 I'm Dorian Cave, so I'm the curator of the Professions Network on the Deep Adaptation Forum and I'm joined today by Matthew Slater. So Matthew has been working on alternatives to money since 2003, I think. So Matthew, you've been writing open source software, you're the founder, one of the founders of Community Forge and you also co-created the Money and Society MOOC, so this online course with with Jim Bandel. So yeah, thanks for accepting to take part in this event. I'll say you're also one of another member of the core team of the Deep Adaptation Forum, so you're also a co-creator of this forum. So today we're here to talk about money and how money is related to deep adaptation and society in general. So I thought we might start off just going over a little context of about what is wrong with money currently and the economic system. So we'll try to not to spend too long on this, because there's a lot to say. But yeah, I thought that I could just state a few key points which to me stand out as some of the main causes for which money should be transformed if we want to improve the way society works. So you could say that the world economy is controlled by this global banking cartel, right, sort of a cartel that has government-mandated monopolies on the issue of currency which creates money by giving out loans to people. A cartel that charges so much interest on loans of money that they never had. There isn't even enough money in the world to pay it all back. So which creates this necessity for the economy to keep on constantly growing for some of this interest to be payable at all. Which is of course one of the root causes of ecological damage that puts human survival at risk. And that's just for bankers' profits. What other sort of main issues would you like to remind us of as regards to this whole monetary system, Matthew? Well from some of the reading I've been doing in the last couple of years it seems to me that one of the problems of the growth of the money system is not only the fact that money is issued as interest-bearing debt but that after the money is issued it circulates around a bit and then it lands in a tax haven and then it gets stuck. And it's impossible for me to tell how important that dynamic is compared to the interest-bearing debt dynamic. But it's important to recognize that money if it's going to serve us as a medium of exchange must be available to exchange and if it constantly gets piled up in tax havens it's not available to do that. And this has been made worse by the quantitative easing of course because a lot of the quantitative easing money has gone almost straight into the tax havens as it's been distributed first and foremost to those who already have the most money. So what you're saying is that it's this function of money as a store of value which is sort of incentivizing its accumulation and that is that is a huge issue especially when it can only well when it tends to flow towards those who already have the most of it. And that this has been emphasized in the wake of the the financial crisis of 2008 with the quantitative easing, right? So if you look at the dictionary definition of money it will say that money is supposed to be a store of value and a medium of exchange but I'm struggling to find out where that idea came from that's not anybody's ideal that's a description of what it is and when you break it down those two functions are very different and they represent different class interests as far as I can see. So what rich people want money for is to store value preferably at high interest rates and what most people want money for is as a medium of exchange and they don't care about the interest rates. So what most people need money for is simply to in order to acquire daily necessities and in order to pay their bills and so on while rich people in fact see money or at least use money in a way that just enables them to become increasingly powerful, right? So the monetary system in effect is a source of growing inequality, isn't it? Yeah by definition money has a way of calling money unto itself but there's a saying I remember from Yugoslavia that the devil shits on the biggest pile that seems to describe the behavioral money perfectly. Yes, absolutely. I read somewhere that something like two percent of the world population own 50 percent of global wealth. There was also a statistic from Oxfam I think in 2017 that eight men owned as much as 50 percent of mankind also. Yeah they update that figure every year and it seems to get like one less person every year and so we can see that the global wealth is becoming more and more centralized. Would you also say that because of the way this system is structured the currency that people use in their everyday lives is in fact being debased as this banking cartel back the government deficit spending with this debt money and this creates inflation therefore increasing prices for ordinary people. Would you say that this is another kind of inequality which is brought about by this monetary system? No, I'm not worried about inflation in the way that it causes money to lose value. Inflation actually works against the people who are holding a lot of money and it works in favour of people who owe a lot of money. So in a sense inflation favours the majority and that's one reason the government likes to keep inflation above zero because the government is a net borrower so it's inflating its own debts away. Of course there are people who think that money should be sound. They talk about gold currencies and things and you can see these charts about how the US dollar has inflated its value away down to four percent of what it used to be in its heyday but for me that's fine that's a social decision and if you agree with the government then do you agree with the government's right to do that to the money in the interest of the wider economy and if you want to store your value use something that isn't money and take a risk such as gold, such as grain, such