 This is Jim Hogue, and this is the House of Buchorna, and today we are going to be talking about alternative currencies, and your guest is Devin Landis, who has invented yet another alternative currency, and that's an area that is of great interest to me, because I would like to see the Federal Reserve disappear, and local currencies become more common. So I will give about a one or two minute introduction to what local currencies are, and what money is, and then we'll turn the program over to Devin, and first of all, let me just explain that money is an agreement, so any local currency that comes up that people agree to use is on, it will work, and so what does that mean? It's an agreement to use it, and if it's accepted it's usable. It can be accepted by all of the above, which is, by the state itself, by local businesses, by businesses throughout the state primarily, and if it becomes extremely successful, businesses that extend outside the state, and when I mean the state can accept it I mean for fees and for taxes. The key, I think for me personally if a currency is going to be accepted widely, is that that currency has to be exchangeable for the dominant currency, so in this case it would of course be the dollar, and there's another word for that, which is another kind of alternative currency which is mutual credit, and there's a wonderful one in Burlington now run by Amy Kirschner, which is accepted by businesses all throughout the Burlington area and wider than that, and a local currency can be based on the concept of the dollar per se, but I like the idea of a local currency being based on what Devin has come up with, which is the minimum wage for that area, and it can also be accepted for exchange of labor. That's a very local currency in that case, and it doesn't matter how widely picked up it is as long as people agree to exchange the labor. Now what happens when a local currency becomes really successful? What happens if a country has a currency that is outside the central banking system? I've done several programs on how money is created, which in this country and in Europe is created by the banks based on loans, so everything out in circulation right now was put there, was created because somebody wanted to borrow money. Money doesn't have to be that way and it's not supposed to be that way, it wasn't initially conceived that way, but that's the system since 1698, 1694, excuse me, that was created when the British created the Bank of England, and we are going to talk about the opposite of that throughout history when an area has created a different system outside that banking system, it's usually created a war, motivated a war by the powers that be or an assassination to change the minds of the people so that they will see the light and go to the current paradigm, which is debt based money. We did a program here recently with John Root, where it was the exact opposite. Money was created by the exchange itself. Money was given as a minimum basic income and that money was put into the exchange system so that it became productive money and it became money that you could spend on what you needed. So today we're going to be talking about an alternative currency that is based on the productivity of the people who are creating the currency and I find that a very good idea. We can go back to colonial script and talk about the great success of that. The Guernsey Pound, which was very successful, started in 1812 in order to rebuild the sea walls and other infrastructure that was falling apart because they had all the goods they needed. They had all the product, they had the stones, and they had the labor and they had the know-how. All they lacked was this concept of money and so they created the money to make all that work. And then there's the weir in Switzerland, which is not state accepted, but it is business accepted, quite successful. There's another concept which is warrants, which California instituted and my friend John Ford with Gwen Halsmith tried to get Vermont to understand the value of a warrant, which is when the state runs out of money, the state gets to write a warrant and that is usable within exchanges of the state. And if people don't like it, what they can do is they can sell the warrant at a discount and get dollars for that and then it gets subsumed into the currency as long as the state has no money. And that worked very, very well in California. Argentina had the Patacone, which is one of many complementary currencies that became the state currency. And it was bought out by the way by the IMF because they were a little, they were intimidated by the threat of the good example. So let's go to our guest, Devin Landis, who's going to be talking about his currency and does it have a name? It does. The central credit exchange distributes talents, which are blank, like I have here some talents and what they are is they represent about an hour of work at the most basic level. So we would call that minimum wage, the minimum earning. So it is always tied to a concept which people know, which is time and everybody has the same number of hours in a day, so it can all easily convert time to money. All right, these are talents and these are talent bills. You can see that these bear my name on them, October 11th, they were created and my economic standing, what makes this system unique is that what has formerly been personal, which is your own personal finances or bank account, is made somewhat public by receiving a grade that ranges from negative to positive four and is printed on your talent certificate when you create it. And now I have a 2.4, which is probably in the upper 30th percentile, and if I were trying to spend these within a community, this is a pretty good bill and you would readily accept it because it shows that I have been serving the community. What else can be said? Well, it's an IOU, like any dollar, by the way, all dollars are IOUs, they're printed by the Federal Reserve, but essentially they're IOUs, and so yours is a traditional IOU because it's got your name on it and so you're the bottom line or is the next creator of the next dollar, the bottom line or what? How does that work? It downs to classic accounting, which you would find in any of your banks that everybody uses or most people use. So if you receive a talent with my name on it, you can't necessarily redeem it, especially to me as you could to anybody else, all you can do is turn it into the central credit exchange and your account, in this case, would go up five talents and they would see that this came from me and they