Open Money

The next global currency system

Definition and overview
Vision
How does it work?
Open money versus conventional money
Advantages of open money
SWOT analysis
Governance
Devices and infrastructure
Technical architecture
Current state of project
Discussion
Links and references

Definition and overview

Open money is intended to become the next global currency system, at front end and infrastructure levels. It allows any community at local or global levels (groups of people, regions, countries, corporations, NGOs,...) to create currencies among its marketplace. Open money is always in sufficiency. Therefore people never get short of money, they can continue to proceed to their market exchange.

Open money optimizes wealth creation and circulation in any human configuration. It allows the design of systemic flows and incentive that communities may need in specific situations such as sustainable development, cooperation and reciprocation, crisis situations, local economy, rural reconstruction, disaster zones recovering.

Open money is open source. It belongs to the commons.

The term open money was created by Michael Linton and Ernie Yacub in the mid 80's. See history of open money?.

Vision

Thousands of different currency systems have been built during the past 100 years, with an acceleration the past 20 years (see complementary currencies). Open money is to be understood as the meta-system and standard that will let communities design the currency they need for their own purpose, and interact with one an other at local or global levels. Exactly like what happed with email, html, or http protocol.

It's likely that money will follows the same path that happened to medias and communication tools: they were once centralized, limited in numbers, expensive, owned and controlled by the few, closed systems. Now they are distributed, peer-to-peer, global and local, open. The same is about to happen to money.

Therefore in the next few years the world should expect to have millions of currencies. Just like it has today millions of medias, TV channels, blogs, discussion groups, etc. Each participant will join the currencies he/she needs for his/her own purpose.

What no one really anticipates yet is that open money is likely to be the next global change. Consequences will be global and probably experienced as more profound than the emergence of the internet itself.

How does it work?

Open money is simply a medium of payment, a memory that something of value has been passed from one person to another, or from one organization to another. One person's balance goes up, the other down. For example let's suppose two people start with no money at all, so both accounts are at zero. One person then pays another CC100, their balances are now CC-100 and CC+100. Their exchange has created 100CC.

Open money versus conventional money

On the contrary of scarce, centralized, proprietary, opaque, dept-based and interest-based conventional money, open money is never short. It is always sufficient.

There is no requirement that that money exists beforehand from an external source. It is possible to go into negative and positive without contacting a bank.

Conventional money	Open money
Number of buy/sell transactions is dependent on availability of currency	Currency is created by buy/sell transactions
Scarce	Sufficient
Centralized	Distributed
Dept-based (IOU)	Mutual credit
Privately owned (85 to 95% of it)	Public
Not free (interest based)	Free
Closed	Open

Advantages of open money

Decentralized: no need for a centralized issuer like a bank, which means no threats from a centralized power.
Free: no interest is practiced because there is no issuer that makes a business of it. The only cost is the one of the infrastructure, which is a flat marginal cost, not an exponential one like in the interest.
Peer-to-peer: the total quantity of money in the community is determined in realtime by peer-to-peer exchange. There is no centralized authority that determines how much, where and when the quantity of money should be allocated. These can be seen as distributed fractal feedback loops to regulate the system and make it resilient.
Controlled by the people: the rules of circulation, credit limits, taxes, decision making processes, etc, are controlled by the community itself. These settings can be configured via software.
Sufficient: because based on mutual credit?, i.e. there's never a lack of money since it is created upon the needs/wants streaming.
Holoptical: transparent between users, and users have access to the meta level of the system to understand and regulate its whole equilibrium.
Adapted to all needs and all communities: whether communities are based on a local territory or a virtual one, each community exists because it has a circulating offer/demand within it. It can be time exchange, objects, services, knowledge... in a competitive or collaborative economy. Mainstream currencies only serve competitive markets, open money serves whatever market since it is sufficient and can be applied in any context.
Connected to any "real" or "virtual" value: any community currency can be based on a "real" value (time, gold, kilowatt, kilo of potatoes, oil, distance...) or a "virtual" value (i.e. no relation to anything in the real world, it is just a unit of exchange used by the community).