Reimagining Money - The Atlantic. Bitcoin was conceived as a modern solution to an ages- old problem: How can two parties agree on and verify an exchange of value? BALLE’s recently published field guide The Future of Health is Local, produced with support from Kaiser Permanente, illuminates the connections between local. It is extremely important to understand the difference between demand and quantity demanded. The program will be run by the staff of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics in coordination with the Schumacher Center Advisory Board and Board. In this sense, Bitcoin is an effective technology, in that it trains the massive processing power of distributed personal computers on the same situation that paper currency was built to resolve. But in important ways, Bitcoin transposes some of the shortcomings of traditional currency onto the digital realm. It ignores a whole host of questions about the potential to reimagine what money can be designed to emphasize: What sorts of money will encourage admirable human behavior? What sorts of money systems will encourage trust, reenergize local commerce, favor peer- to- peer value exchange, and transcend the growth requirement? In short, how can money be less an extractor of value and more a utility for its exchange? Around the world, people have proposed experimental, tentative answers to these questions. What follows are three ways that people have toyed with rearranging the priorities of transactions. One of the first and most successful contemporary efforts is the Massachusetts Berk. Share, which was developed to help keep money from flowing out of the Berkshire region. One hundred Berk. Shares cost $9. 5 and are available at local banks throughout the region. Participating local merchants then accept them as if they were dollars. Although it amounts to selling goods at a perpetual discount, merchants can in turn spend their local currency at other local businesses and receive the same discounted rate. Nonlocals and tourists purchase goods with dollars at full price, and those who bother to purchase items with Berk. Shares presumably leave town with a bit of unspent local money in their pockets. Teaching Case From The Wall Street Journal Weekly Accounting Review on June 6, 2014. New Rules to Alter How Companies Book Revenue by: Michael Rapoport. Dubbed a “great economic experiment' by The New York Times, BerkShares are a local currency for the Berkshire region of Massachusetts. Federal currency is exchanged. The 5- percent local discount may seem like a huge disadvantage to take on. In the long term, the discount is more than compensated for by the fact that Berk. Shares can circulate only locally. They remain in the region and come back to the same stores again and again. Even if nonlocal stores, such as Walmart, agree to accept the local currency, they can. The best Walmart can do is use it to pay their local workers or purchase supplies and services from local merchants. Many other communities. Most of these local currencies are still more fad than utility. Moreover, by pegging themselves to central currency, these local discount currencies can isolate themselves only so much from the chronic monetary problems of inflation, deflation, bubbles, and debt.* * *Unlike local discount currencies, cooperative community currencies don. They are not purchased into existence but are worked into circulation. They are best thought of less like money than like exchanges. The simplest form of cooperative currency is a favor bank, such as those founded in Greece and other parts of southern Europe during the Euro crisis. Incapable of finding work or sourcing Euros, people in many places lost the ability to transact. Even though a majority of what they needed could be produced locally, they had no cash with which to trade. So they built simple, secure trading websites. The sites did not record value amounts so much as keep general track of who was providing what to the community and coordinate fair exchanges. This casual, transparent solution works particularly well in a community where people already know one another and freeloaders can be pressured to contribute. Larger communities have been using . Again, a simple exchange is set up on a website, where people list what they need and what they can contribute. The bigger and more anonymous a community, the more security and verification is required. Luckily, dozens of startups and nonprofit organizations have been developing apps and website kits via which local or even nonlocal communities can establish and run their own currencies. Time exchanges tend to work best when everybody values their time the same way or is providing the same service. Time dollars are extremely egalitarian, valuing each person. The Fureai Kippu exchange gave people the ability to bank hours of eldercare by taking care of old people in their communities, which they could then spend to get care for their own relatives far away. So one person might provide an hour of bathing services for an elder in her neighborhood in return for someone preparing meals for her grandfather who lives in another city. As the Caring Relationship Tickets became accepted things of value, people began using them for a variety of services. Time- dollars systems, and those like them, don. Unlike bank- issued currency, hours are not borrowed into existence, nor do they collect interest over time. When Sylvia babysits for Joe. Since they both started at zero, Sylvia now has three hours in her account, while Joe. He will remain owing those three hours to the system. The net result of the exchange is even. The net total of the system is still zero. It is not a growth economy but a transactional economy. Although a person can do a bunch of work in order to bank enough hours to get a whole bunch of services, most time exchanges put a limit on how many hours members can accumulate. They also put a limit on how many hours a person can owe. This way a freeloader can be removed from the system, and the entire community can absorb the cost of the unearned hours pretty easily.