as even futures contracts or something like that. Any store of value is going to be a bit speculative because you don't know what the future holds but money is like an artificial creation where the government guarantees its value and so if you want a risk-free store of value you use money but you do that at the cost of extracting it from the economy and making it unavailable to use by everybody else as a medium of exchange. Absolutely yeah right yeah so to go back to what you were saying about the role of government well against the position of government as a net borrower so the government borrows from commercial banks in effect and so that's something that most people might not be so aware of as they think that money is created by the government printing money so could you disentangle this relationship for us a bit? I think most people are aware that the government borrows some money because the expression crops up a lot on the news but yes there's also I think a lot of cognitive dissonance in some people because it's easy to assume that something which is so obviously a commons which is money should be created by a neutral authority rather than sold to us as a service like what we have now is money as a service where we pay to rent it into existence. So the government does this borrowing in the form of selling bonds and there's this elaborate arrangement with the Bank of England and the commercial banks where they sell the bonds I think through the Bank of England and then the market decides the interest rates and that means that the government doesn't really have a lot of control over the rates at which it borrows money but then there are proposals to do it differently. Yeah it seems like we just we live in an economic system sorry in which there's a very sort of unhealthy relationship between between commercial banks and governments especially through when you consider the influence that the banking cartel or that bankers and the financial system in general exert through the political system so the influence policy making as some countries might be worried about their credit worthiness but they even are governments sometimes right we know that it's called the revolving door system it applies not only to banking but to other sectors so when something becomes very very specialized especially you have to get people in from industry to help the government with the policy making but then those people usually have shares in those industries and they'll be making the policies in the long-term interest of those industries and so government becomes a servant more of the industries who are the experts. Yeah and then whenever a politician leaves leaves a ministry or leaves the government then they might find a comfortable position somewhere in that industry right such as that phenomenon has been observed. Yeah so yeah so we've just we've just taken a brief look at what this what the structure of this economic and financial system brings about in terms of social inequality in terms of influence over the way politics are run but also in I mean in the realm of of the of the ecology and how the economy is forced to grow ceaselessly in order for people to just be able to to repay their debts to the banking system. I think it's important to mention that those dynamics are completely unrecognized even on the political left and mostly by environmentalists. If you talk to a reformist politician about what we need to do with replacing our energy systems for example and all the investment we need to make in ecology many of them will say we can't do it now because we need to get back to economic growth before we have any money to invest. So there's this idea that growth is a prerequisite for doing anything with the economy and also that we're struggling to get back to growth and therefore we can't do anything. So this this idea of economic growth is has has turned into this this mantra which is disconnected from any close observation of what what the consequences of this growth are for instance. It's not clear what growth actually means to normal people. There's this idea that growth if it's measured by GDP which it is is really just a measure of the amount of money changing hands in a country and then there's the assumption that that translates to the well-being of the people which it doesn't it depends which money is changing hands and what real value is being created as the money changes hands. Of course that's too rich a data you know everything is summed up into this one gd figure and if it's you know two three percent we're happy and if it's not well we need to change our politicians and do better. What we do know though is that if the economy doesn't grow no matter how you measure that exactly people start losing their jobs. The economy stagnates so it means that the money circulates even even less right. It stays in its pools in wherever it's being stored. There are structural reasons why the economy needs to grow in order to be healthy and one of them is we think economists disagree about this. One of them is that since all money is debt we need to constantly borrow more money into circulation to pay back the debt as you said and the other one is that the money is going into tax havens so we need to constantly borrow more money to replace the medium of exchange. So structurally the economy needs to grow it's not a choice it's not because people are greedy it's not because countries are competing with each other that they need to grow. If the economy isn't growing things start to break and so the changes that are needed are very very deep. So let's take a look at the kinds of changes that we can envision in this context and how on different levels we can imagine transformations that could be enacted to this the global monetary and financial system. So if you like we could start with with the top topmost level that of government so national government. So we hear a lot especially in American policymaking and also in the UK I think ideas