I recently discovered the website of the Altruists.org organization, who want to develop a decentralized accounting infrastructure for human exchanges.

It’s part of a whole series of similar projects which I have started to compile on this page on P2P Exchange Infrastructure Projects.

The Friend2Friend project, writes Robin Upton, “is suitable for a gift economy, but that’s not why I call it decentralised. Perhaps a comparison will help – I refer to conventional currency as centralised because it has a set of privileged points (banks) with special powers that are denied to normal users. LETS is more local that national currency, but is still centralised – it needs an administration to control each member’s account.

When I first learnt to use WWW, I was confused because there was no index. How can a system not have an index, I thought? Now I am used to the decentralised model, I see the wrongness of trying to have an index for such a system. If there was a single point with such control, it wouldn’t be the system it is. I see a parallel with currencies here — it is confusing at first not to have a centralised authority which can state someone’s creditworthiness definitively, since we are so familiar with centralised currencies. The lack of a central authority implies a different notion of wealth — I call it ‘relativistic’, because someone’s wealth is relative to whoever is asking).

AE is decentralised in that anyone can create their own currency (by just posting a piece of XML). This may sound confusing, but in practice people are likely to use easily interchangeable quasi-universal currencies, such as 24 hours food and lodging, an hour of work etc. People may use other’s currencies if they wish and comparison between currencies is straightforward because people publish exchange rates which equate their currencies with those of others. This is harder to think about and program (and more CPU intesive to calculate) than a normal, centralised set of accounts, but the joy of decentralised systems is that their design does not require you to submit to a centralised authority in order to take part. No central point of failure or control.

To get practical, a decentralised system offers us a chance to synergise our efforts; we can avoid competing to attract users to join up to our site, avoid a ‘winner takes all’ effect which would result in competition between a few big players ( c.f. Ebay). The decentralised approach to account holding is designed, like WWW, to create a ‘network of networks’ — allowing everyone using compatible software to form one big internet gift economy, just as different bittorrent clients help one another by taking part in the same torrents. The effective size of the network becomes the sum of all our efforts, and an increase for one of us means an increase for all.”

If the topic is of interest to you, we recommend you check related initiatives:

[Giftegrity] of Timothy Wilken, http://p2pfoundation.net/Giftegrity

[OpenXchange], from Francois Rey et al, http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Xchange

[Give Get Nation] from William Shanley, http://p2pfoundation.net/Give_Get_Nation

Larry Penslinger’s m-valued monetary systems, http://www.geocities.com/m_valuedlets/

The ‘comrade to comrade’ P2P Yardsale Engine, http://p2pfoundation.net/P2P_Yardsale_Engine

Michael Lipton’s, Open Money, http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Money

If you know of others, let us know!