Trusteeship-Oriented Currency Design

Building The "NASDAQ" of
Independent Currency Brands

Three-Part Problem with Traditional Currency Systems

• Limited Traceability - products are sold to anyone with money, regardless of how it was earned
• Cannot Refuse - even if you could trace money to its source, not accepting a buyer's money has a direct negative impact to a market entity's survival
• Cannot Evaluate - even if you could trace and refuse money, how should money, and what it represents, be evaluated?

Why Is That a Problem?

• Illegitimate activities and undetected crime pays - market resources could have been diverted towards supporting more productive activities
• Inertia / Feeling of Inevitability - discourages self-determination of what to support
• Market participants have limited resources to arrive at informed economic decisions - blurs cause and effect

Solution: Simple Answer ...

• Make Currency Traceable by encouraging each market entity to issue its own currency brand
• Currency becomes traceable to each entity's declared market specialization
• Currency becomes traceable to each entity's auditable records and activities

Solution: ... Leads to New Concerns

• Solution also takes care of the market entity's survival concern, since it would be able to issue its own currency brand whether or not it accepts currency from another entity. However, new concerns arise ...
• Why bother accepting anyone else's currency when an entity could issue its own brand of currency?
• How to design a scalable, decentralized system of currency issuance, when independent currency brands could eventually number in the millions?

ReVision: Currency's New Role

• No guarantee that an entity's currency brand would be accepted by others
• An entity should promote its currency brand to be accepted by others
• Currency's role shifts to the quantification and demonstration of a market entity's self-determined obligation and contribution to the market

ReVision: A Tool For Self-Regulation

• An entity would self-regulate against its currency brand reputation - focus on entity sustainability instead of mere survival
• Not a Crazy Idea - publicly owned companies already issue revenue goals and self-regulate against the market valuation of its stock price
• In a trusteeship economy, each entity would manage its currency brand in a highly transparent manner - cultivate market's trust in its brand

ReVision: A Dynamic Market Ecology

• A reputable currency brand translates to more diverse product choices for an entity's members
• Unpopular currency brands are more likely to be rejected by sellers, leading to dwindling membership in unpopular entities
• How would it work? How to promote brand independence, self-regulation, market-driven evaluation?

Design: Info-Driven Currency System

• Design Around Ledger-Based Currencies
• Implement OCAUP Accounting Model
• Develop the 'NASDAQ' of Independent Currency Brands -> ICB Index

Design Basis: Ledger-Based Currency

• Currency that is issued, assigned and used through the crediting of one account and the debiting of another
• Currency that does not have commodity or physical backing, non-guaranteed redeemability for market products
• Brand independence translates to each entity's unilateral administration of its own ledger

Design Mechanics: OCAUP Accounting Model

• Organize Accounts
• Create Currency
• Assign Currency
• Use Currency
• Publish Results

Design Mechanics: OCAUP's Advantage

• OCAUP requires an entity to declare and regulate its self-determined limits
• Simplifies intra- and inter-entity reconciliation of currency activity
• Provides a coherent basis for generating entity reports and performing market analysis

Design Mechanics: OCAUP in a Nutshell

(See OCAUP document)

Design Results: ICB Index

• Collect, analyze and summarize trends - bot search and indexing
• Summarize each entity's currency brand reputation and performance
• Aggregate general inter-entity market trends - potentially millions of currency brands ( See Audit Demo )

Design Results: Example Metrics

• Per Entity:
  • Percent Recovery = (inflow/outstanding debits)
  • Inflow/Outflow Ratio - See Evaluation Demo (works with all browsers except IE)
  • Average Currency Units issued Per Member per Week
• Market
  • Inflow/Outflow by Region
  • Most Popular Specializations
  • Median Issued Currency per Member per Week

Project Pipeline

• OCAUP compliant accounting/ledger systems - with Prowl feature
• Reporter Module - to populate ICB Index with useful evaluation data (Source Code)
• Transaction Device - see Demo with Blogger or Simulated URL
• Interactive demo, simulation of market dynamics
• Documentation - http://tyaga.org/docs/

Summary

• Traditional currency systems: cannot trace, cannot refuse, cannot evaluate
• Decentralized issuance by market entity, currency's new role, need for an information-driven currency system
• Ledger-based currency, OCAUP accounting model, ICB Index