of a green new deal. Could you could you tell us a bit how ideas of how this kind of idea connects with the creation of money and how it could transform things somewhat. So what happened in the original new deal in the 1930s was that because the economy was so very very stagnant and there was a great shortage of money the new deal allowed the government to borrow a lot more money than it normally would and it used that it did that using Keynesian theory so that if the government would spend money on infrastructure it would help the economy to grow taxes would come in and they would be able to pay off the debt. So the new deal is a very Keynesian idea. There are proposals that we should do something similar now because we've had 10 years of recession and that it should be done not just to kick start the economy but to finance the very very urgent ecological reconstruction rebuilding and redesigning of society that's needed as we know from deep adaptation and everything else. There are lots and lots of problems with the idea of the green new deal. For example you can invest a lot of money in energy infrastructure and then find out that it still doesn't meet your energy needs. I've been reading a lot about that recently. For all the renewable energy you could install you then need 10 times as much spent on batteries because batteries are super dirty and expensive to produce in those kinds of quantities. Our electricity supply now that's based on coal and nuclear and things like that generates a very high baseline of electricity and we can take the electricity as it's generated so we have very very little storage but with a so-called sustainable economic grid you wouldn't be able to do that because the electricity is generated at different times and different intensities everywhere. The very idea of investing a huge amount of green electricity it's not going to replace what we have now and there are many other ways that you could invest money that you wouldn't get it back in taxes. Maybe it's not a green new deal at all you have to accept that we're actually giving the money away or spending it on really really long-term projects. But do you think that those ideas in terms of new energy infrastructure and so on could be coupled with a new role for the government in terms of money creation? Do you think that for instance ideas of modern monetary theory which say that a national government that has a monopoly on the use of force and so the power to underwrite debts should have no needs to rent money from banks or citizens? Do you think that this could be coupled with with those? The green new deal is very poorly defined but yes very often it comes alongside a footnote or a reference to another paper that says we're going to finance this using MMT, Modern Monetary Theory and MMT says that the government doesn't have to borrow money from banks the government can just spend the money into existence and then the purpose of taxes is to prevent inflation. So the government is effectively creating money through spending and destroying money through taxation which is the opposite way around to how most people including in the government think it works these days. So there's this philosophical difference about does the government spend first and tax later or tax first and spend later? It's a very profound difference. So you see it as workable do you think that MMT could actually help to transform the economy and help us evolve towards a different system? Yes it absolutely could. MMT implies that if something isn't paid for with tax because a lot of people find tax politically unacceptable then it can be paid for through inflation which is like a tax on money and especially a tax on people who hold lots of money. So it could be that the people who hold lots of money would be against MMT and possibly against a Green New Deal if it couldn't pay for itself through forms of taxation that they found acceptable. Right yes okay maybe we could we could move on as it's already 25th past to another level at which some transformations could occur and that's a level that we that you and I together with Jem addressed explicitly in a in a recent paper we an occasional paper we published on the IFLAS website at the University of Cumbria. So that's the idea of local future tax credits. So I don't know if any of our listeners have had the time to to dig into this rather long document but I invite everyone to do so if you haven't. So this idea we had of those tax credits is one that would address the needs for local governments to in effect have a better means to cope with the current climate disruptions and the growing ecological crisis that we are all facing in a context in which they have fewer and fewer means to to actually do so. So we know that worldwide over a thousand local governments have declared a climate emergency hundreds of them in the United Kingdoms in the United Kingdom but in a context of a story of austerity policies that began after the 2008 financial crisis many of the many of the budget allocations received by local governments have been cut by central governments especially because so much money had to be invested into bailing out the big banks that we just mentioned. And so as a result those local governments find themselves less and less able to not only cope with floods and droughts and other natural catastrophes but also just simply social services. We know that healthcare systems have taken a very severe impact from austerity policies especially in Europe and so those policies have also affected poverty relief and schooling programs and contributed to widening economic and social inequalities. And the system is probably not much sounder today than it was in 2008. Things haven't really been transformed at all. So could you explain to us briefly how local future tax credit works and how they could help local governments to cope with this this context? It's related a bit to what we just said about the government taxing first and spending