Excerpted from an in-depth profile of Enric Duran and the CIC by Nathan Schneider in VICE, very much worth reading in full:

“”The office of the CIC’s five-member Economic Commission, on the first floor of Aurea Social, doesn’t look like the usual accounting office. A flock of paper birds hanging from the ceiling flies toward the whiteboard, which covers one wall and reads, “All you need is love.” The opposite wall is covered with art made by children. The staff members’ computers run an open-source Linux operating system and the custom software that the IT Commission developed for them, which they use to process the incomes of the CIC’s cooperative projects, handle the payment of dues, and disperse the remainder back to project members upon request.

If the taxman ever comes to CIC members, there’s a script: They say that they’re volunteers for a cooperative, and then point him in the direction of the Economic Commission, which can provide the proper documentation. (Officially, there is no such thing as the CIC; it operates through a series of legal entities, which also makes it less dependent on any one of them.) Insiders refer to their system, and the tax benefits that go with it, as “fiscal disobedience,” or “juridical forms,” or simply “the tool.”

Accounting takes place both in euros and in ecos, the CIC’s native currency. Ecos are not a high-tech cryptocurrency like Bitcoin but a simple mutual-credit network. While the idea for Bitcoin is to consign transactions entirely to software, bypassing the perceived risk of trusting central authorities and flawed human beings, ecos depend on a community of people who trust one another fully. Anybody with one of the more than 2,200 accounts can log in to the web interface of the Community Exchange System, see everyone else’s balances, and transfer ecos from one account to another. The measure of wealth, too, is upside down. It’s not frowned upon to have a low balance or to be a bit in debt; the trouble is when someone’s balance ventures too far from zero in either direction and stays there. Because interest is nonexistent, having lots of ecos sitting around won’t do any good. Creditworthiness in the system comes not from accumulating but from use and achieving a balance of contribution and consumption.

The idea was to help people out and radicalize them at the same time. The rich use tax loopholes to secure their dominance; now anticapitalists could do the same.

The CIC’s answer to the Federal Reserve is the Social Currency Monitoring Commission, whose job it is to contact members not making many transactions and to help them figure out how they can meet more of their needs within the system. If someone wants pants, say, and she can’t buy any in ecos nearby, she can try to persuade a local tailor to accept them. But the tailor, in turn, will accept ecos only to the extent that he, too, can get something he needs with ecos. It’s a process of assembling an economy like a puzzle. The currency is not just a medium of exchange; it’s a measure of the CIC’s independence from capitalism.”