Open money

[theknightwhosaysni-NI]

I just stumbled upon an interesting project and I want to share it with you guys.
It's called open money.

Let's make a comparison with the medias to understand the thing :
20 years ago, there were only a few big medias, more or less controlled by the same big corporations.
Nowadays, with blogging and web 2.0, there are millions of different medias. It's a revolution in how the information is created. Each person is a potential creator of information.

The open money project wants to do the same with money. Each community should be able to use the open money technology to create their own currency.

The emission of money would not be excusively controlled by those who control it nowadays.

Here's a quote from an official website

Open money [is] a meta-currency system, not just a new single kind of money. It enables the creation of many new types of money. It puts currency creation directly in the hands of communities so that they can create wealth-acknowledgment systems for tracking all types of wealth--tradable, measurable, and acknowledgeable--and so that they can tailor the tracking to fit their precise needs.
Open money works by providing a unified platform for the interchange of all these different kinds of wealth acknowledgment, just the same way that the Internet provides a unified platform for the interchange of all kinds of information. Just as the great shift of the Internet was in not specifying what kind of data can flow across it (unlike the phone network), the great shift of open money lies in not dictating which new form of wealth-acknowledgment people should use. Instead it provides the basic building blocks for communities to create new types of wealth-acknowledgment systems themselves.

A better explanation is on this webpage.

I'd never heard of that before today but I find this idea quite fascinating.
I'm not sure to what extent it could work but I like the idea and the intention.

[LarryC]

I will have to look into this more, but I like the general idea. I think we definitely need some new ideas in the realm of economics. Right now, money is controlled by highly centralized institutions. At the same time, money only has value in so far as people believe it does. It's really a thoughtform. So we all, at least theoretically, have the power to create any currency we choose.

[Peek]

I think we had that before:
first there was Deutsch Mark, Florin, Peseta, Franc, Gulden and so on, now there is Euro.
Finally this will happen if you 'privatize' making money.

[Ponce]

You are not allowed to print money but yes to tokens, there are a few communities that are using tokens among themselves and are doing really good because it keeps the money in place.

[Brutha]

Global Guerrillas: THE RESILIENT COMMUNITY: SCRIP
Having local currencies is a way to get more people to buy local because it makes it more complicated to buy something in another currency.

Finally this will happen if you 'privatize' making money.

Local communities are usually also have democratic institutions, so they aren't directly private.