later and also the idea that the government might sell bonds. In this case instead of selling bonds what the government would do is accept the taxpayers money before the tax was due and spend it at that time the moment it was paid over and then they would credit the taxpayers account. Every taxpayer has an account in the local government because sometimes you overpay, sometimes you underpay, sometimes there's some rebates. So you use that account and you just load it up maybe even several years in advance so you you finance the government and then they would give you interest for that. Technically it wouldn't be interest but it looks like it would be viewed very much as interest but the difference is that the government borrowing from the banks is also borrowing our money but the banks are in the middle taking a cut so this way you would cut out the middleman of the banks. So you can lend your money directly to the council, they can borrow at a middle rate and you can lend it to them at a middle rate so you've got something like a savings account. That's part one of the system but then the next level we described in the paper is where they could enable a payment system. So you would be able to pay from your local taxpayers account to another taxpayer at least in the same area and that payment would be free and it would be from your savings account so it's even more convenient than a bank where you have to give notice if you want to pay from the savings account but so the local government is therefore in a position because it's a local government because local governments find it very hard to default to take a load of money from the taxpayers spend it and then deduct it from the taxpayers accounts later as the tax becomes due and so it's a way of using money twice. The government uses the money by spending it but then you can use the money at the same time because you can pay from your account to another taxpayer's account in the same area. So it's very similar to what banks are doing it's not as if banks are actually holding your money and physically moving it from one vault to another. It's all happening on a ledger the bankers lent the money out and they just keep a small amount like about three percent of all the money they say they've got on deposit. They just keep that available in case you want to withdraw it. With the local future tax credits well it's tax you've already paid you probably don't ever need to withdraw it. Well that's the detail we could talk about another time. Right so right so to taxpayers the benefit is that you actually get sort of like the benefits of a savings account while in fact having the flexibility of a current account isn't it? Not the full full flexibility because you would only be able to pay people in that area taxpayers to the same council. You need another level of infrastructure if you want to pay between councils and that was also described briefly in the paper as well. Right yeah so you could imagine having a much wider system connecting local councils nationally or even internationally right across the across Europe or elsewhere yeah yeah that's that's quite fascinating and it's interesting how it also connects with some historical examples of government being functioning in the same way. We know that the UK for many hundreds of years 600 years collected taxes through tally sticks that was that was something that was and the tally stick was a piece of wood it wasn't money but it functioned like money because it was a credit note from the government to say that the tax had been paid in advance and then the tally sticks were valid to be used to pay taxes by somebody else so you have to get your head around that maybe the people here have already got their head around it but the idea is if I pay my next year's tax and I get a receipt and I could spend that receipt around the economy and then next year somebody else can pay their tax with the receipt because that's the same money that I use to pay next year's tax when I got the receipt. So yeah it's a very well established mechanism but also there's other precedents I pointed out in the paper that in Britain they created the gyro bank in the 60s and 70s and that was a way of providing a payment system for ordinary people who were at that time unbanked so the the government provided a payment system and it was only later that the banks said oh we can make a profit from this and they started to provide bank accounts that ordinary people could use so that was an excellent example of the government stepping up and providing a service and they led with the technology when they did that pushing all the other banks to innovate and they helped the ordinary people and helped the economy by doing things which later on were done by the private sector. Yeah that's it's it's funny how such ideas get lost in the or just resurface from in the midst of history once in a while. There was something recently in in New York wasn't there the sort of sort of similar idea that's been proposed tax repayments I think. I figured the initials but I was fascinated because it was like three days before we published the paper the news came out that it's a proposed project in New York and it's not about tax repayments but New York will use tax deductions to reward people especially for volunteering so everybody's got their tax account and the government would put something in that tax account which would be then used deducted from there the taxes that became due and the project proposal is to use that account as a payment system so that New Yorkers can pay each other using their tax credits but not prepaid but more like rebate tax credits. Do you know how they call them do they actually call them tax credits or how was the I don't know what they're called have we got any New Yorkers around? We can probably search that later but wow that's it's inspiring it's something that's that's around and there was something in Italy also recently with the mini bots although