SIMPLICITY OF CURRENCY DESIGN AND ITS IMPACT FOR A SUSTAINABLE EMPOWERED FUTURE

CURRENCY AS WE KNOW IT
There is a huge amount of movement in the currency space at the moment, particularly with the invention of Bitcoin that has set off a mass of commodity currencies with little understanding of the the macro effects of this. Conversely, alternate and complementary currency experiments have occurred in modern economics since the Federal Reserve Bank was created in 1913, most notably the demurrage currency in Wörgl during the Great Depression and the time currency LETS since the 1970s, but the parameters in these designs have been limited to particular crisis situations or still using the same parameters as usury currency but in a different way, limiting the empowerment a currency can actually have.

Given the current economic model we are in, solutions are invariably limited to keeping currency complex, forsaking empowerment for the commodity, limiting potential to drive sustainability as a new status measure, especially at scale. It is assumed that money has to be a commodity and debt attached to have value, made still more relevant by the redefinition of usury from any debt attached to borrowing money to an exorbitant cost on it, alluding to the poor practice of loan sharks, but its OK for banks to charge a cost.

As we do with the energy invested in many infrastructure projects, we forget the cost it takes to run the money motor, let alone the reasons we think we need it. Money is incredibly energy sapping on time, resources, and the personal investment in believing in it as a necessary solution for society, as limited as it is. That fear-based belief affects all actions after it, perpetuating scarcity, marketing the need for defence, fossil energy, ownership and dominion. Counter-arguments connect money with abundance, and selling how to do that. They negate the type of money that can actually do this, limiting empowerment to those that can afford it, omitting the global framework to empower across different cultural and social structures. Common with all of us is our needs to create and connect, respecting self and the world, so a relevant exchange model that drives sustainability, however it works locally, has to accepted globally to keep the synergy of connecting going. If we are all parts of one, this characteristic is mandatory to compete with usury currency today.
Currency design is actually incredibly simple: knowing what design best supports status in creating sustainably, on demand. It affords business to exercise how sustainability can be a new uncompromising status measure and direct incremental changes towards individual and common empowering goals, connecting them both together.

Misconceptions of usury currency are that it is:
• unlimited: it is, but is distributed scarcely.
• just an exchange of energy: if so, it would be the commodities we make it now.
• actually wealth: if no one created anything, what could money buy?
• an external motivator is necessary to encourage people to do things: when we do what we really love, we don’t really care about the money; we just have to in the current market.

I recently heard Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, speak at World of Business Ideas in 2017. He made clear how proud he is not making money from this work, emphasising the quality of this gift and the people involved, but has to create a new vehicle, the WikiTribune, that will be an income source to keep Wikipedia free. If our reputation is more empowered through gifting quality, why compromise energy on quantified vehicles that limit that?
Reputation is the key to everything we do anyway. Always has been. We always look at how to improve the human condition, whatever that is meant to mean, and how to overcome its flaws. What is of utmost importance is the arena reputation is born from before we can apply the best of this.

So what exchange model would shift status from accumulating wealth quantitatively — money — to experiencing qualitative wealth, creating whatever you want, in the most sustainable way possible, and be acknowledged for that to be given back in return? How would social structures and personal discovery adapt to this?
As an architect, when ideas go wrong, I go back to first principles and figure how to get this right.
My brief is what exchange mechanism perpetuates status to create experiences sustainably, and by default, promoting collaboration, inclusion, synergy, and ultimately, creating sustainable excellence that can be accessed by as many possible, at scale?

Misconceptions we have of alternate currencies are that:
• they can only work locally
• different localities require different exchange solutions
• that different currencies offer flexibility of use and choice — they will while we experiment but it will lead to the best one that saves the most energy — my analysis is to take as much unnecessary experimentation out of the game.

It is possible that money and abundance can go together, but we do not question the TYPE of money associated with this concept. If usury currency is the best answer, why are so many people looking at alternate exchange models as a way out of the increased inequality we are facing? I propose that in the end, when the energy of money is for the exchange of wealth, not wealth itself, there would only be a requirement for one currency, and the free market this works in will make that requirement redundant.

Designing a currency, and understanding the effect, is simple. Main factors are:
• Volume limit (if any) and what it is based on
• Creation/distribution
• Cost on currency (usury or demurrage), if any
• What the currency is based on, if anything

Let’s look at different currencies around these parameters and look at their effects. Any effective analysis must illustrate effects if the whole world, like a country, used that one currency. Anything less introduces the limitation of currencies becoming commodities, totally affecting the capacity of change they offer.

