After reading Mutual Banking , I want to attempt to provide an example of how such a society could function.





Greene proposes a real-credit system, where notes of exchange are created upon the mortgage of real-property for collateral. Essentially the mutual bank agrees to a use-value for the home (in dollars for Greene) and is willing to give the mortgagee up to half that value to be traded as currency with an agreement to pay back said mortgage. The interest rate can be held at virtually 0 due to the non-speculative nature of the notes, creating a system of "paper money" with legal value among the mutual credit association. This credit is to be used in trade and for services among the other members of the association. As goods and services are provided, they are constantly reassessed in comparison to the use-value of competing goods on the market. The divide between real-property and currency disappears into the numerous associations' joint-ownership of all of the forms of property and capital they use to economize their time.





With today's technology, the paper money would be replaced with a " cryptocurrency " to prevent counterfeiting of credit. Credit associations would track ownership of property in order to prevent cross-contamination or double mortgages. I would like to propose cryptographically verifying this real-credit based value system: cryptocredit. This cryptocredit would be created, used, and destroyed in order to maintain a decentralized ownership of land, money, and the means of production, allowing for a stable, sustainable, yet continually improving economy.





Use-value is subjectively determined, but for market exchange, we must create some sort of peer-accepted standard of measurement as the unit of account for use-value. Units of account help members quantitatively prioritize their tasks with relation to their effort and the scarcity of resources.





The creation of credit is an investment by the community in an individual, believing that the member applying for the mortgage will repay the credit in the time frame allotted by the creditors. The credit is repayed with credits the member earns for the goods and services he produces for others in the network. When the credit is repayed to the credit network, it is destroyed by the credit network in order to account for return the appropriate portion of ownership of the property to the mortgagee. Often times members of the network could coordinate their mortgages, or partial-sales, of property in order to crowdfund projects to create products they desire. Note that the system produces wealth as the legal value of the cryptocredit is being negotiated in exchange for the production of products which will have an assessable use-value in the future. This increase in overall use-value available to the members of the network will be a measurable improvement to the network.





With a purely fiat currency, the users and savers of the currency are at the mercy of the producers and regulators of of that currency for its use value. This is how the dollar fails.





The current creation of dollars and debt by modern banks with fractional reserves has no reflection of anything productive occurring. Social justice and legal tender are incompatible for this reason. By requiring people accept the dollar for all debts both public and private, the State violates our freedom of association. The dollar is a value system organized through centralized, state-enforced banking. It is the measurement by which our nations control what goods and services are "worth". We accept these dollars as an economic measurement of our labor although it is given value through "securities" which are purely speculative in nature, with promised returns guaranteed by the full faith and credit of governments with a terrible credit record.





Not only that, the central bank produces new dollars to loan to the governments to spend in perpetuity, diminishing the dollars you've saved to pay for the ludacris salary of the financial executives lobbying for the printing of more dollars. This means that the wealthy and powerful will rule our nations as the lords of feudal Europe, controlling our economies by owning all of the the companies that pay our producers a supposed "living wage". Our goals for society are in no way reflected in the action of acquiring more money. Since competing currency's are disallowed, the supply of money is controlled by the power-elite of our economies, allowing them to essentially determine what each man is worth -- to them. To rebel from this injustice, we must stop measuring our worth with it and working for it for our livelihood.





Cryptocredit offers a token form of measurement that we can use toward ends that we desire our utility and efforts to accomplish. What makes cryptocredit different than fiat currency is that it is all tied to a peer assessed use-value of tangible assets. The assets use-value will be assessed by mutual agreement and exchanged as a contractual credit between the parties participating in the credit network. The end cryptocredit seeks is infinitely divisible barter, allowing for the maximum distribution of wealth through the joint ownership of property by trading interest in everyone's property. This allows for the most federated ownership of the property in an economy as no one is forced to share their property with the mutual associations, but they are rewarded with the services provided in that association for doing so.





What I'm struggling with is a method to assess use value. Perhaps someone can give me some ideas, so far the best thing I've got is the "square meal" as 1 credit. The use-value of anything will be subjective, so I'm trying to pick a standard metric easily assessed by a peer consensus (and reminds us to feed the hungry). The measurement of effort and the corresponding usefulness of the product should be fairly universal as the community should have an average experience of the labor required to obtain food. The use-value of property mortgaged would be assessed with reference to how much effort is required to produce it with the measuring stick of multiples of the effort required to provide a "square meal" with reference to the utility of that "square meal". This allows the labor-theory of value to be used to assess the mutual worth of the property to the network, but also have it balanced by the perceived utility of the property, as a ditch in a yard may take a lot of effort, but not be as useful as 1 meal. Obviously, this is a first go, but I think you can see the sort of method I'm aiming for here. As the economy grows further and further, the effort required to provide each member a meal should lessen, decreasing the value of credits with time, encouraging them to be used, not hoarded. As a result, as property is reassessed by the members will likely "rise" in credit value as a direct reflection of the wealth added to the economy.





Upon creation of the cryptocredit, it will be blinded like cash, but the number of credits available are directly proportional to the assessment of the peer-assessed use-value of all of the property the network holds mortgages for. Each member of the network pays back the credits according to a schedule agreed to by the network, the point of this scheduled payback is to control for the time-dependence of the use-value of a piece of property (product lifetime, predicted wear and tear, etc). So the cryptocredit will only be tied to things of somewhat currently assessed use-value.



The point of cryptocredit is to remind us that the point of an economy is to economize. Cooperate to make the most of the things available in order to create the better things of the future.