it's a bit different even there was something in California in 2009 right with registered. In California they're paying their the government staff with promises that they would get their salary later because they had they'd run out of cash but the government never actually runs out of money because they're collecting taxes all the time so the government promises you money it's supposed to be good. Right so yeah anyway so we see that with with such mechanisms local governments can find breathing space to to provide services to their constituencies and to basically cope better with with the increasing pressure they are facing both financially but also socially and ecologically. Now maybe we could say a few words to what what we ordinary folks who might not be in local governments or in even less in the national government governments what can we do in order to transform money around ourselves. I'm sure you have you have some interesting pointers to give us on how to what new forms of money could we could we use better in our in our daily lives. So this is what I've been focused on myself for the whole of the last 10 years with writing the software and making the MOOC and things like that. I'm aware that time is very short so I'll just say so very briefly what instead of appealing to national government or local government to change things there are ways that we can work in our own lives and our own businesses to behave differently economically and there are many many different designs of local currencies but the one that I find the most compelling and the most powerful is called mutual credit and this can be done between businesses and it's there's a whole industry doing that the business barter industry and if a lot more of that was being done we might find that the recession wasn't hurting nearly so badly because in a mutual credit system a community who trust each other a bit effectively create create their own trading liquidity so they're able to exchange amongst each other because they've created the medium of exchange with which to do so and so what I've been working to support all this time and I'm now doing still in London with the open credit network is the creation of small groups of local and ethical businesses who extend a bit of trust to one another and then they can exchange with each other without money and the proposal that we put out alongside with the local future tax credits was my design for joining all of those systems together because those systems they have scaling constraints because they depend on how much the members can trust each other but in my proposal of the credit commons it's not rocket science you just nest those systems and so instead of having thousands of people trying to trust each other you can have groups trusting each other and making trust relationships and it's just for short-term credit hopefully then they did they did they do need some governance structure over the top but all of that makes us interesting and the all economic mechanisms need governance structures so we put forward the credit commons and the local future tax credits together side by side as a way of stimulating discussion about possible economic reforms I would encourage everybody to try and join or start up a business barter network and if not even that then to try to conduct your professional relationships in ways that use less money in ways that value what your customers do so if my customer is I don't know making chickens or selling shoes then I would go to them for my shoes or my chickens rather than to the nearest market and that way I wouldn't have to pay them and they wouldn't have to pay me this leads to a very different kind of economy when we mediate our transactions through money it says this is a professional relationship there's all kinds of contracts involved where it's mediated by the government and by the banks and it changes the feel of it and I believe it even affects our happiness very often so it's not just for technical reasons of liquidity that we need to be thinking about demonetizing our professional lives and our livelihoods it's also for reasons of happiness and also for reasons of resilience because if we're using the national money we're vulnerable to shocks and crises in the national money system because we have a very long way to go before we can completely remove ourselves from the national money system so this is only a start so in a way you recommend that we go back to to the trust which is at the at the root of of money itself right I mean conceptually it's it's all about trust and trusting others trusting that money is worth something so what we don't just focus on the trust itself and and not necessarily through money right yeah if you have a if you have a huge national and global economy you do need huge national and global institutions to help to mediate the exchange but if we trade on a local basis all of that is unnecessary infrastructure and it's it's costly brilliant thanks Matthew so okay we we've gone on for a little later a little longer than than we were expecting but we shall now open up the floor to questions so if you have a question please raise your hands and we will unmute you to hear your question you can also do so through this managed participants window and you you have a little raise my hand icon but yeah whichever way works for you so who wants to go first Brian I need I need you the unmute oh yeah there you go here I go I think I'm on hi so thanks for this guys I I came a little late so maybe you've already addressed the question that pops up in my head there's actually two and they're completely different I'll I'll pose them both briefly the first is the medium of exchange so I love the idea of creating and participating in a local economy basically you know like a barter type of system but you know when I think about my local farmer and wanting to get some chickens and eggs and vegetables from my local farmer in exchange for you know some service or something