CCG Chronicles #8 - Token Engineering and Holochain
This episode is a continuation of the CCG Chronicles series which is a collection of interviews conducted during the Crypto Commons Gathering (CCG) in Austria back in August 2021. The interviews were also filmed to potentially be a part of a documentary I'm making with a few others. During the CCG I interviewed Scott Morris (@CS_Morris) and Moritz Bierling (@bierlingm) about how to design a new currency system, blockchain vs. holochain, and memes. Scott is a currency design consultant w...
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Transcript
Hi, everyone. What you're about to listen to is an interview that I took in person while attending the Crypto Commons Gathering Conference in Austria in August 2021. The conference itself was a wonderful experience where people of a lot of different backgrounds and political ideas were able to discuss openly and safely about how crypto can intersect with fostering the commons. What you'll notice from these interviews is that these differences in thought are sometimes apparent because we all come from different places, and what was honestly refreshing about the experience is that we could do it in a supportive environment. This is probably one of the most receptive audiences in crypto to socialism, which was really great for me. Also, a heads up is that you may notice sometimes that the audio was clearly recorded in the house that we were all staying in, which wasn't the best place for recording, but we did the best that we could with what we had. A lot of the interviews will also likely feature in the documentary that I'm making about the world of crypto and its potential futures with a friend. A big reason I was able to make it to this conference was thanks to all the support I received from patrons. So if you find the work that I do important, I hope you'll consider helping out starting at $3 per month on patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist.
So we are at the Crypto Commons gathering, and I've got two interview guests this time. They're two very interesting people that I've gotten to know over the course of the conference. And they have a lot of insight into currency design and, systems design, and and a lot of other really interesting topics that we'll get into for the interview. But to start off, maybe each of you can just introduce yourselves for people who clearly wouldn't know you.
Sure.
Of course, they both. I'll let the other one know. Alright. Alright. So I'm Scott Morris.
I am American, but recently became a digital nomad. I come from the community currency space. I've been working as a community currency system designer and strategist, since 2008. I've piloted three currency programs, one in Fairfield, Iowa, one in Ames, Iowa, and another in Ithaca, New York, where I basically took over for the Ithaca Hours local currency, which was known as the as America's largest and oldest, local currency of kind of the the modern generation. I then went on to work, with Coin, which is an agency for community currencies based out of Amsterdam and, supported the Bancorp ICO, which, set a world record at the time of raising a $153,000,000 in two and a half hours. So these days, I'm an independent currency system designer slash token engineer, and I'll pass it over to Moritz.
I am Moritz Spierling. I'm from Germany, although I sometimes enjoy the more local forms of identity more than the national ones, Hamburg to be precise. So you could say I'm a hamburger. And, yeah, I'm not a token engineer. I'm not a systems designer. I have been a nomad. I was a nomad for about two to three years where I went on 50 trips a year, which then led me to desire some more stability. But in the course of the travels, those travels I've worked with Holo and Holochain, two of the sort of most interesting to me sister projects in the crypto sphere that are going beyond the emerging standard of blockchain, let's say. And in the course of that work, I've mostly done communications, I've done writing, I've done advocacy and public relations in a sense. I've also worked with another blockchain startup, Neufund in Berlin, where I helped them write their white paper and also prepare for the ICO. My interests in the space lie primarily in figuring out the soft social side of getting things out into the world. And so I tend to stick around for the start and sort of early period of a project, and then hand it off to more competent people in the further administration. So I tend to float a lot between projects. I tend to float a lot in the spaces between projects as well. And so currently, I'm mostly I'm working a regular development job for cash while also, helping out a number of projects in the whole chain space. And now being here, I'm already seeing another set of opportunities emerge to bring those together. And, yeah, that's something about me.
Cool. Maybe to start off, it would be really interesting if maybe I guess probably, Scott would be the better one, but to define what is currency design since you already have all this. And, you know, maybe taking it from a currency design, not thinking about blockchain, and then maybe, you know, what are the extra things that go along when it comes to blockchain or crypto or Sure. Or Sure. And then maybe you can talk about it a whole lot afterwards.
Great. And feel free to link to my, my TED talk on this subject. Yeah. TED talk. I do. I do. TEDx is a good college. Not a TED talk. TEDx. Alright. Calm down. But but anyway, I I I talk about this. I call it putting people and planet above paper wealth. Right? And the core idea of that talk is that money is a type of energy, right, rather than as this, like, substance or, you know, the printed bills, the kind of superficial aspects that leap to mind. And I define currency basically the same way that Bernard Liedz here defined currency, as, anything that is used as a medium of exchange within a community to facilitate trade. Right? Of course, we lump a lot of different roles into money. Right? Money is such a broad term now, but there's a number of discrete ways that money serve us that are important to be aware of because what's happening as we have all this new diversity of money and units coming into being is that they are beginning to be more and more specialized in the purposes that they serve. Okay. So when you ask an economics professor, what is money? They'll respond with, well, it's a mean exchange, it's a store of value, and it's a unit of account. I believe that's missing something, and it's specifically the function that it serves us when we are interacting with the future with money, making choices about the future when it comes to money. Because, yeah, like, when we invest, when we create credit, we enable certain kinds of futures over others. Right? We're making a very specific kind of choice, but we don't speak to that and the functions of money as they're kind of traditionally discussed. But you can kind of look at it like this. Right? I have my skills. Right? I go out into the wilderness. I mix my time and my knowledge with natural resources. I bring something of value back to the community. Right? And now I'm in a marketplace environment. I have my stuff. I can sell it for some of this money stuff. I can use the money stuff to buy the things that I need, right, and then whatever money stuff I have that's left over, I put in my savings account. Okay? So I check my app. I've got my savings account. I've got my checking account. And I've got squiggly line next to the numbers. Right? That's money serving the unit of account function. Right? When I'm actively exchanging, right, that's the present tense of money in the medium low exchange function. When I put it in the savings, right, I'm storing that value which represents the energy that I went and expended in producing this product, this good or service that I sold. Right? So I'm storing that value there in in kind of a past tense of money in a way. Then when it comes to the future, I can take from either place. Right? The present tense, money, the cash that I have, or the stored value that I have in the past, and I can put that kind of towards a future tense kind of situation. And, you know, that can have different benefits for me, whatever. But it's I think it's something that we aren't taught in terms of, like, the ways to think about money, and having that kind of a breakdown of the functions of money can be very helpful when it comes to understanding the ways that these different currencies and tokens are showing up. And it it also points to, most of the failings in the system design because a lot of times there's so much focus that's put on the token or the coin that we just expect it to do all this different stuff, and then it finds itself conflicted. And so a major example of this in the normal economy is US dollars. