a price on our lives. On understanding we are all priceless, we all afford, and are empowered, to become creators, and all money will become meaningless.

START UPS

Long before we made it cool with the philanthropic and VC support we give start-ups that complement today’s corporations, trade was fast and furious. In any market, you can be overwhelmed at the number of people selling anything of remote value, surrounded with inventory in a 2m2 space. Thousands of traders floors high, like individual bee hives, fighting for your dollar. Sure, some stores are the same with different fronts, but this is in vast minority compared to the number of people wanting your business. Their objective is to turn over cheap stuff quickly, made to perish in a year, if not a month, to keep the people making these atrocious things that waste resources. Markets selling trinkets is more of the same deal, making so many different things that are mostly meaningless, relying dramatically on manufactured demand. Stocks work the same way, selling perception of loss rather than discovering an experience.

The idea of the startup has scaled up dramatically in its promise of diversity creation, free-market principles, and personal empowerment; and, in many ways, the form can yield some extraordinary things. However, the learning curve is full of repetitive research wasting huge amounts of energy and resources, for a sliver of a market in the right time and space. Over 90% of start-ups fail, yet we push this as a model for creative empowerment and sustainability. In the technology space, ideas that are supported are highly specific with most created for their valuation at sale, not anticipating long term use. For a brand to be competitive it is best to buy out the competition to keep some measure of profit. Multiple variations in the same niche waste time. Just look at social media platforms, with monetisation in the background built around advertising and classifieds. Everyone is all over a new armchair-tech idea, but a pitch for tagging animals - for easy tracking - eradicating the need for searching for them every morning has no support, even though this could transform free-range food production completely.

Competing to win is unsustainable. Think about how much more powerful concepts could be created, implemented, and adapted to deliver customised experiences, working together. Collaborating to win! Far more beneficial, sustainable, and self-empowering than all the tools to leverage competing will ever achieve. I could write any example here, but I can comfortably say that with whatever situation you choose to give me, I will find a better, collaborative solution to solve your problems than competing will ever achieve.

Of course, resolving a small solution is easy, but it is at scale that an idea truly shows its capacity, so I will apply these ideas to two large sectors, and the consequences of applying both: resource management analysis between ownership and the commons, and the ultimate consequence of that in city design.

Consider the difference between crowdfunding and what I call crowdfinding, which is like crowdsourcing, but focused solely on leveraging support through the quality of what one creates, producing sustainability and peacefully, on demand.

Crowdfunding is about getting support to buy people and resources. It is a derivative of and centred in profit making; it is a tool for startups. There is little focus on sustainability and even when there is, it is applied within the confines of money. Growth and valuation are still key measurements of wealth. Nothing much changes. At the same time, there are social entrepreneurs who are more for the quality or for the greater good of what they make at the expense of profit. But even finding balance between these is an oxymoron — a symptom of our current exchange model. Again, this demonstrates the flaw of money as we use it today.

Crowdsourcing has a bit more scope: leveraging support in more ways than just money: equipment donations, advertising people’s support, community awareness projects, and the like; all still within the current exchange model ’

Crowdfinding demands support solely based on creating sustainable quality and giving incentives to people to give their creative energy to a project  all for nothing; at least, not in quantitative terms.

A business proposal demonstrates what one is creating, how and who it benefits, what will be taught, options for recycling and reuse, adaptions between localities, customisation possibilities, and decentralised production deployment to produce on demand. The objective is to make the producing units of what is created redundant, yet are a legacy for evolution to new ideas and systems. Without buying labour from people to obediently produce, people are invited to create  and give their time and resources for free. In exchange, they receive the output for free. But not just this. On many people and projects using crowdfinding as a method for support, all participants in creating this way have access in what the whole network creates. Once scaled to cover the six minimum sectors that we all need to not just survive, but experience and evolve: food, clothing, shelter, technology, transport, healthcare, with education underpinning all of these, and the need for money, even stable free money, becomes redundant. I do not mean to say there is no space for purely artistic endeavours. I am simply focusing on necessities, and spiralling outward from there. What is most important is how one wishes to apply their creative capacities, and we all have more than one.

There is no way possible for quantified exchange models, that crowdfunding is based on, to compete with what opportunities, and security, crowdfinding offers. Crowdfinding reframes the free market for what people choose to spend their time creating, for whom, how, and why: for self, everyone, and everything.

THE YIN+YANG BETWEEN CREATION+SUSTAINABILITY

It’s quite clear that the values of collaborating are taking hold, from the advent of crowdfunding turning to full crowdfinding solutions like Hylo and Sustainable Human (many thanks to Edward West and Chris Agnos) with everything, like sharing sites, in between. As in any sector, these platforms are still looking for optimisation; finding the best possible way. Many promote and advocate for decisions relying on ethics to counteract the complete lack of ethics that money repeatedly demonstrates. I hope I do not have to labour this as all over the news and internet stories of trade agreements valuing corporations, coal and tar sands mining, oil and coal seam gas exploration, or promotion of nuclear power as a stopgap between fossil fuels and renewables, are all offered but we can see are available only at the expense of water, ecosystems, and ourselves. Should I also mention the pharmaceutical industry?

Money, as we know it, slows down innovation; it does not advance it.

The obvious situation to demonstrate this is climate change. We are arguing this as a platform for IF to change, when actually it is irrelevant. Producing sustainably benefits everyone and everything, but climate change deniers can’t validate that it’s fine to destroy fresh water access for oil and CSG that run machines to mine the same thing, when renewables offer far higher sustainable energy access. Money drives the need for jobs that would not have to exist if we had an exchange model that values creating experiences abundantly instead of slowing innovation down to stay in scarcity, for money.

I remember on my first radio show, Sustainable Synergy, nterviewing three Australian sustainability think tanks back-to-back, asking why, as one combined force, they were not building the status of being sustainable, first and foremost by talking to each other. Each said they were in different sectors and offered differing solutions. Of course, to survive in the existing economy they need this type of differentiation, but this does will not offer a full solution, until the time is right. With no change in status or exchange models, that is likely to never happen.

Probably the ideal platform to discuss the differences between resource management through money +ownership and reputation + sharing is commoning. The Commons is a vast network developing platforms for more collaboration and sustainable living and connect humanity with the more qualitative and supportive aspects of life we all desire. Legends such as David Bollier and Michel Bauwens are all looking at collaborative consensus protocols that afford the greatest support for parts of communities. Other platforms are Sociocracy and Loomio, but like most decision making protocols, they are highly based around being rational with ethics and scarcity. Resolving arguments ethically can be extraordinary difficult to do as it values levels of disempowerment, and makes management of the commons exceedingly complex; again, a symptom of the present parameters to survive against others, not with them.

We are innately status driven animals so any collaborative platform must invite setting ourselves apart and making a difference. This is how we show our distinction. This is much more about excellence than ethics. Change the parameters of the goal from quantitative scarcity to qualitative abundance, and we naturally collaborate as this is not just rational but the most empowering action to take. Collaborating makes all of us better as have access to much more information and experiences to be better at it. Pricing this is a contradiction to abundance of experiences and connections that are possible through gifting while respecting who are the best in their fields of expertise. This drives excellence as a primary driver of creating. Nothing less.

There is a scene in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where to test his theory that value is devalued by quantifying it, the author does not give his students marks for one semester. Previously students craved to have the status of the highest mark in the class, attained by rote, usually doing the bare minimum to pass, but in refusing to allocate marks the teacher  empowered the students’ search  for new information. Everyone’s concealed grades improved, with the brightest understanding the full ramifications of the experiment: that quantifying value devalues it.

Managing the commons would benefit greatly from this foundation of civil management. Certainly, ideas of excellence differ, but the objective of experience founded around sustainable creation offers an opportunity to collaborate and converge ideas for the greatest empowerment of many. No solution is static or lacks support if empowerment is at its core.

There are many urban projects which revolve around commons management. The case in Melbourne of an unused alleyway adapted to provide space for its community, is a simple example. Better examples are intentional communities. The documentary A New We discusses a few intentional communities around the world which do their best to be independent but are still servant to outside support. Usually the scale of these communities is quite small, they have fewer resources and innovation than needed, and they abide by spiritual or ritual dogma, putting ethical governance at the centre of management. This can and usually does lead to political power struggles, not creative ones, and so disempowerment and fear perpetuate. An important realisation of this experience is that any worthwhile management model promotes the advantage of trust as a core element of evolution, contrary to models that try to stop distrust from taking hold. Yes, there is a big difference in how this changes what are best solutions or ways for communities to manage resources.

What is most lacking in intentional communities is the scope of creative diversity. The essentials need to be covered before anything else and there may not be the expertise in communities to cultivate that sustainably. The need to do what has to be done, rather what one wishes to do makes such communities more a reaction against, not an alternative to, current social structures.

Incentives are critical to the formation of practices which value qualitative exchange in a large network. For change-over, a simple start point is to agree within networks to give freely what is normally done at a cost outside of that network. Invitation to other networks to join and complete what is lacking enable oneself and participating networks to be unchained from quantitative exchange. The opportunity to connect with like-minded empowering people in such a community has no limits and is a huge incentive to participate and build an alternative model that invites support and wellbeing to all. Frameworks like Sustainable Human, built off the Hylo platform, are cultivating exactly this type of exchange.

While we value local communities, we do not want to lose the choice of what cities offer. As we can’t really connect in a human way at a global scale, we think we need some kind of quantitative exchange to resolve the lack of trust this scale creates and evolve collectively. This, by its very nature, bases exchange to focus on, and therefore cultivate, fear.

As said before, any exchange model can only show its value at scale. So as much as qualitative exchange is easy to understand at small scale, it is at the scale of the city that it will show its true capacity to empower, and what that type of city would look like.

THE QUALITATIVE CITY

We can argue whether the city is a culmination of systems that leverage the common freedoms for all over the individual freedoms for self, but its the parameters of those systems that ideally support people to follow their creative capacity to resolve challenges, in the most constructive, peaceful, way possible. Seeing the huge turmoil we are all going through to keep the momentum of city life going easily demonstrates the current models are grossly inadequate for the creative capacity we have. We are looking for new solutions with projects as grand as Masdar City, a $20 billion project for 50,000 people promising zero-carbon output, and failing but how far do such systemic-focused projects perpetuate sustainable change?

A great example to demonstrate this is a recent New Cities initiative by startup giant Y Combinator, managed by Sam Altman and Adora Cheung. Utopian ideas first dreamed of by the likes of masters such as architects Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, the objective for New Cities is to see how far technology has taken us and how it can reshape the city as we know it, but their first goal is how to make housing affordable.

Affordable housing is a very small part of how a city functions. Sadly, and unsurprisingly, there was no basis of understanding how exchange models affect the scope of ideas, therefore more suitable solutions. It dangerously promotes further synthesising nature on foundations bearing no sustaining relationship to it. Nature perpetually diversifies creative culture to survive, connecting and empowering. Cities certainly have diversity, but for them to create and survive, how, in the language of quantitative exchange, would technology resolve and lead to empowerment fulfilling, experiential, connected, JOYFUL, lives for all?

I made a proposal to be a researcher for this project. So much stress is born from wanting to protect yet empower and expand children, so my central foundation of a city design is that it has to be safe and support valuable experiences for children. My proposal certainly did not restrict itself to urban plans at human scale, or the best toys, or the best way to design a kitchen so children do not get hurt. My foundation was what social, economic, and political structures would support the greatest access to education and experiences to empower capacity to cultivate creative lives respectful of all life.

Is this not what a city is all about? I asked what city design brief could afford flexible working hours, following creative interests, perpetuate sustainable innovation, access to new experiences, cultivate trust, and truly live in peace and abundance? And not be boring? Naturally, as these are all qualitative and priceless, there is no dollar value in this, hence the need for qualitative exchange. I suspect that this has nothing to do with the limitations of money, they missed the point, and I did not even make the first round.

It is limitations of parameters of perception and restricted conceptualisation of how cities may grow that leads to their ultimate demise; the cycle of civilisation as we accept it.

Qualitative exchange has no limits as it values what we create from scarce time and resources; not a derivative of scarcity itself. It leverages our competitive nature to create sustainably and enjoy it. It makes business a sport: play to win, then shake hands and both learn to be better from the experience the next time. It perpetuates joy over stress. It values empowerment for all over the few. It fully supports you to be responsible and gain status in applying that. It kills the need to compete against each other and builds collaboration as the best way to create. This is the foundation of excellence.

So, what would a modern, sustainable city look like?

Some useful concepts to optimise the city for creating sustainable, diverse, experience are the: centring the city around the pinnacle of it’s fuel: food, water, and renewable energy excellence of innovation, such as recycling and reusing, especially trash diversity of locally-sensitive housing solutions promotion of goal-centric, not system-centric, working hours leverage unlimited automated public transport on a 24hr cycle cultivation quality food accessible to all, on demand, reducing food waste separation of quiet and noisy precincts, and making sound-proof housing mandatory provide free healthcare with more natural solutions make access to knowledge bases free

As stated previously, the parameters for how these are created affect how useful, efficient, and encompassing they can be. As an example, after travelling around many different cities in South America in November and December 2016, it is amazing how systems in cities are so similar. Buses and trains are different, machines and systems to pay are different, but that we need to pay is the same. I noticed that the buses in Sydney, Australia are huge square things that have a high centre of gravity making them difficult to manoeuvre, but buses in Buenos Aires taper upward and are a little smaller, which lowers the centre of gravity, allow the bus to clear obstacles when it sways; this makes them much easier to drive. It seems that what makes public transport more successful is not the type of vehicle, but how often they run, so that there are so many designs competing for market wastes resources.

Payment options are just as diverse. Seattle offers free rides on any bus within the city precinct, so if you enter within the city area and exit the bus outside of it you pay on exit.  Some cities price fares by zones, or the quality of bus, and others, such as Brazilia, have turnstiles in the bus after paying the driver or conductor who has his own throne, taking up a huge amount of space. The movement to more electronic payments offers challenges for passengers wanting access to public transport regardless of wherever they might be, but with the globalisation of the market, why have any payment at all? Would it not be far more welcoming for locals and foreigners to come to a city and access what experiences it offers, and not make transport the first obstacle to master ?

While we say such a change is difficult to fund compared to the cost of ticketing systems, we could make transport free, promote its use and reduce traffic which would save other costs (such as cleaning up pollution) allowing the addition of more services. The point then becomes what type of service to make if everyone has flexible working hours, which takes out peak-time loads … and so it goes.

The object of a city, any community, is not to make things to sell, it is to create experiences that afford us to love life for as long as we are alive: far better to take out the need for traffic than to resolve traffic in an inefficient system.

A very progressive community model is Rise, in Costa Rica, which fundamentally values and creates a connected quality of life. Although still entrenched in the money world its quality affords a model to cultivate and extend as it inspires applying our senses of creativity, without money.

Everything starts with a concept, so the transport network is my simple schema for an efficient city. The shortest distance between relevant nodes is a triangle. This affords only one change, if any, to get from one place to another. How this is applied depends on the topography of the area, affording respect for terrain, ecology, and diversity for preferences for private housing and public areas. Assuming the humility to know we can’t challenge nature, only augment it, is a great place to start from. Many people move to cities for opportunities, but a city can’t function without the support of its environment, so balance with environment and incentives that promote urban and rural places is crucial for any design, however schematic, to work effectively. Leveraging low maintenance and  less work permits more efficient use of resources and time. This is possible by the introduction of parameters that can deliver innovation. These concepts can be applied to any sector. To own a resource is meaningless, but what does have true value is what we do with the resource. This means money is an insecure measure of safety. It promotes none of these values, and we are better to do see this and move on.

EVOLUTION THROUGH QUALITATIVE EXCHANGE

There will be many more effects than just on what, how, and why we produce what we want to make living life so valuable.

We spend a huge amount of resources on security, against one another, of which money plays a huge part facilitating. We live with so much more tension, fear, wariness, than we did 50 years ago, and we have become accustomed to this as being normal. I was recently told of how the city of Paris has mobilised since the terrorist attack at the newspaper offices of Charlie Hebdo in 7 January 2015. Police with automatic weapons have become so common in public areas with screen checks while entering buildings that people are now accepting this as part of everyday life. This is a small example in comparison to the perpetual state of war and corruption so many countries are in, this more by political choice than anything else. I could say acts of fear are perpetrated for this very purpose, like the act Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, created with debutants smoking at a glam event implying that women were cooler if they did the same: we are sold the necessity of extrinsic protection to be safe. We are further led to question human nature, not the environment that drives scarcity and disempowers, so much such that some think that this type of activism brings attention to their grievances.

Qualitative exchange driving sustainable abundance makes any kind of violent or disempowering act unsustainable, therefore this would not be good for one’s reputation nor would it be unsupported. Resources used for acts of war becomes redundant. Anything used against the ideas of sustainability and peace will simply not be possible as the need or desire for war would be lost. Trying to pursue it will achieve nothing except lower your reputation. People would do better accessing resources to be educated and create. ‘War’ would become a game of being the best sustainable creator.

No one is disempowered in the qualitative world, unless they want to be. To choose not to be in a world where every opportunity to reach your capacity is free for you to apply your creativity is incessantly stupid, and everyone would know about it. No creator is obliged to give such people, anyone, anything, so at least trying to do something has its benefits. However, one does not choose to enter the gifting world unless they se the advantage of doing so, so it is highly unlikely people will be dormant in this space. More power to it.

Many books and theses have been written about understanding and possibly resolving issues within the immediate paradigms around debt-driven money. I believe we are all searching for unlimited empowerment, but stifle it within this system that drives scarcity. We want people to live to their full potential, but limit resources to make this possible. This is why the exchange system we choose to use is so important. Our capacity to create is not scarce, so why base sharing this on an exchange model that limits this?

A friend told me that we, nature, evolve towards efficiency. It is quite apparent that quantitative exchange is exceedingly inefficient.

So why do we default to using quantitative exchange when it promotes fear, scarcity, and destruction? Because selling negativity is easy. There is a maligned sense of power in it as it promotes people working for you, not with you. It values being lazy. This is not true empowerment. Many are trying to resolve this conundrum, but while we choose to rely upon existing paradigms, nothing much will change. Since the 70s, perhaps with the debut of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, warnings have been communicated en masse. Instead of valuing peace, we have been sold the security of greed. As most follow the status quo to fit in, we accept that this is the best option. That we trust the status quo easily proves we are trusting beings, believing we want to empower each other, and we are easily taken advantage of, otherwise public relations would not exist. As mentioned before, Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, capitalised on it because he firmly believed people are stupid. We are as stupid as we want to be, or not.

It seems 2017 is the year for researching global system change with multiple manifests and constitutions; Marx on a collective level. We explore how to measure qualitative value through happiness indexes, social good enterprises, and collaboration networks. At global scale. There are many people looking at new options for new model societies that are more human. One with greater exposure, probably for the prize than the outcomes, is a competition by Laszlo Szombatfalvy. Described to be the Warren Buffet of Sweden, he has created A New Shape - Remodelling Global Cooperation, offering up to USD$50million in funding for solutions leading to a UN 2.0:

‘This competition is a quest to find new models of global cooperation capable of handling global risks. It will award USD$5 million in prizes for the best ideas that re-envision global governance for the 21st century. Be part of the effort to safeguard our world for future generations. Be part of the global conversation. Help to change the shape of things to come.’

Of course, this is not a new idea. David Suzuki has been capitalising on such concept proposals for decades. Still, there is an emphasis on political reform without addressing how politics is supported: selling greed. It would be fascinating if the idea of qualitative exchange is valued as high in such a contest as it would stare the need for money in the face, recognise the redundancy and inefficiency of quantitative exchange, instantly making the idea of ‘winning’ money amusingly superfluous as a measure of status. What a wonderful conundrum to reach, and the scope this would present for effective, efficient, sustainable creation.

It would be interesting to see if people propose changes to win, or indeed present ideas that have value. The value of ideas is certainly dependent on the time and situation they address, but a fundamental endgame offers a direction to work towards. Hopefully something far more valuable than profit, or money. This would begin the inflexion point where we can work to let money go, stop wasting resources on building new currencies as a way forward, and cultivate trust to build sustainable abundance as a natural governing mechanism.

This aptly brings up the experiments of George Price, the man behind the Price Equation. He tested to what level self-sacrifice is not in the interests of self. Examples of organisms that sacrifice themselves for the community are bees, in the interests of extending their gene pool to survive. The more closely a gene pool resembles self, the more likely one is to sacrifice oneself for it to survive. Price was not happy to discover this and so in the interests in pushing altruism to its limits, he decided to live with nothing and see what came back. He gave away everything, squatted, helped the homeless, did anything he could to prove that altruism exists beyond this inherent limitation of genetic survival. Sadly, he discovered he was wrong, with fellow homeless and destitute equally stealing from him as much as supporting him. Depressed at not discovering the empowerment of giving life to one’s fellow man equally and without compromise, he committed suicide.

Why this is important is people can make a choice, but the environment we live in is an immense factor in deciding what choice we will make, and how it supports us. We are not selfless.

Like any belief pattern, those valuing supporting others do this to propagate the idea of collaborating, helping, assisting, within parameters perceived to survive, and master. Doing this through ethics is like bringing the gene pool together, but whose genes, or rather perceptions, will you follow to survive? There are two common baselines to this argument: that all perceptions are based on scarcity, and that the gene pool across race and cultures is incredibly similar. As mentioned before, people are selling abundance attached to scarcely distributed money, which is like setting off a time bomb. Attach abundance to quality creation, excellence in the most sustainable way possible, valuing what we do, not what we have, and we open a whole new concept of being, embracing selfishness by collaborating, discovering, sharing, experiencing. There are no limits to knowledge, innovation, creation, and how we use it. On realising this do I believe that Price’s concept of altruism will be true, just not the language he described it.

THE REAL ENDGAME

Maybe it’s here that I lay my cards on the table, and iterate the endgame a qualitative exchange model can, and I think will, create.

We have been building models that hope for more trust inside a model that works against this, but would we be inspired to work in a model that makes fear diminutive? Can we believe connecting with no fear is possible, or is just something we can hope for but think is impossible; therefore reinforcing it will never be? While lots of icons sell no fear, this makes our achieving this servant to the host that offered the information, and the environment we have created does not support this perpetual evolution. I think we are subconsciously afraid of this, and think that there would be nothing to work towards if we all achieved this state of being, so we idolise the exception of this, not evolve it as a mainstream premise of being. Like money, we cultivate the scarcity of being free. This is a complete misconception of existence. It is in leveraging self-love in its fullest form that we accept not just who we are but what we can and would become. That is true sustainability.

To speak of this sense of positivity and empowerment in a world of artificial battles, like vehicle registration, good schooling, taxes is odd. Is information truly constructive or is it only to sell a perception?  There will always be challenges, but the idea is to overcome them, not empower them. No exchange model can do this better than qualitative exchange.

Self-empowerment is a personal journey that we cannot own, hold back, for a price. Quality has no limits, so communicating empowerment through a quantified way disempowers it. We create fear when our creative capacity is constrained. While we believe things or people are icons over oneself, we devalue who we are.

I feel I need to give an illuminating example of how all this works, as we are the system, not just a part of one.

The automotive industry is going to through some intense changes with the introduction of Tesla. It is not the only innovation in the transport industry, but it is the most well-known at this time. It took Elon Musk his personal fortune, and more, to make Tesla happen. It almost failed, but today it’s sales figures are enviable. I see them everywhere and have had the pleasure to drive them since the Roadster. Build quality was hard in coming but conquered. Projects are scaling to incorporate electric power across energy demands, particularly for the home.

Competition demands alternatives and so, even though Tesla information is available open source, industry is instead looking at using hydrogen to create electricity to power a motor. That means transforming energy twice. Like nuclear energy, the energy of hydrogen is as volatile, difficult to extract, requires specialised equipment to contain, and a huge amount of infrastructure to deploy, in the same way petrol does. However more efficient and more abundant hydrogen may be, depending on where you source your information, it is still scarce, and the infrastructure alone to make it efficient is incredibly immense. This will take a huge amount of time and money. Like nuclear does. And to create energy for what? Our current, inefficient, largely disempowering, happiness in a bubble, lifestyles.

The first steps in using electricity to power transport has been made, thanks to Elon and all those who share a vision for quiet, efficient, energy. Logic demands that solutions that require as few transfers of energy as possible from abundant sources: wind, sun, ocean. These are safe and low maintenance, almost set and forget. We also already have the electrical grid infrastructure to push this and will improve through further urban and rural development. Infrastructure is set and forget, and be deployed easily at multiple areas, to be replaced as demand increases and technology and design improves. Output can be licensed for a return of investment. Everyone is happy and energy accessible.

But this is not happening. Instead of reducing work and enjoying more experiences, we create work for its own sake. Follow the connections back to why we are stalling on sustainable innovation and it leads to money. Further, we are sold the idea that hydrogen is good because it offers more jobs. It will over a longer period because the deployment of renewable energy will follow the same path as Bitcoin: charging licensing for unlimited energy becomes redundant as the need for infrastructure decreases. It runs itself, so better to let it go. Money slows efficiency down; it does not encourage it.

The same analysis can be made for food production. It has been proven that permaculture practices will yield more nutrition and values soil more than monoculture practices. Less work demanded to care for the crop, although more is likely to be required at harvest. If we are to value a qualitative return of investment, then we would value the time to build a permaculture food forest. Money, however demands yield in as short a time as possible, compromising quality for volume, and eve then so much of it is wasted due to market demand. We increase the amount of time to create yield, and make a very difficult industry artificially harder by taking the fun out of it.

Farming would be even more enjoyable if we introduced practices that really reconnected farmers to the creativity if magnifying diversity, not just maintaining it, but making its evolution an event! Depending on scale, each farmer or group of farmers would have access to a chef, either living on the land or in the area, for weekly, even daily, feasts at different farms, always something different, for people in the region or even further. Bring your own plate and glass, and discover new gastronomy and people that come with it. These could be low cost or even free, valuing the quality and diversity of what is advertised on the day. Waste, and scarcity, are resolved. It becomes cooler to be a farmer as it is not so time dependent and such hard work. This is not just a sales pitch to make a hard industry look easy, but leverages creative input for the great quality with minimal resources in the shortest time.

It would be incredibly wrong to think no one would be interested in doing this. There is an abundance of permaculture design graduates, just no platform on which to practice their chosen interest. Again, we see doing this as the exception, but would be the norm.

An exchange model must facilitate this type of creative capacity. While currency has a cost, this is extremely difficult to do as the top tier becomes the bank, which creates nothing except given the authority to create and distribute money. A debt-free, therefore stable, currency would go forward a long way to shift pressure from production volume to what is best to produce in that locality, and have access to the smarts to do it. Giving what is created freely takes this to a whole new level. Just as easily as we have been sold fear to be wary of connecting, we can show the incredible benefits and security a gifting model can create, but this also demands trusting others as much as yourself, the latter usually being the bigger problem than the trusting others.

Our current economic model has been built around the weakest link: people that want to create nothing, and so we venerate them. Instead, a model that values the strongest in creating excellence is the key. They are al priceless. Their reputation is beyond a quantity. We always value the intrinsic in people, with unquantifiable capacity to create joy, so why make this so difficult for so many people?

Politics has a lot to answer for in perpetuating this, and so it’s flaws are finally becoming glaringly clear. Fighting politics with politics, ethically-based proposals, achieves nothing. Make the beast redundant, and it goes away.

So does entertainment. In watching almost 50 years of TV and film, it is amazing how the story doesn’t change, only the way it is told. The acting is the same, except that they become more violently intense. Always the good overpowering the bad, in parameters that always invite compromise, not resolution. Peace is always wrapped up in some idea of some external artefact that powers the universe, either kept safe in peace, or lost, or to be possessed by some nemesis that thinks there is more power in dominion. Of course, there isn’t.

You are the artefact. We all are. We do not have to be this weakened, this disconnected from self. You are an icon. This is not something to actively step up to, you are already. Do what you want with it. It’s up to you.

WHERE TO GO FROM HERE

This has been a very encompassing construct of many facets of life that many people look at separately to resolve, but the parameters to resolve them in is just as important, and like any good idea, these are very simple.

Understanding money is a good step forward. If it was as simple as simple a measure of energy exchanged, it would not be much of a problem, but it isn’t. It takes more energy to create it than what it produces, hence why all its debt can never be paid off, and so is not economical.

For people that feel human nature and its greed is the problem, look at the environment it is cultivated in. Dr Bruce Lipton pants out all cells are the same, but the environment triggers what genes become active. we learn to adapt to the environment we are in to survive. Quickly. Watch a child’s incredible joy of life at birth when all they want to express is love in the total abundance they are given, and then learn that not all live in a world where love, and resources, are not abundant. This is why foundations that offer security of children without sacrificing creative empowerment is so important to cultivate. When we can actively engage our creative capacities, we will stop at nothing to apply them and give the result.

Look to your networks and each of you offer what you want to create most for free. See in what sever it its in: food, clothing, shelter, tech, transport, healthcare. Connect your network, and find others with similar mindsets, on platforms like Sustainable Human, not so much as to track what you have done, but more to advertise what you really want to do, and to see who offers what you need. If there are sectors missing for which you need money for, find them in your area and invite them into your network, offering them the network’s capacity for free in exchange for what they offer in return. Look at models that reduce their need for debt to survive, and offer expertise to shift their production line from units of lowest quality at a designated price to a highest quality production on demand line. Leverage this to all sectors to obviate the need for debt. Thinking that the powers that be will not allow this to happen, like in Wörgl in 1932, is a misconception. They are all disempowered by debt, and even if they think they are not, the infrastructure that supports that is falling down around them and there will be no place to turn but to be able to do what they really wanted, and be supported to do that. Without compromise.

If you think this is not feasible, that it is a nice idea but practically impossible, ask yourself where does your fear that it not work come from? Look for ideas for what can work instead of judging such a proposal as viable or not. Unless you do not want to be empowered without limits. Then it doesn’t matter. That’s OK. You will come around when you are ready.

Is this my exit for a part 2? To explain, to implement, how this works in detail on a case by case basis, at any scale? I am happy to do that.

I've realised this is my Everest for fundamental change, as much for everyone as for myself.

I look forward to hearing from you.

I love you.

:)

Frederick Malouf

Theqse

Bondi Beach Radio

[email protected]

[phone]

[theqse-blog]

EVOLVING EXCHANGE MODELS FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

‘If we did not have money, no one would be poor.’ - Alex Georgiev In all the time and effort many people are spending in developing economic models to support collaborative sustainable change, it is interesting that few question the exchange model we use and how this affects social behaviour, as Bernard Lietaer, the co-creator of the Euro and Terra, has succinctly pointed out in his book ‘The Future of Money’1. Given the parameters and scope of a steady-state economy (SSE), I’d like to present what currency models would best support an SSE over ethical based governance, and where that would lead. It was after I interviewed three think tanks back to back advocating sustainable practices in industry that set the trigger off to find out where the fulcrum point is to achieve sustainable change. ‘Do you connect with each other and share knowledge about how to leverage practicing sustainability, across your sectors?’ ‘Oh, no. We offer a different package.’ I realised then it was the commodification of what we create, and the price for it, that affects progressive shifts to creating more sustainably, and the status in achieving this. As much as many enterprises look for sustainable solutions and the profit this can afford within the current money model, the eventual abundance of creating sustainably opposes the scarcity that money creates for profit to exist. David Graeber’s book ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years’2 effectively illustrates the journey of commodified exchange, and the power though violence that comes with it. Debt became an exchange in gratitude to an object of ownership. Similar to the cycles of competitive business and monetary crash cycles, I personally believe that civilisation cycles are due to the type of money we use more than any other cause. The advent of social entrepreneurship and more collaborative ways of exchange has brought an array of possible exchange solutions, usually based around usury, demurrage, or mutual credit. The purpose behind them can either be more as a commodity or promote sustainable change, but almost all aim to function within global money markets that, as Thomas Piketty suggests in his book ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’3, inherently is not sustainable and concentrates buying wealth, increasing inequality and social unrest. Capitalism, as we practice it, seems to contradict the intrinsic motivation we have to create. Richard Ryan’s work Self-Determination Theory,4 eloquently communicated through the presentations by Dan Pink, demonstrates that we are far more empowered within an environment that values our creative autonomy over mechanical systems that demand being motivated by reward. We are far more productive and happily express our autonomy and give our purpose through mastery than be reduced to tasks that restrict us, yet accept to do for a price. Consequently, any currency design must not only leverage sustainable innovation, but also be a vehicle to empower to create the highest quality without wasting people’s time and Earth’s resources, as current knowledge allows. No doubt this is going to open a few questions to definitions of capitalism, quality, and sustainability. Free-markets are not solely within a capitalist system. Investopedia defines capitalism as ‘an economic system based on ownership of the factors of production’5 whereas a free market is solely based ‘on demand and supply [where] a buyer and a seller transact freely only when they voluntarily agree on the price of a good or a service’5. it seems that free markets and laissez-faire have a volatile history, hence labouring on governance. However, I believe is the exchange model we use that affects how constructive, or not, they are, and any governance to empower them. Quality certainly can be different to different people, the focus being how valuable an experience is for those choosing to participate in it. However, how well such quality is created is a universal asset: that it has an audience of both participants and creators, valuing time and resources in the most sustainable way possible. Sustainability is also perceived to be different for different people, arguably around the intersection of economic, social, and environmental factors, depending on what one wishes to achieve. Again, the foundation of any creative excellence is the social and environmental connections created: circular economic practices, wellbeing, bespoke manufacture, unlimited knowledge sharing o leverage time and resources in the most effective way. So, however anyone can prioritise sustaining a finance market, valuing ecology is inescapable. There is a lot of movement in looking for solutions within the current economic framework: micro lending, social enterprises, not-for-profits, philanthropy, management of the commons, and universal basic income (UBI), all working with flows in valuing social return of investment (SROI), energy returned on energy invested (EROI), and natural capital, connecting these to profit. Discussions focus on governance over markets, believing that ethics is the only way forward for a worthwhile solution. Deciding quantitative values for global impact at such a scale is excruciatingly difficult and forestalls other, more productive avenues of change. An example, the Accountability Institute6 in Melbourne is looking at how to expand double entry accounting into a quantified system of accountability. They look at a six column balance sheet, for money, social good, and environmental support. Their continuing stumbling block is not only what amounts to value social and ecological resources, but that, ultimately, this reduces them back into monetary figures which only reinforces the accounting method they want to avoid. The energy spent looking at solutions that subordinate sustainability is the same when arguing if climate change is real or not. The point is it doesn’t excuse compromising people or Earth. Not a very good return of investment for time spent, yet we keep doing it. Tim Kesser’s work ‘The Dark Side of Materialism’7 validates the see-saw argument between extrinsic status through money versus intrinsic reward creating sustainably. Trying to find sustainable solutions within a monetary model that doesn’t want one wastes a lot of time and energy. Why should enterprises that value community and resources sacrifice time and profit, and vice vera? Even the startup explosion, as creative as it appears, value themselves more for valuation and exit over any sustainable long-term affects that change the game. We accept that failure is a learning curve, but does it need to happen in such a competitive market that leads to so much wasted effort? Automated production and intelligence is also changing the longevity of the work cycle as we know it. Less people can find work, leading to less people being able to buy it, regardless of how efficiently it is made. Renewable energy is a great case in point. It is becoming increasingly cheap to create abundant electrical energy with the work of Elon Musk, with buildings not even needing to go on-grid for their energy needs, that the price is falling, but the exchange market we use does not allow these innovations to take hold. Instead, some governments are taxing those using solar energy to stop the regression of the fossil market.8 The fossil fuel industry can’t compete, instead corrupting governance, and therefore the environment, for money. These foundations are important to establish what purpose a currency has and the parameters to achieve them. With so many currencies with so many different nuances, more around glorifying currency as commodity over being a unit of exchange, it’s important to have a strong brief to work from. I do not believe nothing is of higher value than driving sustainable innovation, in the full meaning of the word, so lets look at what parameters a currency, or currencies should have to achieve that. Deciding basic parameters for worthwhile currencies is much simpler than currency designers make it out to be. Contemporary designers follow similar parameters to current fiat currency, as variations of this are familiar to people and easier to implement. Small steps of empowerment are simpler to accept, as and support the governing structure almost everyone is used to. The sad reality is they do not change very much, and limit their scope of acceptance. How many times have you heard that alternate currencies can only work in small communities and that we need different currencies for different communities if they are going to work. This focuses on communities, countries, political parties, like corporations. Not people. Behind all entities are people, so design a currency that empowers all people, and the rest follows accordingly. People mistake money being wealth itself. It isn’t. It is an exchange mechanism for wealth: this being all that we create. Therefore, the total amount of money that exists at any one time must reference what is actually created. As money is a service to exchange wealth, money itself should not have a cost to use. Consequently, any currency that has usury or demurrage is then less than suitable. Both also demand some kind of tax to be employed, supporting governance and oversight, assuming that these are required for larger community projects, and not cheating the system. History has shown how maligned and energy sapping centralised governance can be, especially around projects they support, irrespective of communities’ opinions. Direct democracy offers a lot more flexibility, but so few governments apply it, drawn more to the power of wealth in governance, at the expense of the people; again why the exchange model employed is so fundamentally important. That money has no cost does not mean there is no debt, but there is no cost on the debt. The world has and still is experiencing the consequences of usury exchange models. Inequality, debt dependence, abundant creation but scarce distribution. It is killing cultural diversity and sustainable innovation. It’s interesting that usury is now defined as ‘the lending or practice of lending money at an exorbitant interest6’ when historically it was any ‘interest paid for the use of money’. That implies that any other type of currency is not plausible. Most dutifully accept this, blaming the lack of moral code business has rather than the currency we use that business invariably uses to support itself. Demurrage has different issues. It is a great mechanism to value creating something and spending over saving, and can be made stable through the currency devaluation being paid to government or written off completely. It can also leverage full employment. The demurrage currency used in Wörgl, Austria, nearing the end of The Great Depression is an excellent example of the effect demurrage currencies have. While the world was screaming nonsensically for jobs, Mayor Michael Unterguggenberger empowered the community by creating ‘Certified Compensation Bills’9 as a means of fulfilling badly needed public works, and the support industries for that, or lose value in what they earned. It was so successful that other communities were about to set up they own before the Austrian National Bank outlawed it across the country. Crypto-currencies have exponentially grown the currency commodities market since the launch of Bitcoin (BTC) in 31 October 2008, with more than 700 in existence and counting. They are unique as effective alternate units of exchange, such as Ripple or Stellar, or just prized elite possessions, like 42Coin. Most are the epitome of the speculative currency market, potentially inviting everyone to create their own illusory value; an argument in itself for just having one currency. It is the parameters of that one currency to either support the people, or not, that make all the difference. Blockchains are being used to drive trustless transactions, but this is hardly human, let alone possible. Instead, it would be better to develop blockchains to promote more trustful exchanges, which value what is being exchanged with respect more than forced obligation. This in itself would resolve so many conflicts. Bitcoin is an ingenious phenomenon. Of course, in the short-term, it is considered a commodity currency like almost every other, but forecasting its long term game offers a different picture. What would happen to the velocity of money, and pricing, if everyone used Bitcoin? Bitcoin perpetually deflates because it has an absolute volume limit: 21 million. It is set to hit this at around 2140. Its diseconomy of scale, meaning using resources to mine Bitcoin becoming redundant, is expected to hit within the next decade. As this infection point approaches, there is less need for infrastructure, nor desire to charge a fee for mining, as it restricts the money supply. Either way, the volume of currency is depleting anyway as people use the blockchain for other purposes such as smart contracts. Even if Bitcoin was solely used for transactions, prices would perpetually fall to keep it in circulation. How it flows becomes dependent on population numbers. Even if the population reduces, differences in pricing narrow and stabilise to keep it in flow. Supporters of Bitcoin, who predominantly see it as a commodity, are looking at splitting the coin to increase its volume as it’s infrastructure is so big. Instead, we could look at the other message that it is trying to tell us: that the price mechanism can never value quality, and that all quantitative currencies are inherently redundant. What is so captivating is that Bitcoin hedged the commodities market to build infrastructure to run itself to the point of illustrating its irrelevance. I do not think this endgame escaped the designer, whoever that may be. It took Sardex10 six years of trial and error to discover that the best currency is one that has no costs. A mutual credit model founded in Sardinia, it is created only by work, or the promise and completion of work. It is loaned without interest, but is paid back in full. Most importantly, while it is valued 1:1 with the Euro, they are not exchangeable for it. The local government once asked for a line of credit but knowing that the government would never pay it back, refused. As a complementary currency, its primarily based on trading surplus, but is not limited to this and can work independently at a larger scale. People trade with the same diversity of pricing as that of the Euro, but as its acceptance increases across all exchanges, the pricing difference between services narrows to keep exchange, and your reputation, in flow, stabilising pricing, therefore the currency. While there is more of an emphasis in creating sustainably, what it may lack is the competitive game to really drive status in that. This is where fully qualitative currencies come into their own. We have and always will value reputation as a true, unlimited, resource, but have failed to find an exchange model to match that. Collaborative economy supporters who support reputation, such as Rachel Botsman in her book ‘Collaborative Consumption’ still connect sharing within the current money model we use now, as do many leveraging abundance, such as renowned motivators such as Anthony Robbins, Peter Diamandis, and John Demartini suggest. Clearly, it can’t, as money only has value in its scarcity. As a currency, reputation is unlimited, decentralised, has no cost, and based on all work produced. And the only exchange model that truly supports reputation in creating customised sustainable experiences, that are possibly automated, on demand, is gifting. Gifting games sustainability. It flips status from a destructive competitive money game totally over to a constructive collaborative qualitative one. There is still a competition of ideas, but status demands connecting these together, sharing knowledge, transparency, creating highest quality with minimal resources in the shortest time, excellence without limitations to price. Resources are not wasted making less than the best. That is sustainable abundance. Instead of searching for funding to buy people to fulfil projects, it is about finding those who see the value of what you wish to create, all choosing to give their time and resources to make it happen, and gifting it, as you will. As everyone is doing this, the ROI of gifting far surpasses that of money, and totally supports and expresses our intrinsic need to create, and be respected for that. Open source platforms like Wikipedia and GitHub are perfect examples of how empowering creating, and gifting it, can be. Timebanking Australia have also discovered that people earning time are gifting their time amounts to other people to further support causes they already would support without time currency. Gifting also totally supports a free market that requires little governance as there is no status compromising sustainability. Protecting ownership of resources becomes redundant, as does wasting resources for civil action. Colin Turner’s book Into the Open Economy holds that the majority of social, economic and environmental problems are caused by the limitations of the market system, and that honouring reputation is a far more inspiring way of awarding excellence. To fully realise the empowerment of gifting will take some time to get used to, but a stable free one offers an effective transition. Positive Money UK, founded by Ben Dyson, advocates what a non-fractional, usury-free currency can achieve. It proposes stabilising the economy, reduces inequality, can support qualitative change, and free-market choices, what SSE advocates want to achieve, as well as direct democracy over governing controls. What is not apparent is its incentive to gain status in gaming sustainably and any onslaught of automated production. Still it is a long way forward from where we are now, and does help refocus wealth towards more qualitative, collaborative frameworks, whatever those experiences turn out to be. We are not always rational and hang onto fears and beliefs that contain us for so long. Whatever the logic and benefits of changing to a qualitative exchange currency, what is most important is that people feel safe and empowered to change, supported to accept the challenges ahead, and not be held back by misconceptions, inevitability, or delusion, for change to happen. 3 http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042215/what-difference-between-capitalist-system-and-free-market-system.asp 4 www.theaccountabilityinstitute.net 5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGab38pKscw 6 http://www.dictionary.com/browse/usury 7 https://realcurrencies.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/the-power-of-demurrage-the-worgl-phenomenon/ 8 9 10 http://www.sardex.net/en/

[theqse-blog]

THE SELF-EMPOWERMENT OF A GIFTING ECONOMY

Do I need to explain where I started to get to this realisation? As much as the story can matter, I find that it can pull you out of the present, as you are your story at this very moment, and I will see it just by looking at you, if you feel the freedom to show me.

Consequently, I do not follow formulas of storytelling. I write as is, in the present, and you will see the freedom I write of today, or later, but either way, you will. Don’t trust me. Trust your heart, your sexual centre, your soul.

Very arrogant, hey? Not conventional at all. Time will tell if you think it’s worth it. Because my story is not important. This is about you.

The journey for change has been a long one. And despite the groundswell fighting for respect, for connection, for freedom of expression, something always seems to get in the way of this taking hold and running with it. In the meantime, we turn Earth to toxic dust, and us with it. We know Earth will continue to live past us, but do we need to try to kill it, and ourselves in the process? People think this is the cycle of life. There is always a cycle, but it doesn’t have to be engineered, based on perceived perceptions, as we do it now. If you think we have not, stay tuned.

The journeys of change are so interesting to watch, especially with how we identify with them. Activists gift for causes that, without doubt, must be brought to everyone’s attention, but one has to wonder why these situations come up in the first place. The TPP v free economy, CSG v renewables and water preservation, obsolescent manufacture v sustainable production on demand, animal cruelty v veganism, pharmaceuticals v organic food and natural therapies, race distinction v all being one. It goes on; fighting for change with paradigms that make it very difficult for change to happen.

There have been many, many, champions for change. And there are still more. We all point at human nature being the culprit it is, developing, and buying, evolution of the spirit of humanity. I have met some extraordinary people with an incredible zest for life. They are wonderful. We say to change the world, we need to change ourselves, but then, even in achieving this, we need the environment to affect, and evolve, the change, no? So when do we know when we have hit the crossroad of changing self before changing the environment? Changing self in a social microcosm is great, but do we think of scaling the empowerment of this, or stay in the bubble?

Change is taking a new course lately. Crowdfunded startups. B-corps. Social enterprise. Motivational speakers advocating personal change. Systems and pattern analysts in business and education looking at their specific sector of change, illustrated in a multitude of ways. Activists competing for support of huge disempowered communities. Philanthropy. Social impact bonds? What is that? Decentralised philanthropy?

Changes are happening, but within what bubble? Everyone seems to connect money with impact. Even the currency designers that have been doing this for years think the same thing. Of course, in the short term, this is correct. Sustainable infrastructure has a long way to go, but what infrastructure are we building and how fast are we getting there? Few venture capitalists in business go for social impact ideas for long-term profits.

And then we have beautiful sustainability. Of course, it is our holy grail, bur we dismember it into sectors, like scientists that kill synergy to understand parts. An architect asked me what type of sustainability am I talking about: ecologic or economic? Others say sustainability is not enough, we need to regenerate. Why separate the meaning? Would not regenerate imply sustainability anyway? Regenerating what? We reduce our want of change to discussions over wine and jokes, in places and events that are hardly encouraging of valuing sustainable empowerment.

If we take a step back, looking at the whole picture, and look at the drivers of systems as a whole, we can simplify networks of empowerment disempowerment. Acting on fear, or joy. Trusting, or trustless mechanisms. Of ourselves. Of others. It comes down to this, no?

And so the key is what drives disempowerment. What parameters deduce us to think we are enemies but try to be friends? Let’s move past race, or governance, or scarce resources. There are two main points of view that shape everything else:

1  how we perceive human nature

2  money

Did I miss anything?

I didn’t think so. If you disagree, think back from your opinion, and you will get to these 2 paradigms.

The 7 year old son of a friend of mine told his father: ‘If we did not have money, no one would be poor.’

The discussion about the human condition is enormous. Discussing this as a foundation will waste time, but as much as we have our own instincts of being, so are they also shaped by the environment. We are instinctive survival creatures. We adapt to the environment to do this, some better than ours, and we are usually recognised for this capacity, especially by the opposite sex. Masters propogate. What we question is what type of master. One of war? One of ownership? One of science? One of love?

Who we become depends on how empowered we are. On truly understanding self, we do not exercise leveraging conflict, but collaboration. We are discovering this change in this age, but are tools, like that of the hunter, are blunt in achieving the full scope, and deployment, of this realisation. Yes, we are both competitive and collaborative, but our environment dictates which is dominate. People believe we are the source of the evil in our world. Certainly our reactions are, but this is dependent on being empowered, or not.

To allay the discussion of human nature, and focus on the leverage point to empower it, I give you the child. Look at their first breaths of joy of discovery, wonder, vulnerability. Their love, and our connection to it, is absolute. But then things change. Schedules. Sleep. Support for everyone involved. I bet the newborn feels this, and they are already called to action to decide: am I overwhelmed with my need for support and safety and need to command it, or do I fully trust that the support is there for me with my trust? I believe that the babies who become adults that never forget their trust are the ones we hold in highest esteem. The self-realisers. Amazing people. I love them already.

Navigating one’s trust can be daunting. So many curve balls. Some incidental, some contrived by those weaker or stronger than you, either destroying, or cultivating.

So what drives the decisions that people make early, or late, in giving up and valuing war, or holding onto their integrity, trust, honesty? See? There it is. Human nature.

Please allow me to present this simply to you: scarcity. Before intelligence, we lived in scarcity. No doubt. However, are we still this inept? Many want you to think so. Time is scarce, resources are scarce, and so we work without love for the things we do. And told this is life.

Until now! Yes! We are in abundance! Scarcity is a perception! Look at all we have! Be a part of this today! Let the money come to you and love every moment of your life. Buy my book, listen to my workshop, be empowered.

Systems.

And who is empowered? Is empowerment just you? Your peers? Your community? Or Earth?

I’ve noticed how abundance is being sold: feel it in your heart, let the money come, watch the film, let me teach you abundance as I know it. Over and over. Have you noticed that?

All to have you embrace money.

Yes, we have used it for generations, civilisations, but based on what paradigm? That human nature is untrustworthy? That we need a quantified exchange model to get the based deal, as resources are scarce?

There are many ways to measure value, to measure wealth. What is important are the parameter to achieve. Throughout history, in cultures after dominion, wealth is measured by power over others. We acquiesce, trusting this is normal, hoping to find the strength and acceptance to be great. This becomes political, not creative. And as all political-centric civilisations go, they grow, and die. We blame the greed of human nature, we blame scarcity, but really, it is our trusting the perceptions of those that want to disempower us, in the guise of empowerment. Because trust is human nature.

We think that maturity is learning to be wary, of knowing the difference of those that empower and not, but we always envy those that keep the child in themselves, who invite trust and joy in their lives? This is always beautiful. Does this have to be an exception instead or normal?

Let me show you how to do this, and I gift it to you, because to achieve this is priceless.

Why do we give our lives, our creating experiences a price? If creating sustainable experiences is abundant, why do we reduce this to a scarce parameter? We can design in lots of ways, but the ultimate realisation is it will never, ever, measure out unlimited capacity to create.

There are many people who make a living in designing new currencies to empower connection, yet they limit the parameters for their designs. Like mainstream currencies, there is always a cost somewhere. There is always the need for administration. There is the perpetual need for learning, always designing currencies in a new way, exploring, continually making exchange complex between communities. All this does is perpetuate the need for icons. Fuck icons. Fuck people who think you need to be empowered because of them. They become stars in the hope of building community, but always based on derivatives of fear. We always look for icons outside of ourselves, instead of seeing we our all icons of creation. There are many names I could mention that keep our progression of freedom small, but like all leaders externalising power, they limit themselves.

People call money energy. A measure of wealth. It is neither. It is a medium to exchange energy, wealth. Money’s existence is dependent on our creativity, not dependent on it. This being the case, there should be NO cost to money. None. That people own money to distribute is a travesty to freedom. This disempowers everyone except financiers, and ultimately it disempowers them, too, as they are totally in service to sustaining money over connecting to people authentically, openly, honestly. They can own money all they want, but they build towers of fear that continually grow. Are they at peace? No. Is that life? Of course not.

What type of currency values all our lives, and all of Earth, while enriching and cultivating sustainable innovation? Reputation. This is abundant, like creativity is. It is what we do with scarce resources and time that is important, and this is limitless. People think reputation is attached to money. They are wrong. They are playing the limited game of reputation as servant to masters who mine your value, not empower it.

I could talk about currencies and credit institutions like micro banking that are designed badly, but the bottom line is that any that incur debt or depreciate value the currency itself, not what it is for: creating sustainable excellence. They are based on the weakest link in creation: the people that do nothing. Instead, currencies should be based on the strongest creators, as they are vastly more numerous, as it is the nature of humanity to collaborate, not compete, to make the experiences of life so valuable.

There are only 2 currencies that show the true nature of money: Sardex and Bitcoin. Both are fascinating for how one overtly, and the other covertly, realise that pricing quality is meaningless.

Sardex is the closest transition exchange that values creativity. It is based on all wealth created by real work, cannot be bought by any other currencies, is loaned freely, and all exchanges balance to zero. There are fees to run the exchange, based on the national currency, as it is intended to work complementary to that. It requires a huge amount of time to administer, and while it is based on trust, not the trustless nature that people implementing blockchains as the new derivative of currency exchange, there are those that do take advantage of the credit line which they must take legal action to claim back. it is the nature of quantifying the creation of wealth that makes this happen, which also leads to the danger of it being controlled. As an example, the Italian government loved the currency and asked for a line of credit. It was refused. Of course the government missed the point of Sardex. If the government creates nothing in the Sardex world, it earns nothing. A true wake up call for a government.

But far more interesting is Bitcoin. Not as a solution, but illustrating that no scarce quantitative currency is a solution for any exchange, only abundant qualitative ones. Bitcoin is astonishing because it leverages the profit-centric motivation of people to build its infrastructure, surreptitiously building it’s foundation as it becomes harder to make profit, disempowering owners of the infrastructure to charge fees in an effort to keep BTC circulating as prices deflate, breaking the price mechanism, inevitably losing the option of profit in charging fees/mining coin. There is a choice to let it go and move to inflationary currencies, or realise the obvious: that price is meaningless as a measure of quality, let alone sustainable quality.

Analysing the endgame of a currencies is easy: if everyone is their own currency, or everyone uses one currency. Everything else is a game between currencies, which achieves nothing. With inflationary currencies, distributed scarcely but with volume increasing, it’s a slow race to get more before it breaks. This is the nature of economic cycles, and they are designed that way, increasing inequality, promoting what is ultimately slavery. With bells on. When currencies are held back from being distributed, they become deflationary, and as prices do not change, who gets what currency is left are momentary winners, but have less to buy.

Either way, the bank wins.

Bitcoin handles this quite differently. Whoever ultimately owns the BTC mining infrastructure is buying a currency that is totally decreasing in volume. The algorithm cannot make more than it’s limited 21 million coins. People play with derivatives, but this is fractional lending, which, if everyone used Bitcoin, can’t be supported. To keep the currency floating, its better not to change fees on mining coin, but it will eventually crash at the point of inflexion when there it becomes uneconomical to mine the coin for the energy needed to do it.

Now most people would pick different currencies, with different parameters, to sustain the idea of profit through money. The games we play to do this are incredible. But what does it change? We build further inequality, even for ourselves, making everything a commodity that has a price. It is the most warped sense of wealth I have ever seen perpetuating itself. Totally disconnected, trustless, inhuman. And unsustainable.

Did it empower those that live in horror of war, of waste, of loss? No. We play games with ourselves while the people that really support us: farmers and sustainable innovators, live at the bottom of the supply chain, blinded into thinking wealth is becoming a quantifiable bank.

When a currency becomes stable and free, it has a balance, but it doesn’t drive sustainable creation. Reputation, status, has no price. Everything becomes about how sustainably an experience is created, and we are invited to realise this, and ourselves, in the most trusting, supported way possible. This is priceless. No exchange model can value that, except gifting.

On understanding we are all priceless vessels of creating new experiences to share, we exchange the same way. We all become, by default, collaborative, supportive, sustainable creators. Our reputation demands that we support others, that competitors collaborate sharing resources, creating the same thing, but differently. We build diversity together. Our creative profiles become transparent, and we want this to be so. Resources of war become resources for sustainable value. All on demand. It is not about having, but what we do with what we feel we need for us to create with.

And who decides what is created? We all do. We are all different. And so we design systems that manufacture experiences differently, to be recycled into a new way as innovation evolves. Only the best ideas that present highest quality with minimal resources in the shortest time are made. Quality is not just about the product, but how the product is made, that everything is in synergy creating value that means something, be it material or a word of inspiration. We serve ourselves and others, together. There is no higher entity than ourselves, and so we all become peers. Connecting, understanding, discovering.

Dichotomies of self or other are over. These arguments are based on fear. Being empowered together is a beginning, not the end. It’s time to evolve from this point, from joy. People who think that fear is always dominant want to own you forever. They are wrong.

Understand fully: no one is greater than you, than me, than Earth. Get used to it.

:)

[theqse-blog]

Where humanity stops asking permission. The New Earth Oracle emerges as an interactive digital platform for the dissemination of knowledge & wisdom committed to those navigating between the old-world and the new-earth.

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The edited version of the talk I gave: The Greatest Gift. Why money builds scarcity, and why we need to surpass quantitative exchange to achieve...

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People are the Real Money

People really are the real money. Giving us a price is stupid. An old presentation I made in 2014, but the concepts are still concise and relevant. :)

People really are the real money. Giving us a price is stupid.

An old presentation I made in 2014, but the concepts are still concise and relevant. :)

[theqse-blog]

IF THE WORLD CHOSE BITCOIN AS ITS ONLY MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE ...

How many people are currently using Bitcoin?

How many people do you want to see use Bitcoin?

No reason for people to buy in: low cost, decentralised, transparent.

We are all looking at how to increase the market for using Bitcoin, but are you expecting a tipping point and you would want to limit its use?

Are we valuing Bitcoin as a commodity itself, relative to other currencies, or are we really looking at Bitcoin as a fully fledged global currency? Is Bitcoin a better driver for creating quality goods and services, applying sustainable values, offering a different game to play?

Many people are making other crypto-currencies, different parameters, etc.Does making new currencies, decentralised or not, change the game of what banks are doing now? Lets be honest, no one should own currency. It doesn’t create anything, it is only a measure of value. Bitcoin goes a long way forward in establishing a low cost of exchange, whether people compete within Bitcoin or between other crypto-currencies. Fair enough. Without them, without you, there is no exchange mechanism viable.

I question if we need other crypto-currencies. It is a dream of any banker to have one global currency they control, so what makes Bitcoin viable to be one global currency while no current central bank model could ever work.

Central banks want to own money, creating nothing. This is what is happening now.

Bitcoin is a total decentralised one, open to all people, either creating coin from mining, or creating goods to be paid in Bitcoin.

But, unlike banks who are printing or creating money left right and centre to build debt and own your ass, Bitcoin has a limit. 21 million coins. And then what happens? No more need for mining. Minimal, if any fees, for accounting transfers of Bitcoin. 21 million coins for the world’s global transactions.

Has anyone noticed how the profile of Bitcoin mining actually follows resource mining? Easiest references would be gold or oil. These all have limitations, harder to mine for less, until there isn’t any more, no matter how hard you try. the difference is you know when you reach the end of Bitcoin. So, what do we do: we make new crypto-currencies, different parameters, sector focused, etc. Did we change anything? All we would have done, all we are doing, are focusing on the money, not what money buys. Boring. If no one created anything to buy, what would be the point of creating money? Money makers are not the masters, they are the servants to people that make things we really want t for our security of life. We only think money makers are masters because, for sure, someone is going to make something. That is a certainty, but don;t take it for granted.

So, making different currencies, crypto or otherwise, is meaningless. It takes away the focus of who is really creating what, I want the security of a money model to buy things for my security of life, not gamble with the one resource that affords me that exchange.

There is no reason not to think EVERY PERSON ON EARTH would want to use Bitcoin, for the same reasons many of you are in it now. So what happens when 21 million coins covers every transaction every day?

Any ideas? Anyone?

The answer? Prices fall. There are more people buying different things from different people. Not just anything. The best of their kind. You will, too, be creating the best of what you do t get that coin from others. There will be no other choice. More people, offering the best, for less.

And then what? Anyone? What do you think is going to happen? Abundant quality for next to nothing. What would you do? Anyone?

Why use any transaction model? You are getting the best for nothing. Where is your insecurity to build incentive to do anything, when we are all creators and want to create?

It won’t be about the coin anymore, it will be about who you want to give your time to, who is worth your time to give. No doubt, they will be the best, or are going to be. Like it has always been, really, but no longer imprisoned by a currency, or a price.

Money is not a driver for creation. You are. It is part of you. You can play a game of fear, or you can play the game of trust. It’s up to you. The amazing beauty of Bitcoin is, it is doing it for you. It is building us out of the resource wasting, price-limited world into a resource efficient one, built solely on reputation. In essence, Bitcoin is transparently showing you that it is the reputation of a creator you are exchange with that matters. And this has no price.

Thank you.

[theqse-blog]

The Bitcoin Endgame @ Hackers Congress Paralelní Polis - 12/10/2014, Praha CZ

This is the latest videocast to be presented at the Hackers Congress in Prague 12/10/14 @ 1100 CEST (Sydney 12/10/14 @ 2000 AEDT). I think I have been very g...

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The Inevitable Evolution Towards A Gifting Economy @ DIF2015 - 12/11/2015

From DIF 2015: 'In this session, Frederick Malouf will explain why money and sustainability do not go together, why money itself will become a redundant mean...

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Change Money, Change the World @ Sydney Greenups - 6/10/2015

For those that could not make it, here is the edited podcast of the presentation on Theqse I made at Sydney Greenups. The first 20min is edited, but the Q&A ...

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THE LOGICAL POWER AND SECURITY OF A FREE GIFTING ECONOMY

"Money is a social design that then designs the social. Therefore if we work in currency innovation we need to think about what kinds of behaviours we want to support and then design mechanisms for that into the currency system.”

This says it all. What kind of measure values what human nature is all about? Are we lazy people interested in owning the creativity of others to survive, or is this a figment of the system we are in? Or are we naturally creative sharing beings, and are stuck in a system where we can’t express this? I hope you read everything. I swear it will make sense.

THE ISSUE ... ... only touched lightly on is how gifting can leverage status in a different way, rather than basing exchange on various methods based on a premise that we do not want to work. We do, but are not able to do things we want, which is a big limitation on quantified measures of exchange. Further, if we are valued for what we create, we will make as much as necessary, no more or less, so the idea of scarcity is again a figment of quantified measures of currency. Time and resources are scarce, but what we can create is limitless, especially if we focus on sustainability as a fundamental foundation of status. Money in quantified forms encourages hoarding. Demurrage is useful only in growing economies, not sustainable ones, as the needs to build something slows down to only building innovations that last longer, and use less resources and time, leaving more time to experience, which is a choice, not a requisite for a money supply. I find that we are concentrating solely on some belief that we need a quantified unit of measure to get anything done. Do we? I don’t think so. A status measure? Sure. Money? No. And the most difficult thing no quantified measure of exchange will give you is education to discover what you are best at creating. This, as mentioned, is what the problem is with measuring people’s capacity with time. I’ve worked on a model where education is peer focused, and so status for educating is shown on a time clock, but there is no point to exchange it. Further, time doesn’t measure how good the education is. Only reviews will do that, so time becomes redundant. Lastly, money and sustainability do not go together. It is either one or the other. Perhaps are free, fixed volume currency can work, but it opens the opportunity to corrupt the system, becoming our weakest link of trade. Money disconnects our association from people, not respect it. I believe every civilisation before us has failed because of the political dogma, and monetary foundation, owning creativity, not leveraging it. It has taken a long time to get here on such a global scale. Doing it again will be easier the next time if we still value quantity over quality. Any currency has to be human-centric, based on offering status by creating in the most sustainable way possible. I am going to comment on a few things in the lecture, and then come up with my argument for why a gifting economy is feasible, scalable, and, I believe, inevitable.

BANGLAPESA In essence, what was created was simply increasing the volume of money available to people. which allowed them to buy more things, which means less waste. So, despite the technical details of the currency itself, in the context of how it was delivered I do not see much difference than a bank increasing the money supply. The significant difference is it can’t be taken away by anyone, and yes, it can stabilise pricing, but then how do people weigh the differences between what they create to each other? They have based it on the shilling, which doesn’t change much, or provide the development of a different price mechanism to take hold if there was no more money created. This leads to ...

BITCOIN AND OTHER CrCs As centralised as it becomes because of the higher work needed to validate transactions, there is no incentive to, because taking money out of the system limits exchange, and the engine that runs validating transactions becomes virtually maintenance-free. Even the energy to run it can be on solar or whatever which makes free to run the server. So, let’s say the world begins using one currency (BTC) that costs as much as the person/people who owns and runs the best server to live how they want. Let’s say that’s me. What on earth would be my gain if I take money out of the system and have you struggling for prices, especially since I there are a limit, and I have a hoard of BTC to spend? I am going to look pretty stupid, and be ostracised, because even if prices fall for your survival, there is no need for you to have me as a customer. You would take advantage of the currency and just deal with it, and realise that your value is more on creating something that people want, not the price for it. It could be legislated that you have to use BTC, but how is that going to work if you all jump ship and use a more democratic currency, or forget currency altogether and start looking at your sustainable quality as a value in itself, not the price for it? What a total waste of energy? Better to incentivise you to stay in BTC, and I can get what I want at the natural prices things will become by the natural volume limit of the currency. In other words, if we didn’t have idiotic govts increasing and decreasing the money supply, we’d all be pretty stable exchanging at certain prices, and just keep creating quality, irrespective of price. Right? Because that’s your nature. You want to be known for being a good person that gives the best to people. What has money got to do with that? This argument for BTC is the same for any crypto, as, even if they are like Stellar or Ripple that increase volume available by 1% a year, it just forestalls the obvious: that the price on your quality is limiting, and does not diversify cultures, the latter being natural evolution.

MULTIPLE COMPLEMENTARY/ALTERNATE CURRENCIES (CoCs/ACs) AND WHY THEY HAVE NOT TAKEN HOLD Paul Grigon’s voucher based on abundant creation is really interesting. The value is solely based on your energy creating something. You do nothing, you have no vouchers, and vice versa. It could even be a measure of status of how many vouchers you have in circulation that show your value. I do not think that will work as how do you measure the voucher of someone making a plane to the other making bread? We can say that the plane would be made with a different currency model, but like the vouchers can become complicated in themselves to measure against each other, using project focused currencies just wastes energy quantifying energy.

SO, why, with so many models out there not taken hold to evolve our current debt model? Firstly, we are making people stupid so they think debt money is the only option. We also have employ more enforcing administration, like police and govt processing departments, who think they are doing something for their community, and getting off on it in the process, e.g. “Man, this job makes me feel so important, because I can do to others what my parents used to do me, and/or they can be proud of me.” Etc. Very simplified, but just look at how inhuman these people are becoming, and why they have the job ... because they trust govt to feed them, while keeping them stupid. See, our native instinct is to trust, not fear.

But I think the biggest destroyer of CoCs/ACs is ego. We have a personal interest to gain status through the creation of and exchange model that we can be known for, and think this is a currency for validation. How many books are written by so many people that offer change, but change so little? And you have to buy the book! At what price? This is so funny. And so we keep going through loops for change, not of change. How long have we been doing that? And in the meantime, we accept using a currency that chokes us, because authorities say so. So we buy the book to help us alleviate our pain, and so it goes. so we stay perpetually disconnected, hoping for an icon to save us, forgetting we are our own icon, and want others to be the same. That is far more connected than it sounds because we are not the same icons.

So, I propose gifting. I can’t own it, can’t tell people what to make, can’t tell them to believe in me, but I can tell them to believe in themselves, and that no one own’s this except them. This can make me the most humble person on earth, or the most conceited egocentric person you could ever meet. I’d go with the latter, but I want you to be the same, because only then I can have a friend I can create with.

The argument to make quantitative currencies is based on a maligned concept of what human nature is. If we understand that human nature is a status animal wanting to survive, and that we want to trust and learn from each other, what would be the best measure of exchange that facilitates this in the most sustainable way possible ... ?

ZEITGEIST AND UBUNTU
The arguments for either are compelling but I think the results are not human-nature focussed. Zeitgeist thinks that 5% of the human race will spend time doing what the 95% want, giving nothing, living in processed homes doing the same thing. That’s not human, local, or culture centric. We will become transparent fluff balls. Current money hides this very well, supported being fluff balls that can’t do anything, so they feel content staying this way. Zeitgeist brings this out in the open, taking away any differentiation for status if we are not creators, so it will breed some bad things.

Outside of the mystical aspects of Tellinger’s argument, he focuses on at least 3-hours day for the community, and at least 3-hours a week on your own creations. Sounds like Google. Creators/innovators are obsessed with creations, to the time will never hold fast, while working for the community may lead to things you have no interest in. Better to leave that stuff to people that do, no? What people create in their own time will be, more often than not, of value to the community anyway, so why make the distinction? Further, it still establishes political rule, limiting diversified creativity. Any exchange model must promote owning your creativity, at all times. Anything else is a power-trip.

THE GIFTING MECHANISM IN A FREE ECONOMY AND HOW TO GET THERE I am not advocating to gift in good faith alone, but that you are in communities that value creation, seed themselves in knowledge, and that, no matter what capacity you give, that is not just of value to the community, but that it has value to you to want to create and give it. That it is your best. I am not presenting this in a woo-woo way, because that doesn’t interest me. My analysis is purely based on logic. I am happy to leave the spirituality to others; better yet, yourself, because how to live for joy, not fear, is why I am doing this. There is no governing body telling you want is most necessary to create. It is dependent on your locality and your needs. Of course, different communities will be better at creating different things, but they will be known for how sustainably they can do that, so why compete to do it if they are better at it? And they are happy to give it, because you are giving your creations, too, to anyone that wants them, on demand. Highest quality, minimal resources, shortest time. People will gravitate to projects that achieve that best, in interests of their choice. The best thing about gifting is it empowers EVERYONE to create. It takes away political control of developing counties, as they are now free to build what they want for themselves, and if it has value for us, they can give it. And we can help them to get there, freely, especially since we have taken so much away from them.

GETTING THERE is a far simpler concept than money models will ever be. The objective of any business is to make profit by building a reputation for creating value. The current mechanism to do that is get money to create lowest quality at highest price, and being as unsustainable as possible. The larger you are, the better you can do that. Why are the banks, who create nothing the largest industry, and govt the second biggest? Incomprehensible. I’ll call this community the FREE COMMUNITY (FC). This is as big and as decentralised as you want, as it is not just one community in one place, but many communities in different places. 1
Begin my approaching industry with an offer for free labour, interested in their industry, to transform it into a sustainable powerhouse of production: producing only on demand, reducing costs of production, needing the banks less, empowering their reputation as sustainable quality creators, getting other things in the FC for free, and freeing their time to do things they could not normally do. In return, they will give their surplus to the FC. As costs drop, and the need to produce reduces as it becomes more sustainable, the need for loans reduce, as well as price to sustain paying them back. This evolution continues to the point where there are no costs of production that require money, everything produced is free solely for the FC, and everyone has had a great time creating and learning something new and valuable for themselves and others. In the process, the plant need no longer be ‘owned’ by anyone, except the people who are interested in producing what it makes.