that I can provide I I wonder what's your thinking on the medium of exchange I mean is is you know dollars or pounds actual bank notes appropriate in that in that context I mean you're still sort of relying on the central printing of that currency and so forth but it seems like it's universally recognized or do you sort of advocate for more of a brand new kind of local currency and if that's the case then you know how do you overcome the barriers of of creating that and and you know generating trust in it and everything else and then a separate question kind of unrelated I wonder what do you think about local investment so like if you've got people who have investment dollars in sort of traditional investment vehicles in the US that's 401ks and it's brokerage accounts and that kind of stuff I like the idea of trying to bring that money home and and using it in a way that is more locally focused and I wonder if you have any thoughts about ways to do that you know finding local bonds or or or something you know your city is trying to improve its its water infrastructure to deal with with heavier rainfall you know and they need money to do that and they they put out a bond issuance and I suppose you can buy those but I I'm just curious if you have thoughts about you know ways to to sort of take investment money and bring it home rather than just putting it out into the sort of ether of brokerage accounts and and you know ETFs and all this kind of financial instruments that that you know most investors are are familiar with so thanks. Thanks Brian. I think the longer the question the shorter the answer so if we want to do local trades with local people sure you can use dollars and all of those available instruments and sometimes it's really the best thing sometimes dollars is what the the person you're buying from most needs because we've all got bills to pay in the wider economy the point is to try to use something else or anything else preferably what you produce but you can also circulate beer it's been done you know people produce beer and they pay with beer and then the beer can circulate in the local economy as a form of payment or you can just have an IOU in your head or you can do it as a gift sometimes gifts come back to you sometimes they go around so a mutual credit system is a slightly more formal way of doing things and to to create one of those you have to get everybody together and decide on a unit of account and just decide on some balance limits so how much can everybody have credit of everybody else but you don't have to do that to start you might find that if lots of people are experimenting with money and means of payment and trust around you then you might want to get together and create something more formal to make it a bit more powerful and effective so moving on to the second question about local investment that's less my area I understand that issuing bonds is very difficult legally very costly and although in UK local councils are allowed to do it they don't because it's just too much trouble and that might be one of the problems with local future tax credits is very similar to issuing bonds and we didn't do the research as to exactly how much trouble that is and so if it's a lot of trouble for local councils to issue bonds how much harder is it going to be for ordinary people who want to get together and finance themselves a windmill so those vehicles don't really exist there's a thing in Britain called the community shares unit I think the government set it up to help people buy back pubs and there's a there's a trust I mentioned it in the paper or in the blog that goes with the paper that helps people with advice to do community finance things but it seems to be very difficult legally one way to get around a lot of that is to trust each other more what costs money and what is difficult is bringing in the government and the legal system for when one of your members changes their mind or defaults or fails or dies and if you can take that kind of hit because you trust each other enough then those kinds of actions should be much much easier you could do things entirely informally we just imagine insurance so you've got maybe 20 people who decide to ensure each other's houses how formal does that really have to be um you don't even have to put money into a pot because the insurance could be when somebody's house burns down everybody else just finds five or ten thousand pounds or dollars to help them build a new house so everybody has to sort of make sure they keep that money available but it doesn't have to be in a pot with a third party earning interest and i'd like to see much more innovation around that that's the best answer i can give to your question especially while leaving time for others thanks Matthew um i see we have a question in the chat from in the chat box from uh from Sasha from a few minutes ago um Sasha would you like to um to actually speak out your your question to us uh i can unmute you please go ahead um i didn't actually meet it as a question it was more a comment so thank you i did find it very um inspiring what i read in braiding three graphs and i did make some changes in my life about the difference between money economy and the gift economy that it creates a different sense of trust and bonding in a community and i made some different actions in my own life that have been effective um and uh were you uh were you saying that um it seems like the the let's schemes that you were involved with uh have become less active uh in recent years um that was me who said that about the let's schemes actually oh sorry yes oh sorry better yes okay there was yes um would you like to follow up on this yeah well it was just an observation that um i used to be involved in these let's schemes and that was before the internet or social media um and it was all done on paper it was incredibly laborious we had to kind of reprint new directories every three months or something like that and everything was