Note: This License is not limited to software manuals; it can be used for any textual work, regardless of subject matter or whether or not it is published as a printed book. I am using this License to protect the integrity of this project. If you are interested in the development of this 'open source decentralized money' idea please feel free to add to it.
The general idea is that every major city could establish a coupon exchange that would look similar to the floor of a stock exchange. Any business with an inventory or a service to provide could issue coupons on that inventory or for that service. The exchange board would determine limits such as what percentage of inventory can be forward issued or how many hours of service can be forward issued. The exchange would serve as a regulating market mechanism where free market forces would determine the value of each particular issue in relation to other issues on any given day. People could bring odd lots to trade instead of actually going to the backer for delivery. Delivery always remains an option however, which gives the bill its intrinsic value.
The exchange board would determine the standard for each class. The standard unit would be 'emergy' which is the combined value of all the energy it took to get whatever product or service is being represented to market. There is a formula for determining this and the board would calculate it for each class and set a standard ratio such as x number of emergy units (in this case 100) equals x amount of that product or service. This way instead of trading a ficticious value amount youre actually trading energy. This gives a fair and market accepted valuation to trade against. Supply and demand tends to distort 'fair value' at times so the exchange provides a platform for the free market to trade at will. For instance, even though two different issues have the same face value, they may trade on the exchange at a discount or a premium to each other. For a primer on emergy try these links http://www.dieoff.com/page232.pdf and http://www.dieoff.com/page170.htm (if you don't have pdf you can get the pdf reader free from adobe.com)
Now heres where it gets interesting. Most likely the market would develop three tiers. The top tier would be benchmark issues that remained generally stable such as certain commodities or various products that dont experience price swings due to supply and demand distortions. These issues would begin to trade directly as money throughout the local economy. You could have in your wallet an assortment of goods and services to trade to others in exchange for their goods and services. In other words REAL MONEY. Think about that for a moment...
The second tier would be issues that tended to trade on the exchange at different levels depending on various market or class specific reasons. These would not be as widely accepted but would still be valuable and entities would form around the exchange for clearing these for people. The third tier would be obscure issues that were very hard to trade except for face value at the business of issuance. These would be discounted by the broad market but would have value to specific individuals looking for that particular good or service. Again entities would form around the exchange for clearing these for people. This system would create a healthy regional market based on real value. As regional markets developed, they could then form intermarket exchange between cities.
Because of its open source decentralized nature, anyone is able to produce coupons to trade. If Argentina had this system alongside the peso, the public would be in much better shape right now. There is nothing to stop Argentines or anyone else from trading coupons. Anyone seeking empowerment and relief from market turmoil now has a solution. At first the market will depend on the integrity of the person trading the coupon. Over time as more individuals and companies begin to issue and accept Emergy Coupons, exchanges will need to form for regulation and clearing. Initially a standard will have to be set by the issuer and be readily available for reference. At some point an Emergy Coupon Standards Board will need to be formed. The internet would be ideal for this.
This is a first draft of what they might look like. The barcoding would provide easy tracking for merchants to make sure the bill was good. They would also be able to scan them to ensure that there were no market valuation distortions occuring recently on whatever class and or backing entity being presented for payment. By having them destroyed when redeemed at the source, it would discourage counterfeiting since no one could know when a particular bill would be taken out of circulation and thus flagged in the system. Trying to pass a counterfeit would be much harder than it is today. There would also be other security features to protect the market.
Heres the current federal version for comparison. 100 dollars of nothing. The beauty of Emergy Coupons is that they are just regular coupons for goods and services that are standardized making it easy to use them in place of other forms of money. The coming environment could prove to be a perfect time for the grassroots takeover of the market by the people.