USURY
• Unlimited creation independent of what is created.
• Limited distribution
• Usury (positive interest)
• Created from nothing

This has been the mainstream currency type we have been using globally forever, across civilisations. It is created out of debt. It’s an owned currency model. We can see the effects of this in the last hundred years as we can in previous civilisations. It is extremely compromising in what we create, converging cultures, creating economic cycles, perpetually unsustainable, and adds weight to the energy exchange. It isn’t a neutral exchange between 2 people; there is always a third party, hence the imbalance of energy exchange. It is a control mechanism, enforcing labour, not inviting it. The destructive nature of it is obvious: obsolescence, trinkets for as expensive as you can make it, market making for needs outside of empowering self. The SDR by the IMF has all the hallmarks of one classic fiat currency for the world to use. The effects of this will be catastrophic. Banks opening to offer new credit lines only increases the volume of money available, but not change what the money is for: profit. The conversation around universal basic income (UBI) is a derivative inside usury currency, and while the concept may have some value with the implosion of employment, it is more imprisoning people to a system with little creative empowerment, let alone value those that do create; a very short-term solution to an immense problem.

DEMURRAGE
• Unlimited creation dependent on what is created
• Limited distribution
• Demurrage (negative interest)
• Created from nothing

The best example of the effects of demurrage are best illustrated is Wörgl, Austria, during the Great Depression. Built infrastructure while rest of the world was crumbling. Tax on money that was not used, so was advanced tax payment, but govt put all this back into the community, not corrupt and filtered away from the community. But how much infrastructure does a community, a country, the globe, need? It demands growth to continue so while it may be one useful method of leveraging production, it does not drive creating sustainably as it demands commodity to function.

TIME
• Unlimited creation
• Unlimited distribution
• No interest
• Based on what is created

The best example of this is LETS (Local Energy Trading System). A great concept in taking out any cost of currency, but is not capable of leveraging free-market pricing. It also can’t price goods effectively or value exchange with more than 2 individual parties and does not value ones time in education to deliver more specific quality services, such as doctors or lawyers. Different communities adapt it to incentivise use for such professions, but this affects its scalability and exchange with other communities. It also does not drive creating sustainably as it incentivises using more time to complete a task, negating the opportunity of trust at scale.

BITCOIN
• Limited creation
• Unlimited distribution
• Usury + fee based
• Created from nothing

I mention Bitcoin (BTC), specifically as crypto-currencies (CCs) can be designed with any parameters they choose, but the characteristics of BTC are unique for the long-term game it presents. Most CCs are commodities created in and of themselves, as a means of crowdfunding or distributing ownership, but not necessarily as a medium of exchange. 42Coin is the epitome of ownership of a currency solely for its status, even beyond its actual value. BTC is unique because on it being the only currency used globally, it would follow what would have happened if we stayed on the gold standard: the price mechanism would invert (higher prices will no longer define higher quality). Pricing differences would converge but unilaterally fall, allowing more access to experiences, but ultimately fails while people fight for status through price. To me, the endgame of BTC is to realise that all currencies, including itself, will never value creative capacity and ingeniously demonstrates we need a new, qualitative, means of value and exchange.

COST-FREE
• Unlimited creation
• Unlimited distribution
• No interest
• Based on what is created

Cost-free currencies offer the opportunity to take out the commodity and wealth interest-money represents, shifting value and wealth to what is created. Ben Dyson, the founder of Positive Money, is the beginning of changing mainstream currency to become more stable, but others like TÚMIN and Sardex are independent cost-free currencies that are gaining traction. Created from different reasons, both are navigating their own way to leveraging a currency with no cost at all. The TÚMIN is an organic currency that grows by preference of use due to its emphasis on exchanging through quality and gains acceptance by using part of any exchange in it. Sardex is a membership exchange that realised after many mistakes that its best leverage point was to go debt-free. Both are scalable without limitation.

REPUTATION & GIFTING
• Unlimited creation
• Unlimited distribution
• No interest
• Based on the quality of what is created — leverages status in creating sustainably.

Reputation can technically not be exchanged but when given different parameters for value, can be shared, therefore is unlimited. Currently being leveraged as ethical quality within an arena that doesn’t want this, reputation alone would demand transparency in leveraging excellent sustainable quality across all industries and sectors, without compromise. The only exchange mechanism to match this is gifting, not barter. Acceptance is better at a community level, which has been demonstrated before, but has not been scalable due to resources owned and locked up in competitive markets.

Gifting, based on excellence over ethics, would shift resources into collaborative markets to be used in the most sustainable way possible. Without money, free markets would shift to crowdfinding projects, based on their sustainable forecasting. Like any business plan, but with different paradigms. Conscious Currency, created by Conscious Club Australia, is leveraging pay-it-forward and recording the trail a gold-coloured ingot travels along the road of giving help. Despite having to buy the initial ingot, it’s a wonderful way of connecting the quality of a gift in transactions. It’s a blockchain in physical action. Find out more here: http://consciousclub.com/conscious-currency/. The best platform leveraging gifting is www.freeworlder.com. Colin Turner is creating an exemplary model with this site presenting the empowerment of gifting over other models of exchange. Find out more here: https://freeworlder.com/about.