done by paper um and then just around the time when the technology became available to run it much more easily online all these schemes seem to have seemed to have formed by the way wayside it's really weird i don't know i have no explanation it's just an observation really and maybe a question why that might be i don't know whether Matthew's got a theory on that i have many theories on it um i was uh in about uh 2003-4 i started working on the software specifically for let's in uk and in 2008 i went full time so i can tell you they haven't all fallen by the wayside um although in england um they're not very strong in france there's still about 500 going along uh and several hundred i believe in germany and uh time banks are all over the place um my concern with those things is that they many of them want to make the transition to the formal economy but they just don't and that business barter systems are very different animals so people have tried to innovate within let's in many ways by bringing in high street shops and trying to make formal systems of volunteering but it just doesn't seem to work and also the um let's tend to get limited in their size and i don't know the reason for that i imagined that uh once i had come along and provided software that made all the administration much easier the let systems might be able to grow but they didn't and now i think there's a problem that um they're not replacing themselves with young people so um many people involved in let's now are well over 50 and they don't have that uh drive or inspiration to follow through with new technologies and they're very happy to think of the let's as a small social circle which it very often is so i said i'm looking forward to something new coming up um some new brand or some new framing of mutual credit and in part that's what i'm working on in London with the open credit network i mean there are some examples of local currencies like in Stroud for instance which are sort of like a continuation of the let's scheme i don't see them as a continuation of the let's because they're not doing mutual credit in those systems you have uh they put the pound in the bank and they give you a piece of paper so they're not creating any new liquidity so what's what's the numbers that you find that the let's schemes tend to stagnate um i haven't been looking recently but um about 150 paying members and then the inner circle would often be 20 people yeah but isn't there a theory that isn't there a theory that human beings can only maintain meaningful connections with around 150 people so that would kind of match that number quite neatly it is a theory but um i don't know if it really applies here i think there's probably several other things going on that's just my opinion thanks Betty um okay we had um i think Tony had his his hands raised for for some time and then Sasha and maybe Nigel if we if we have time right this question ties into with Betty and Matthew have been talking about which is uh bankor is an interface software program to allow value exchanges among networks of different value exchanges as i understand and i'd be interested in Matthew's uh thinking how to apply that kind of application or process to mutual credit could you speak to that Matt yeah i've looked at bankor very closely and uh wrote a couple of blogs on it last year if i can be very brief about it um we might be more accurate to say that bankor is a system for token exchange rather than value exchange because there's nothing to say that the tokens have any value or who values them or what they're valuable in terms of um it does so in a context of the free market where there's the tokens themselves don't have any value or any agreed value they only have a market price in terms of supply and demand and so one of the common features of money is that it should have a declared or agreed value it's not just a commodity that sits on a market that's a problem with all the the money in the world today it's regarded as a market commodity and so bankor's in that paradigm so that's not to say you couldn't set up bankor to trade with money where you define the value because it's very configurable but then i would say that bankor is working in a trustless paradigm um it's it's a blockchain it's immensely complicated and difficult and so it's over engineered um for uh any kind of trust relationships and um also the fact that it's working with tokens and not with credit means that you kind of have to reverse engineer bankor to get it to do the kinds of things which i'm designing the credit commons to do thank you um sasha i think you've had your your hand raised yes i think the idea of increasing trust is a way to make changes in the economy is really interesting and something that would be interesting to go into more i've lived in a rural community and then quite a bit of barter and other things here and um there are definitely some things that can come up when you try to change from money exchange into a more trusting system and i just think it would be great just to take that on as a topic of conversation yeah i agree that's a very valuable topic um i've been living somewhat in the gift for much of the last 10 years as a nomad i found that very easy maybe because i was moving from community to community and didn't have to endure people or them endure me for very long there was a recent blog post on on the deep adaptation blog jem's blog about living in community together and in deep adaptation generally it's all about uh how do we live together and relate in a deeper way which is all part of living in community one day i'll become an expert in it um so we have a question from nigel i believe and then maybe uh one from francesca in the chat box if possible uh was that a no nigel oh yeah i think it was betty that was talking about straw uh yeah i'm not i'm not good on that anyway i know saundra bruce very well who ran the starboard i'll give betty some numbers there were 500 people ish who were