* * *How might traditional banks participate effectively in the financial rehabilitation of the communities they serve? Normally, the bank would evaluate his business and credit and then either reject his loan request or give him the money at around 8 percent interest. The risk is that he won. Indeed, part of the cost of the loan is that speculative risk. In another approach, the banker could make Sam a different offer. The bank could agree to put up $1. Sam is able to raise the other $1. Sam is to sell digital coupons for $1. The bank can supply the software and administrate the escrow. Sam got his money more cheaply than if he borrowed the whole sum from the bank, because he can pay back the interest in retail- priced pizza. The community lenders have earned a fast 2. These are benefits one can. Meanwhile, all the local . The bank becomes a community partner, helping a local region invest in itself. The approach also provides the bank with a great hedge against continued deflation, hyperinflation, or growing consumer dissatisfaction with Wall Street and centrally issued money. If capital lending continues to contract as a business sector, the bank has already positioned itself to function as more of a service company. Like money in a digital age, it becomes less a thing of value in itself than a way of fostering the value creation and exchange of others. This article has been adapted from Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. Berk. Shares - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Berk. Shares is a local currency that circulates in The Berkshires region of Massachusetts. It was launched on September 2. The Berk. Shares website lists around 4. Berkshire County that accept the currency. Berk. Shares are pegged with an exchange rate to the US dollar, but Nick Kacher of the Schumacher Center has discussed the possibility of pegging its value to a basket of local goods in order to insulate the local economy against volatility in the US economy. According to the Berk. Shares website. Businesses then accept Berk. Shares at full dollar value, differentiating the business as one supporting the Berk. Shares values of local economy, ecology, sustainability, and community, and creating a five percent discount incentive for those using the currency. Berk. Shares can then be used by accepting businesses to purchase goods and services from other participating businesses, make change, pay salaries, or support local non- profits, increasing the local economic multiplier effect and keeping value recirculating in the region. If businesses have an excess of Berk. Shares, they may also be returned to a participating bank at the equivalent rate of 9. Berk. Share (i. e., charging no exchange fee). Over 7. 0 area non- profits currently accept Berk. Shares for donations. Participating banks provide Berk. Shares with 8 brick- and- mortar offices where residents can exchange dollars for Berk. Shares and receive more information on the project. Denominations. Du Bois, a civil rights leader born in Great Barrington. The 1. 0 Berk. Share note uses a portrait of Robyn Van En, co- founder of the community supported agriculture movement at Indian Line Farm in South Egremont, Massachusetts, died in 1. The 2. 0 Berk. Share note uses a portrait of Herman Melville, the author of Moby- Dick, written in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The 5. 0 Berk. Share note uses a portrait of Norman Rockwell, a painter who lived in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Purpose. It is an attempt to strengthen the local economy. The program also seeks to increase public awareness of the importance of local economies and to foster optimism for the prospect of gaining local economic self- sufficiency. The project seeks to assure that a high percentage of each dollar spent will remain circulating in the community . This increase in community capital creates a positive environment for new entrepreneurial ventures. The Berk. Shares currency has attracted international media attention. Berk. Shares were featured on the History Channel program Ten things you didn't know. Taxation. Similar to gift cards, the applicable tax is taken at the time of purchase and paid to the IRS at the time of redemption by the merchant. Retrieved September 6, 2. Bello, Marisol (April 5, 2. Archived from the original on October 1. Retrieved September 6, 2. Retrieved September 6, 2. Solman, Paul (September 5, 2. Retrieved September 6, 2.
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