Marc Fawzi launched an intensive debate on social currencies on our Ning community site, with 112 replies on November 28, as I write this.

I asked him for an overview of that debate.

Marc Fawzi:

“Here is my summary:

1. With respect to my interactions with Dante, the discussions centers around how deep of a change we want: it can be as deep as changing the nature of money itself from the start as Dante’s ideas suggest to me, or, as in the model I’ve proposed, it can be initially confined to “changing the nature of the system (or the ‘environment’) for the creation and use of money, which changes how money behaves, and that in turn changes the nature of system (or the ‘environment’), while keeping the nature of money the same, as a neutral carrier of power and as information, and while making the information explicit.”

2. With respect to my interactions with Sepp, the discussions center around how we’d change the nature of the system (or the ‘environment’) and we have strong agreements in some places and strong disagreements in other places, and since neither of us have gone out and done this before (i.e. neither of has have actual experience implementing new currency models) the agreements and disagreements, including the strong disagreements, which can be justified logically in the confines of our overlapping theories, come from our personal experience as users of the system, not from trial and error, and we both agree that simulating (by way of turning the given model into a game with actual human users or by some statistical simulation) is the way to go.

So my discussions with Dante and Sepp are on two different levels.

v0.12 implements many clarifications, rewordings, and reworkings that may justify another round of discussions with Sepp re: credit points, energy/productivity based money creation, anti-dumping/anti-monopoly, and energy price regulation, all being aspects of the model. The good news with respect to Sepp is that we seem to have overlapping theories, which also indicates that we may want to have two different models, as opposed to forcing convergence to one model, and just simulate both and see the pros and cons …

The good news with Dante is that he is striving to articulate a much more radical model, and while it’s good news, I’m personally afraid of going there (for wasting time, energy) and I’m much more comfortable with fixing the system not fixing money because to me the system is a problem. The reason Dante’s thinking is good news is because he’s of a different generation and what he considers the problem maybe valid too for his generation’s experience.

So worst/best case scenario is that we’d end up with 3 different models, two that are on one level (reflecting Sepp’s and my thinking) and another that attempts to change the world far more radically.

At this point, I have no reason to be alarmed by the split and convergence of these efforts and take it as a very natural for the very early stage of thinking that we’re in.”