users i call them users not and system not scheme but that's me there are about 500 people but it was driven by about 25 single mothers that work together because they had low income unlike when it was birthday time the kids wanted a present or they wanted a party or something like that so the core of the thing was the social relations between these single mothers hanging off that core with loads of self-employed people like guys who trim trees you know they saw a branch that was in the way of repair your car things like that they spent they probably earned maybe five or ten percent of their monthly income through the let system but the mothers themselves with the drivers that the 500 people hung off and it was kind of like decreasing intensities as the circle got bigger however you could hire a cottage in the south of France a hundred percent legs sprout legs you'd have to pay the train fare to get there in in your rows or pounds or something but the cottage itself you could power in legs saundra is now in ireland but i'm still in contact with her she's been busy starting stoner school to miss that and the other and he's no longer interested in all the garbage around professional poverty developers she's much more interested in reality creating rather than money creating which frustrates me because i'd like her to be involved but there are people all over the world playing with bitcoin kind of things as community currencies and maybe just contacted by somebody who's been paid by the indonesian government to create a local currency in indonesia being paid a very fat consultant fee and raised three million dollars this year alone for investment in local currency so it's not bad but one thing that really upsets me as a kind of in my body is this word trust i don't trust anybody people have reputation or they don't if somebody has a reputation kicking my door in then i don't let him anywhere near it if somebody has a reputation knocking nicely and say hey i've got some hot dinner would you like to eat something then they tend to be more welcome so i would really really really like the discussion to shift from trust to reputation thanks thanks nice or maybe we can continue this conversation on the on the thread around this event if you like on the on the forum i would be happy to if you like we're working internationally hmm thanks a lot maybe the difference between trust and reputation is that i've been speaking about trust as something that happens one to one whereas reputation is about what everybody thinks of somebody and you can really trade much more with your reputation if you look at the economy as a network effect then yes reputation is what counts rather than individual opinions i'd like to come back to just very very quickly i was in Sri Lanka staying in a small village well a large village or very small cell and the guys had very heavy wooden boats so when they came back from fishing every well i needed about 20 people all about the beach they knew who put their back into it when it came to pulling boats yeah they could feel it you know like if somebody was one leg was doing their best they would help them pull their boat if on the other hand you were pretending to pull the boat up everybody suddenly found they were otherwise occupied when it came to you all about to pull up the beach so you had a reputation within the community just for pulling boats up the beach but then it went on to all the rest of the stuff that we did together and they were a community because they needed each other you know if you were going to town you needed to lift with the neighbors or something like that they lived in community already and the weird thing about where i live in Brussels is nobody talks to anybody else under any circumstances whatsoever it's really bizarre yeah lessons to be um to be gained here for deep adaptation on the on the local level yeah yeah absolutely um thanks Nigel uh let's see uh do we have Matthew do you want to take one one last quick question there was one in the chat box from uh Francesca asking you to expand on the on the the London open network i think she was referring to the um the open credit network uh do you think always um yeah so to conclude uh thanks everyone for your contributions because when i'm on screen i tend to forget everything that i'm supposed to be saying so you added uh depth the open credit network is a project inspired by the credit commons white paper that i wrote three years ago and they want to build uh cooperative business partner networks and network them all together with the possibility of creating something really profoundly different economically something with the potential to scale and um move the monetary power back to producers and away from the banks so people are interested in that you can you can sign your business up or they may be uh they may have voluntary positions and so Nenad pasted the link to the open credit network in the chat box in case yes you guys want to check it out and i'm happy to uh to end on um on this reference because it's actually through uh the work of the people of lowimpact.org this great website which i recommend to everyone and who are the founders of the open credit network that i got to to know you matthew and then to know gem through you and then to get involved in all of this so it's um very um very nice um to see that they are continuing on this trajectory so um thank you so much everyone for for joining us today and um it was uh it was great to uh to hear from you uh if you um if you want to uh to read the LFTC paper that we refer to i pasted a link in the chat box but you also see it referenced on the professions network there's a thread in the forum uh also please feel free to continue this conversation on the event page um and um we look forward to um connecting with you again um be it in person or online so thank you so much and thank you matthew for your brilliant explanations take care everyone and have a great thank you thank you bye