Hi there!
I’ve read a lot about Holochain and also about mutual credit (also on this forum) and am really pleased to see so much knowledge about the subject here in the Holochain community. In my region, we have a concrete project of starting a local currency based on mutual credit, for which we are searching for a technical solution.
Our goals are pretty simple:
people should be able to exchange currency with a simple mobile app (iOS and Android). Paying and getting confirmations should only take a few seconds.
we would like a system than can hopefully have 10’000+ agents.
the system as a whole should be stable if we want to be able to enroll companies in it
we would like to have a kind of transaction fee that sends a small amount of currency to a local association
credit limit should be flexible (is the HoloFuel algorithm thing documented somewhere? I find it very interesting), automatic or somehow centrally controlled
we would like to roll out in 2023
it’s ok if it still needs some kind of centralization
I understand that everything is or will be possible with Holochain, but it’s not really clear to me if realizing such a project is feasible now or if it will take 10 more years.
Examples of similar projects are welcome, I saw GitHub - holochain-open-dev/community-mutual-credit but it’s archived.
At the moment, we are not really interested in other economic systems. We feel that a “simple” mutual credit system is a good next step for raising awareness about “money” and starting a more resilient economic system.
Mutual Credit is the modern day equivalent of old fashioned bartering except that we have modern accounting systems and computers to keep track of each members balances. of Credit owed and Credit earned/owned.
If we look at how mutual credit is done in the current ‘real’ world here in Arizona, at the Arizona Trade Exchange (Arizona Trade Exchange), a prospective member joins with approval of the association’s management and a membership fee, and is given several hundred dollars of ‘Credit’ he can use to order services and products from other existing members. This is Credit he owes, of course, but he can pay with it and be paid with it (credit he earns/owns) for work he does for, or products he sells to, the other members. The accounting is managed by the accounting firm that owns the accounting software that keeps track of all the transactions and member balances. This accounting firm adjusts various fees and polices any perceived abuses. This latter part is the centralized part and, as I see it, can be abused. Membership for my son was denied by ignoring our follow up calls.
The benefit of this mutual credit system is that it functions regardless of regular ‘fiat’ money’s inflation created by government. This is how Sardinia famously avoided the crippling effect of the collapse of the Italian lira. I’m still trying to grasp how Holo Fuel is going to make all this possible but it sure would be nice not to worry about paying with deflated savings.
