Also don’t forget that billions of ordinary people rely on these faulty national fiat currencies to get through their day and eat. So not all bad. Until the alternatives are mature enough to fulfill the current function of national fiat-issued currency as primary exchange mechanism, they better stop whingeing and do it better.
All this noise about digital currencies like Ven and Bitcoin – they are interesting experiments and something may yet come of them when they get to grips with relevance to the man and woman in the street and standards of governance. Until then, they are no better than central banks and may be worse. Much more potential IMHO lies in geographically bounded currencies serving whole regions in a strong partnership between local citizens, business, voluntary sector and local government with equal representation in decision making about the regional currency, its goals and management.
I have tried my best to summarise this worldwide movement of local currencies in my two books:
“Local Money – What Difference Does It Make?” http://www.triarchypress.net/local-money.html
and “People Money – the Promise of Regional Currencies”, co-authored with Margrit Kennedy and Bernard Lietaer: http://www.triarchypress.com/pages/Regional-Currencies-People-Money.htm
On top of which, the market on which these “individualized currencies” are traded, because of the sheer impossibility of knowing credit risk for each individual absent a central credit rating authority – which can itself be subverted and manipulated, a la Standard and Poors, for political and financial ends – can be rigged, just as the FOREX market has been shown to be rigged: http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-thoughts-on-forex-rigging-scandal.html …
So I think that there needs to be a commonly-agreed upon standard for what money is – and what it *isn’t* and to set out criteria to achieve this, criteria which might include: being relatively immune to speculation, the originator of the money not holding sufficient amounts of the money to move a market in the monetary unit, the monetary unit holding a constant value against a set of tangible commodities in commercial use, and so on. Individualized currencies obviously won’t be able to measure up.
]]>i also recommend having a look at this essay for Harvard Business Review on Rethinking Growth, which takes some of these ideas about sustainability into account: http://hub.vg/rethinkinggrowth
]]>But if “play” comes at the expense of ignoring the critical paradigmatic problems, then it’s a problem.. Because we’ll still be at the mercy of an unconscious monetary system.
The more the community is able to focus and collaborate like a laser beam on the CENTRAL systemic problems such as exponential growth, I believe there are profound opportunities for enormous breakthroughs, general consensus and grounded solutions. That, in my opinion, is not at all the end, but rather the beginning of play for this community. That’s where things get really interesting.
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