would deduct five from me and yeah, this is the basis of all the accounting. So that is like what Amy Kirschner does in Burlington. You do a service for somebody and you get credit, you accept a service, you become indebted to that credit system, but no money has changed hands, whereas this is a physical IOU. Now, do you have other ways to make this work other than the physical piece of paper? Yes, that would be an app which I am currently trying to raise funds for. I need about $11,000 to create an app and folks with smartphones could make these transactions happen instantly and it would help me as the only administrator of the central credit exchange to not have to do as much paperwork and to not have to use Microsoft Excel as much. So that is the next stage, the next hope for the system as far as expansion goes. Now are you using a blockchain kind of system or is it just like you said, you are simply adding and subtracting? Yeah, I am simply doing it with Microsoft Excel and when people register they submit a real form, but with an app a lot of that could be done electronically and as far as app security, I would hope that nobody tries to hack the app, but if somebody does we will definitely get them and yeah. So yours will start with agreements among the people who use it and that is important for people to understand because there are really two different ways to get a complimentary currency going and in almost every case that I can think of except the colonial script, well even that to an extent it is created by normal people and the state may or may not come in later. With the Patakone in Argentina it was something that in a manner of speaking throughout Argentina people did anyway because they didn't have enough cash and throughout history a lot of people don't have enough cash so they come up with something else and it is a local currency and it may or may not be accepted by the state. If it is successful enough you would think that the state would say hey I don't want to miss out on this and it is just like they forbid barter unless you pay taxes on it, which is ridiculous because who pays taxes on barter you have to be you know people barter all the time without paying taxes on it, but the state likes to get it cut so with an alternative currency if the state sees a benefit to it then the state should kind of help it out and move it along. I would suggest that Vermont would be the last state in the union to do this just because there is a fear among legislators of doing anything that does not have the approval of the feds and of all the people and I think that a currency like yours if it got going and the state saw how usable it was this state would approve of it just like they do of the mutual credit system but guess what they taxed that so they are really happy with Amy Kirschner's mutual credit system because it is all accounted and therefore it is all taxable. Is she able to pay her taxes in the currency that she has made? No. So the state doesn't care about anything except getting its tax money. They like to see businesses thrive I am not saying they are deliberately trying to stop a business from thriving but all they really care about is that they get their money and that you are not thriving without paying your debt to the state so keep that in mind. Two conditions for somebody registering for the central credit exchange talent network one is to uphold honesty and two is to never exchange talents for any established other currency. Okay so you are doing the opposite of what I suggested at the beginning is that it is not. Yeah. Okay so have you thought of the ramifications of that for the success of your talent? Yeah growth will be slower but in the end more stable. Okay and can you talk a little bit more about why it would be slower and why it would be more stable? Well I remember when Bitcoin hit the stock market and I remember about three days of accentuated explosion and that is because Bitcoin like if stock market was a large gear and Bitcoin was a small gear it was basically engaging with the international monetary system and picking up speed and you know now it has reached its equilibrium. There is another quote like the idea of new wine if you put it in an old wine skin there is like extra fermentation that would burst the old wine container so I just think that this is a new fresh wine and it needs to be separate in a new wine skin I guess if that makes sense. Yeah now when the people in Argentina used the Patacone etc I am using the word Patacone more as a synecdoche meaning there were a lot of them they merged they were so successful that they kind of merged into one and the name I am using is Patacone that and it became accepted by the state because the state was bankrupt. Now why it was bankrupt I have read various explanations from the quote experts and some of these particularly the mainstream media experts blamed I think false villains for this they blamed the excess of imports over exports they blamed the spending money when they didn't have it all that paradigm stuff I think what happened was the flight of capital from Argentina from the aristocracy turning their remaining money that they might have had into dollars and so they stripped the country of currency period and when you strip your country of currency people can't buy and sell anything and there is no point in producing anything so everything grinds to halt that's what happened with colonial script the currency act forbid the creation of colonial script and so everything ground to halt now I forget why I mentioned that except to talk about your interesting idea of making it a slow developer yeah so that those kinds of things that I just said can't happen yeah exactly yeah no I'm imagining that if gradually it became more and more and more accepted and the state said well we'll take it for parking fees yeah that would be good yeah that'd be great that'd be really good so how do you imagine it developing well for example give me some examples of businesses yeah that might do it and I'll say first that if that business that you're talking that you're about to mention yeah is petroleum oil gasoline yeah not gonna happen yeah I would say farming communities farmers and trades people are the foundations of society they're the folks that keep our country going so it would start with them and then where would it go then it can grow beyond that to some larger businesses and more established small businesses and once like large things like if a large mine of any raw material were to accept that I think that would be a switching point