Saturday, December 8, 2012

P2P — Konstantin Kirsch on the Self-Production of the Minuto Alternative Currency (video)

A sufficiency-based monetary system that mobilizes human effort exactly when it is needed and which is not dependent on the prior availability of debt-created scarcity based commodity currencies.
P2P Foundation
Konstantin Kirsch on the Self-Production of the Minuto Alternative Currency (video)
Michel Bauwens

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tom, why do you you give these cranks the time of day?

Anonymous said...

These "minutos" are just transferable IOUs designed for use in a small semi-barter economy. And the description on the P2P page is completely wrong, since the IOUs are clearly commodity backed.

Tom Hickey said...

Bernard Leitar summarized it clearly when he agreed that MMT analysis is correct and disagreed with it policy-wise. He explained that the MMT solution of state currency paramount in the hierarchy of money gives government too much power. He prefers a distributed to solution.

I don't think that is being a crank. This is a battle that is brewing.

Tom Hickey said...

These "minutos" are just transferable IOUs designed for use in a small semi-barter economy.

Right these are called "local currencies." The UMKC buckaroo is an example of one such, as are the business card model. But they run on a different principle of "backing." There are various ways of doing local currencies.

And the description on the P2P page is completely wrong, since the IOUs are clearly commodity backed.

As Minsky pointed out anyone can create money (IOU's), the trick is gaining acceptance. There are various ways of doing this and actual exchange value is one of them.

Anonymous said...

"Localism" is another name for national degeneration and backwardness. Disaggregating a great nation into a primitive motley of locally bartering village tribes is not a path to progress in my opinion. It's just giving up.

Surely there is enough patriotism left in this country to join together to fix the national economy, rather than going in the direction of mass secession from it into a bunch local city-states.

Anonymous said...

I agree there is a battle, Tom. But it seems to me it's a battle between cranks and people who are willing to put on their big-boy pants.

Tom Hickey said...

Dan, I don't see it as either/or. Some people are going to see the handwriting on the wall and realize that things are not going to change in their lifetimes and so they will seize the bull by the horns and take the course they see best. That is the decision I made long ago and never looked by.

Others will decide to be activists and try to change the system from within, as Tom Haydn tried to do, for instance.

Others will combine both, doing their own thing and becomes politically active as well.

My experience is that people in general are pretty much sheep and they will only get really agitated if things get really bad, and then they will quiet down as soon as they are co-opted, and go back to munching grass.