A new blog on the block: Tom Greco of Reinventing Money fame takes a few tentative steps. Here, he raises an interesting definition of when a currency is issued:
A currency is not issued until a buyer offers it in payment and a seller accepts it in return for real value. Merely distributing notes to potential participants does not constitute issuance, but only distribution. Notes are not issued until they are first spent into circulation. When accepted in payment, there is an agreement to reciprocate. That agreement may be either explicit or implied, preferably explicit and precise.
That's an interesting distinction; a contract only achieves the status of an issued right when it trades between buyers and sellers. Which means many of the lesser and flawed contracts that I've mounted on servers over time aren't really issues; they never traded, even though they were minted.
Tom is author of Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender (PDF), one of the more serious books on alternative views on community credit, and he is also a persistent scholar of E.C. Riegel, an early 20th century economist who hammered out much of the thought in community currencies and indeed the theory of money.
Posted by iang at January 12, 2007 02:12 PM | TrackBackHow come people from the community currency groups do not ever speak about digital metal currencies? Why is there a canyon between these two groups? Seems to me the dgcs are more successful and more cutting edge than these sometimes fiat based ideas.
Posted by: Gordon at January 13, 2007 10:22 AM