Hawala

I’m impressed you’re familiar with RipplePay in its previous incarnation. It makes sense in a capitalist mode of production that a startup for a trust-based digital token would pivot from trust between individuals to the much more lucrative trust between financial institutions. IIRC, I discovered the concept of hawaladar networks through their white paper. The idea is that any two merchants can act as nodes in a grassroots money wire service, based on their mutual trust. Money can be transferred long distances by simply communicating the sums and recipients, and then paying out of the local cache. Each exchange is kept in a each merchants’ ledger, and since traffic flows both ways, sums often cancel out. Actual transportation of goods or currency is only occasionally required to settle trade imbalances, and could be done without national currency, using their value in marketable products instead. Since networks often involve more than one merchant, reckonings can be handled semi-locally, with long-distance debts balanced as individual remittances ripple through the network.

An anarchist digital exchange currency could follow similar lines. You would be able to establish mutual lines of credit with friends and associates, and set different credit limits for individuals or different groups of people, possibly scaled by how far separated they are within your web of trust. People who have trouble demonstrating the trustworthiness needed to participate in the network could still use the system for exchange by making a non-digital loan to someone acting as a trusted node on the network. It would be reasonable to grant access for the entire amount of the loan to comrades with poor financial savvy, and charge an access fee to everyone else.

Software to run it could be based on the ActivityPub protocol, and proven local rings of trust could federate with each other forming regional, national, and global networks of remittance. Bankruptcies could be handled humanely, with people who are close nodes on the network covering the debt and forgiving the debtor, while revising their credit access in accordance with the reason for the default.

A network with this structure side-steps the problems associated with growing currency algorithmically because currency is created and annihilated according to the needs and limits of people within the network. The money supply can grow to the collective credit limit of the network, and at the same time shrink with degrowth without leaving surplus currency and causing panic. A shock capable of destabilizing the network would have the same effect on a comparable fiat currency system. As added security, node operators could establish individual value caches so the failure of a single node they connect with does not propagate across the network. It’s similar to central banking in the way that nodes federate, trade resources, and insure themselves, but there is not a central institution that sets interest rates, and all loans are interest-free. With enough of the population participating it has emergent democratic qualities.

Mutual projects could be funded by people giving unilateral IOUs to the organizers. Funds could be transferred swiftly to good causes, in spite of government blockades. In an anarchist mirror of Visa cutting off payment to Wikileaks, the networks could defederate from instances connecting landlords or police, and individuals could refuse to be used as an exit node or remittance path, limiting the total credit available to them.

While national currency might be convenient to start such a network, denomination of value could just as easily be pegged to some standard unlikely to be manipulated by capitalists. For example, 200 units could be said to be the equivalent of one nice new mid-range bicycle, or about $400 in US currency. A single unit could then be called a centicycle. Fractional units would be milicycles. If you’re Canadian, half a bicycle could be a looncycle. Since the amount is referential, it would not lead to bicycle hoarding, the way the gold standard creates metal scarcity or bitcoin creates energy scarcity. Debts in the system could be paid with whatever cash or physical good anyone on a node in the network is willing to accept as worth some fraction or multiple of a bicycle.

While it would be possible to accumulate enough of other people’s debt to stop working and retire, the ultimate goal of such a system would be that the structure of the network inspires people to crowd-fund enough mutually beneficial free infrastructure that the need for labor itself would become scarce. People acting as nodes on the network could use the forged mutual bonds of trust as a starting point to form unions and organize coops. People empowered by newly discovered democratic control of their economic lives would find confidence to throw off the shackles of liberal democracy. Those who don’t want or are not able to work would still be able to relax in their fully automated solarpunk luxury communism while those working would need to put in less than a day a week to meet the basic needs of societal maintenance.

Whoops, I may have gotten a little carried away there. I hope some of that is useful, it seems you may be on track towards a more technically feasible solution of your own. But the takeaway is this: fuck Monero.Town. Defederating might be the first step on a path to solarpunk luxury communism :)