TAXING CURRENCY
In any debt-based currency, let alone the centralised dependency political structures have on these, taxes are currently necessary to create infrastructure for work in an economy that demands production to produce work for its own sake. We build inefficiency to alleviate it in future projects. Taxes don’t just disempower community decisions to get things done, but what to be done. Governments can and have outsourced, however the parameters in doing this are for the sake of jobs. A money model needs to overcome this need to create for it’s own sake. Instead of tax, projects can be offered, bid for and executed by the best that present the best sustainable option, and if the society is using currency can be generated into being through that work, stabilising the market.

As an example, it was brought up at a talk at Semi-Permanent how much resources are used in making cars, and how artificial intelligence (AI) will reduce the auto-making market by 90%, saving a huge amount of resources. So let’s think about the resources we use for defence, let alone money itself. What in our social structures demands so much need for strategies to overcome adverse belief patterns in this way? How do we build trust within mechanisms built on fear and disempowerment, thinking only a few can be honourable in a mass of obscure emptiness?

City designs are limited around one type of lifestyle: working certain times for the sake of producing. Sustainable economies take out the quantified structure of work and shift purely to qualitative paradigms. So much work created from fear paradigms, such as insurance and investments, as well as menial tasks that would be taken over by AI until innovative design takes it out altogether, become redundant. Cities built around Commoning networks are far more inherently resilient, flexible, and can promote more sustainable processes across sectors, EG. wooden high-rise buildings and more community-centric support of families.

EMPOWERING HUMAN NATURE
A lot of energy is directed to personal development, of ‘doing the work’. There is no question these are valuable experiences to overcome fear, pain, and trauma that has been enacted through disempowering others. It is a wonderful thing to express, to let go, mostly to be given the space and acceptance to do this. Whatever arena this happens, be it in ceremonies or a group of encouraging friends, the effect is incredible. For me, the permission to do this is the main point, to be held and supported to let go.

In the development of this phenomenon, it is always interesting that even this is becoming commoditised, that people judge if enough work has been done to afford the experience, when just being encouraged can be enough. Of course, to want to participate has to come from an authenticity to let go, not to be involved for the ego of it, or externalising the experience as a shortcut to letting go, which again misses the point. This demonstrates the disempowerment, and waste, of commodity, and how quantifying the value disconnects the need for the experience. Commodifying. Self. Doesn’t. Work. This concept of commodifying empowerment spreads across other industries: coaching and motivating, startup and conference culture, philanthropy, gratitude, and happiness. The driver behind aiming to resolve arguments has been through politically-driven ethics, the focus being on overcoming the limitations of human nature.

But what is human nature, or the human condition? Rather than whatever the definition of this could be, it would be better to define from what parameters we define that from. Dr Bruce Lipton attributes whatever the human condition can be not in the human itself, but in the environment a human grows in. A cell is capable of anything, but the different environment a cell grows in triggers what part of the cell activates. So whatever human capacity we create, it will always be affected by the environment we apply it in. A simple analogy is the incredible advancement of personal transport, but we are at ills to use their capacity for the decreasing quality of roads, limited communities to use them in, and vehicle designs that blinker and synthesise the connection to the environment where they are used, creating more problems, not less.

Our disempowering definitions of human nature have overlooked the innate positive aspects of human nature we are re-discovering now. The work of Dr Richard Ryan on Self-Determination Theory makes evident the intrinsic nature of humanity to not just create, but is further empowered to connect creation with others when supported and given autonomy to follow their most creative desires. By default, we connect the empowerment of self and others together, assessing others on their basis of creative empowerment over any other characteristic, and how this connects and supports the earth. Our innate competitive streak becomes a tool to challenge capacity to collaborate to only make it better. Most evident is we do this without a price, more for our reputation. We have and always will value the quality of one’s reputation, so why limit this capacity to the quantification with the illusionary measure of price, when quantifying the synergy possible would be far more valuable?

That humanity was taught to trust money, especially debt-based money, only illustrates we can sold anything through fear or a false sense of control, given the right story to go with it. Humanity is returning to its instincts to feel what is truly good again, and if we are to be offered the full environment to realise the unlimited capacity of this, we need to let quantitative exchange go.