because that's like and it is maybe your analogy is correct if petroleum were to take it that would be the the true tipping point well then it could be a unit then it would be a universal currency yeah and you'd be famous sure like Bill Gates yeah or somebody like that yeah now if that mine were to be found in Vermont mm-hmm then then the state would be extremely foolish not to move in and say well we have yeah a something we have something here yeah that is accepted worldwide yeah as a currency and as a stable value yeah and we are going to create a currency based on that but you're not you know you're starting with goods and services mm-hmm first mm-hmm and then if the son there's a some other thing going on yeah then the state could pick up on that yeah what we just discussed when the brain trust was working on this with second Vermont Republic mm-hmm we we discussed forests mm-hmm the great thing about timber and some pitch is that you don't have to do anything to make it grow mm-hmm so it accrues interest if you will yeah without any debt yeah it just keeps growing yeah and when you harvest it it's got a certain value mm-hmm the trouble with it is of course based on the dollar it goes up and it goes down depending on the needs mm-hmm of the community for lumber mm-hmm but in any event that's one of the things we talked about it's a commodity yeah and then there have been there have been others that people have thought of I thought of actually water mm-hmm because Vermont has a rich clean supply of water mm-hmm which can be used for hydro mm-hmm which they foolishly kind of abandoned in the early 1900s and continued to abandon it there's actually enough hydro to supply all the electricity in Vermont if they decided if they wanted to do that but they don't so you've got forests and you've got water that are actually worth more than gold mm-hmm try to buy a little water in the store and how much you pay for it you pay more than you pay for gasoline mm-hmm so it seems to me that that would be a good thing to fall back on mm-hmm as the basis for your currency but again you've chosen to go with goods and services but do you see any shifting if that's the right word or morphing into a currency based on timber or water I don't think so I would like to eventually print well how do you call it make coins mm-hmm where you melt down metal and one talent is worth about ten bucks so that is not practical when it comes to buying coffee because you still have about eight dollars left over enter coins and then to make coins real and accurate they should the value of their metal should as precisely as possible match the amount of time and effort it took to mine and coin that coin I can cite a definite problem in our US economy where if you go to the hardware store a washer is between five and ten cents a penny is a washer without a hole in it so if you were to drill a hole in a penny you'd have a washer for one cent and the secretary of the Treasury or the US men readily admits that it's impractical to print pennies and they lose money when printing pennies so at least in the US system inflation has occurred for so long that a penny is no longer even accurate well there was a time when the copper in the penny was worth more than the penny so they swish melting it down yeah so they switched that that they don't yeah copper painting yeah but so now you've got the same situation yeah only without the copper yeah where the penny is worth more for making a water out of it I haven't I'm only 30 years old but one thing I would love to see and would really interest me is economy and a society maybe it already exists but it's certainly not in the United States where money is not always inflating and so instead of people like chasing an ever decreasing value in their currency like anybody who is saving money it's every year one to two percent less worth less than it was the year before what would it be like if a currency were in some cases becoming more valuable than the goods and services around it I don't think we've ever seen that since the early 1900s well gold oh yeah so if you are an owner of gold then you do feel like that every day yeah well sometimes he drops and you know there could be a yeah there there could be a run on gold and you know the price go up and then the price go down so precious metals but generally speaking gold has increased tremendously in value yeah and then back to Bitcoin yeah look what happened with Bitcoin the thing about that Bitcoin isn't that much of an alternative folks because it's based on the dollar yeah clearly and so that you're not buying Bitcoin hoping that it's gonna lose value yeah you're buying Bitcoin hoping that it'll be worth more dollars than it was when you bought it and so it's a speculative event but it is at least it's not inflationary because it's a there's a finite amount of Bitcoin out there and so that what gets unless you mine it which is another matter there's a finite amount of Bitcoin out there so it can't become inflationary yeah just because of that but it can change its value based on the dollar so you've got a if you're going to buy Bitcoin folks buy it when it's low it's that simple yeah and hope that it goes up about what you said is probably true that it has probably hit a an equilibrium at this point I don't know was it six thousand dollars I think so yeah I really don't know what Bitcoin is that sounds about right today and it's whatever it hit I think it stayed there for a long time so that's why you're suggesting it's hit an equilibrium now if on the other hand the dollar becomes extremely inflated quickly Argentina just went switched and didn't switch picked up Bitcoin as an exchange as an official government exchange wow method okay again it's not going to do them any good unless they have production yeah if you just simply creating another way of exchanging it doesn't help you if you don't have anything to exchange it for except things from out of the country which is really bad idea yeah so I guess we don't have time to go into that no but you can basically understand that a a nation that doesn't produce enough to make up for the currency at hand is in trouble because that currency flows out of the country and there you are again yeah in debt there you are again with without enough money to buy what you need to buy yeah so a local currency can be a big help yeah in that I'll plug my website before we sign off it's a centralcreditexchange.org okay and thank you very much for listening House in precorder with Devin Landis thank you and Jim Hogue thank you bye bye