Community Currency
Yesterday I was talking about Chiemgauer, it’s a community currency in Germany. This post is just me thinking out loud, because it will allways help to keep experimenting with things. Most of the time I look @ the pixels, but sometimes it’s also good to look @ the bigpicture. Worldwide there is this phenomena called community currency, if you want to get a rough idea about this, check out these video’s. There are communities out there who got there own money and rules attach to them. We are on the point to also have our young, fresh and revolutionary Safecoin. Sometimes it bothers me when I see people asking about the value of Safecoins. Why it bothers me? is because they are looking at the fiat value and not the real value (Fast, really secure anonymous transactions and empowering people to make money on different levels). I’m not gonna lie, if the price of Safecoin got really high I would sell my coins, so that I can buy more later when the price goes down again. With a little more money I can do more for the Maidsafe network than all this talking (I love taking action, instead of just sitting on me lazy ass telling fairytales). We as a community give Safecoin it’s value, if we keep using it and promoting it. I admit I feel sorry for the people that would put there money in Safecoin when it’s high and loose their money when the price suddenly drops. But i’ll just say that this is just an exchange of hands and leave it at that for now.
SafecoinX
This is just another delusional idea, but to be honest it might work to the Maidsafe networks advantage. Project SafecoinX or Safetycoin would be a move of the Maidsafe core developers to design a coin that has all the features need for a community currency. I’m not talking about the Maidsafe community here, but the other communities out there. Incase you want to ask what the logic is of developing another coin with adjustable features. It’s really simple, if we can develop a coin that can be used by other communities, then these people will be using Maidsafe. To be frankly I HATE PAPER, I’m a treehugger and we’re also destroying nature with all the polution machines that’s needed to move trees. Anyway, if the SafetycoinX project could enable the Chiemgauer community to digitize their currency and add their prefered ingredients, they would be on board. Understandably you can’t get everybody on board, but if they could use it as a phoneapp, they could go about their business.
Coin Features
What would be really nice features, is if the coin could hop from one phone to another without a internet connection. Like this project Tin Can. It would also be nice if you could just send the app to another phone without needing to go to a appstore, like the Serval project. Other ingredients could be adjustable demurrage, time instructions (pay Bob this when he has work for so many hours), ones imagination can really start to run wild at this point. For instance if you sell expensive bikes, you could tie your coin to physical objects and let that be the price of your coin. If we want to go forward we should also embrace the old world and make it easier for people to transact. Why sites like wordpress (CMS) are so succesfull? because they are easy to use and come with the hardest part allready in place. If besides Safecoins we could also have a morphable coin, it could really help a lot to let the network grow. Imagine what a community coin that’s pegged to a fiat currency could do. Some people say that sucha coin would be worthless, because fiat is dying, it might be dying, but nowadays you can make a new currency within 5 minute without high costs. Sucha coin would also make it easy to exchange from Safecoin to fiat. Because it’s pegged to fiat people don’t have to immediatelty change to fiat. If Safecoin could be internally exchange with sucha coin right on the Maidsafe network, I think that you have just solved your Safecoin to fiat problem. People woulden’t even have to pay a exchange fee.
You might argue that there is no time to create a morphable coin, specially for people with their community currency allready in place. You might even say that my other idea of a timebased coin was also strange. But if we don’t dream, hope, think, talk and try to understand how we can improve lives…