2
The factory has its labour for free, but what about resources? No problem. In the same way, the resource suppliers are offered the same proposal, and so it goes down the line to the real resource creators: farmers and miners. Farmers will have all the labour they need to produce high yields using permaculture methods, supporting labour with what they need while they are there in the most respectful and sustainable way possible. Miners will mine resources that have the capacity to be used over and over as innovation improves. Many miners might even become waste collectors as innovations improve to use this waste in productive ways. If we have waste at all.

3
These cycles continue until everyone is using this time to the most effective way possible, as they see fit. Time producing reduces. Time experiencing and creating increases. All people are supported in education and to experience more. And there is a lot of down time to just be present. As we spend so much time, talent, and energy with media selling useless crap to us, there are certainly innovative people that can present the idea to people, but then, unlike current models where you are forced to sell something that has no meaning for you, the seed is here to see how much meaning the FC gives you, and that you will gain so much more for yourself, and others, using it, than money will ever give you.

4
This is not a legislated model, but designed on total free choice. If you are thinking go grading people to where they fit in this, you are missing the point. This is what money does. It is their choice, not yours. Encourage people to be, and they will give so much more back. Feeding them proper food so they can think as real people is a good start to do that. You are also not dependent on money to build projects, but people. Offer what the advantages for people to get invoked, and they will come. You will get many more people than money will ever buy you. You get them for free, like everything else you are getting, and you give for free. Think of the ROI on that! This also naturally builds status through sustainability, without compromise. All resources will flow to the most sustainable projects that give the best to most people. It also creates, and offers, a wider range of choices, or experimenting with new ideas, tastes, experiences, based on sustainable foundations. Is there anything this lacks for what we want? I do not believe so.

5
We also reuse the need for inequality, in all its forms, as a status driver. Owning/having becomes redundant to what you do with what you own/have. Is it really useful to you to own, or lend and return for a better model? Resources used for demarcating become resources for sharing. All the differences we perceive to make a difference in belonging fall away, becoming what we have in common that identifies communities. War? Racism? Land ownership? What for? What political mechanism could exist to warrant that, when gifting sustainable creation is the mechanism for enriching lives? It is impossible.

CONCLUSION We always value creation, so why give it a price? We can say that money empowers, but what type of money? Does it need to be quantitative, or can it be qualitative, as simple as saying: “You’re the best!”. If you are the only person gifting, that’s to be taken advantage of, but if EVERYONE’S status is measured this way, it’s a disadvantage to not create anything, especially if education is free and people are supporting you with their specialities. Living life is not just about taking, because you need to be valued, and that is not going to happen in a gifting world if you do not create, and if there is no price mechanism, you know it is all about giving that, and being the best at it, if it interests you so much. So there is ample opportunity to learn what you like, make it the best, leverage others to make it better, and keep mooing to new interests. That’s experiencing life.

I think we are really missing the point of why we are creating quantitative currencies. This is based on a perception of what human nature is like, especially since there is so many of us on earth. Even saying curbing population growth is a problem misses the point, because it was our social models that got us here. As people say, educated people breed the least, so maybe we should build educational institutions to regulate economies, not money models that focus on exchange, not what we are exchanging.

Money is not a priority to exchange wealth. What you will to create is. Everything must serve this objective, and why people to be more sustainable doing it. There is no status doing anything else. I think the biggest fear is what will happen if we are no longer fuelled by it to do anything. I believe our story really begins when we pass that point. It is not a stagnant being, but evolving with new parameters, and resolving other problems as they come, but not being lead the fear of them. Going back full circle, we shape our societies by the monetary system we choose to believe in. I think every quantified system creates fear. Pass this point, and there will be no limits to what is possible, if you find meaning to do it.

REFERENCES Please excuse the brevity. I have been reading, listening, and watching so many things over the last few years to get to this point, I hope you do not mind my listing the people I have researched, as they are the sources of information. What they produce is the vehicle for that, and they have so much stuff online. This MOOC and their creators Jem Bendell and Matthew Slater, with support from Leander Alan Weisman
Peter Joseph
Paul Grigon Bernard Lietaer Thomas Greco Riane Eisler Charles Eisenstein Dan Pink Ellen Brown
Michael Tellinger
Margaret Jeffries and Deidre Kent Tim Jenkin
Rudolf Steiner and many more ...

[theqse-blog]

THE FALLACY OF MONEY - SHIFTING TO A QUALITATIVE STATUS ECONOMY

The 7 year old son of a friend of mine told his father: ‘If we did not have money, no one would be poor.’

The history of money, and why we think we need it, has changed tribes and civilisations the world over. I believe it is the core leverage point for the rise, and fall, of all societies. While it is an interesting measure to use for exchange, perhaps it is time to understand why we think we need it, and if there is a way around using it that benefits all of us.

Money is born from scarcity. Time and resources are scarce, but is what we create for trade also scarce? Almost all economies base the value of creation to a scarce unit of measure. In kind, we limit creativity for the highest gain through creating a scarce commodity. This is quite amusing since money itself creates nothing, yet so many people make a living exchanging it, much more than what is actually made to buy.

How did our idea of wealth become so distorted? If everyone decided not to do anything tomorrow, to live the day would be meaningless. So would money. Of course, we all know that we could not live a day without someone doing something, even nothing (which still requires something). The people that own money know this, which is why those that own the vehicle of money know they own you. Because we believe they are giving a service to warrant people creating something of value, they also provide it at a cost. This is a fundamental problem of money.

Money is not wealth, therefore it should have no cost. It is a servant to the wealth you and all people create, not the master. However, if money was free, and still limited, would it still have any value for exchange? If it was abundant, such as shells, would it work at all?

There is a poignant dis-association that money breeds: that we are alone creating, and cannot trust that others will create for our benefit, to make life better. Valuing money on resources like gold, energy, even shells, warps the idea of what is wealth. If money is to be based on anything, then it has to be based on EVERYTHING we create, not a part of it (energy) or something that looks shiny that everyone would like to have (gold). Models have been designed that accommodates this, based around a marketplace, where every creator issues what becomes technically their own currency. Still, some type of relationship between what goods are valued for between each other, but the cost of exchanging is very stable, and the volume of money in the market rising and falling as goods and services available rise and fall.

What concerns me is that the seed for dis-associating what wealth really is could happen again, if it drives sustainability. Also, having all these vouchers can be kind of messy, again inviting changing the relative values of exchange.

Enter the new world of crypto-currencies (CCs). Yes, they are digital, as any bank will tell you to make you think current money is the same as CCs, but they are vastly different. It offers the opportunity for anyone to make a currency, just like the mainstream model, but it has no reference to what is created. Currency is created out of nothing, like the banks do now, but when everyone does it, free- market forces come into play. What will incentivise people to use your currency over another? The natural consequence will be that it will be free to use.

Bitcoin is achieving something like this in a very ingenious way, capitalising on competitive currency markets, and the commodity of money, for people to build the infrastructure for it to grow. This is founded on validating transactions, the reward being a fee paid in Bitcoin. As the popularity to use it grows, the difficulty to validate transactions centres on fewer and fewer people, but there is little incentive to take money out of the market, as this limits people’s will to create, so the desire, and need, to charge a fee for validating transactions reduces, leaving the infrastructure to do what it does, with the most minimal to no fees needed to be charged.

So what would happen if everyone just used Bitcoin, and it reaches its limit of 21 million coins? Prices start to deflate as the price mechanism, that being what is in higher demand costs more, will fail. This is an evolutionary cycle. Pricing will either stabilise or fall, but as Bitcoin can be used for much more than exchange, the number of coins available will always fall, even with no fees being charged. Other CCs are looking at how to resolve this, to keep currency decentralised, to find ways to incorporate existing national currencies into the fold so work together (complementary currencies), or changing the design so that price always has value. This begs the question, however: do we need currency at all? It isn’t wealth, yet we waste so many resources to make it exist. So why do we think we need it?

I think this comes down to an immense misunderstanding of human nature. We do not need incentives to create. It is how we manifest identity, show ourselves apart. We value the quality of people. We have always done this. Why do we admire those that give freely, yet build an exchange model that takes advantage of their gift, giving them as little as possible, because you need the money more than they do? Why are so many companies now trying to look good by giving part of their profit to help others, when it is their actions that put people in such a position in the first place?

Something needs to shift. To what, and how?

Enter the qualitative, free-market, economy. I call it Theqse, The Quality Status Economy. Its objective is to leverage our native need to create, in the most sustainable way possible, and be acknowledged for it. Collaborative economics is not new; there are many models that fit collaboration inside our competitive economic model, but scaling it to a fully global model that competes with competitive money economy is.

The model is project-based, establishing how what is created achieves highest quality, with minimal resources, in the shortest time. Production will be based solely on-demand, and people will support you if your project is of persona interest to them to want to participate. They give their time and resources for free, as will projects give their results for free. Your return on investment is reputation in creating such a great sustainable idea, and you can get everything you want, need, desire, for free.

There are mechanisms to incentivise shifting over, and this happens over time, of course, but the foundation of all proposals is whether people prefer limit their creation through debt, or be free to explore as many options created and experience as much as you can.

It comes down to trusting people. Completely. Do we need to drive creation though fear-based mechanisms for our security, at their expense, or can we show our value a better way, by allowing people to create as much as we want to? It may sound lofty, but all that is presented is changing the parameters of status. Money is all about having. Quality is all about creating, doing, being. Of all the people I speak to, they all love the idea, but do not trust that others would want or have the will to do the same thing. This only proves that the ones who will resist will see they have no other choice but to follow the change, as their security will be based on you're creating, and the opportunity to create of their free will, too. And being fully supported to do so.

The choice is yours. There are many people looking at collaborative economic models. I can only suggest that so long as they are apolitical, a-spiritual, and are creative/people-centric, they are going in the right direction.

I hope you like it. :)

[theqse-blog]

BEGINNING THE EVOLUTION OF CROWDFINDING

https://www.facebook.com/theqse/videos/10153120044280817/