MISINTERPRETED ECONOMIC THEORIES
The lack of synergy we are creating in our connections is one of the most disempowering effects we are developing. This is an intentional part of economic theory, otherwise we would have a lot less to buy. For however many game theory scenarios available, we picked the most fear-based ones to work with, deriving the context of how other animals live. Unlike other animals, we have been able to mould our own experiential world, of challenging our creative capacity. No other animal has been able to do this as we have, so economic theories that are based on the scarcity animals live with are irrelevant.

Given our creative ability to create evolving experiences beyond survival, economic theories should be based on these premises. The empowerment of co-evolution, collaboration, and the synergy were made apparent by evolutionary giant Charles Darwin (not to mention Alfred Russell Wallace) economic giant Adam Smith, if all their work was read and applied in totality. Even the works of Ayn Rand, whose heroes are so focused on the quality they created and are therefore deserve the money they get (sound familiar?), became nemeses who only worked for the money; if she was interpreted correctly, these are the second-handers she despised: the people who want to control the true creators for their own benefit. Regardless of her personal flaws, it does not take away the empowerment of her message when looked at correctly.
The full spectrum of encompassing solutions presented were lost in adding solutions in sections, of creating value by creating problems to resolve, coming the point of where we are now: pointing out global resolutions to reconnect with, but compromising solutions within old dualities and segmented synchronised processes. These are not empowering or cultivating, for teachers or students. Hence, solutions though commodity that can’t reach full empowerment, otherwise there is nothing to buy.

We need, and we are, redefining what economics is meant to create, and the parameters how. We can no longer compromise solutions between frameworks that have opposite goals when the parameters around such goals were contrived, not real. Nothing beats the synergy of collaborating creativity for optimal diverse experiences. This is what nature does, and so our economic model should be biomimic, as it was always analysed to be.

TRAJECTORY IMPLEMENTING EMPOWERING DECISION-MAKING
An easier title could have been ‘Trajectory TOWARDS Empowering Decision-Making’, but it would actually be more difficult as I would evade solutions that can be applied today and see the effects it will have. The ‘towards’ part is your choice to apply them, or not. Any action is up to you, and they can be as powerful as you want them to be. There is no time to baulk at solutions to evade implementation, so how to has to be addressed so action is possible.

The most fundamental foundation of any decision is how effectively it empowers as many people as possible. At worst, if a decision is disempowering today, it is made aware of the empowerment in the future, and hence is empowering, but this is explained in full transparency, and is an advantage for all people an things involved, without compromise. If a decision lacks this capacity, then it’s completely the wrong decision. There are many processes at the moment leading up to this capacity such as Loomio and Sociocray,3.0, establishing the flexibility of consent over consensus, but these are based on ethical over excellent solutions. Which brings up the next point.

The most empowering decisions drive the inclusive resolution of excellence, not the exclusive compromise of ethics. Ethical solutions resolve nothing; they only compromise the way forward. Ethics is created from the wrong parameters we perceive, or are told, to believe in. The core of ethics, like money, is scarcity. Creativity is not scarce. There is always a better solution that encompasses excellence if we change our perception; again, something we have heard before.
Perceptions is not the only change to make, but see the reality of what stops excellence being created. As mentioned, that perception is the true energy of the current currency model we use, and how different currencies have different energies. Pick the currency that drives the greatest excellence. This may not be able to applied today, but at least we have a point to work towards, leveraging better, more empowering solutions in the future.

There is no deviation to the fact that the best, most empowering, excellent decisions value sustainable creation, customised on demand, to the point of redundancy. I equate this to the Japanese definition of a good death. If the final destination for all decisions does not empower all, then it is not sustainable. Life is a cycle. There will always be death, but it is the spiral of expansion this evolution leads to that makes it all worth, as the legacy of our life is reborn anew, in some way; why it is not just important to live a good life, but to leverage the diversity of good lives everywhere. Why shaping the environment, not just self, to empower is just as important.

LIFE PASSED THE ENDGAME
Money as we know it is connected to everything, so it is important to change it, if we need it at all, for any empowering change. Imagine if Sustainability was connected to everything? It is, but valued as highly as money is today? The demise of money as we know it is obvious. We tell stories of our givers as exceptions of living life. Are we afraid there will be stories to tell if we all become givers? Do we think that there are no obstacles to overcome if we all acted beyond fear? To me, life evolves from here, no longer living for life. It is here that the full-blown explosion of complete tension of empowerment can reach fulfilment in peace, testing self, but realising there is nothing to test. :)

HOW TOTALLY INCREDIBLY AMAZING IS THAT!? And I get there by losing my connection valuing myself to a debt-based currency.

EPILOGUE
What I say may not be real, or realised, but the foundations for not giving it a shot are non-existent, except that you want to live your life prioritised by fear. The core to empower your self in a fully supportive environment is there, and no one can own it and never will.

That’s why it’s beautiful.

:)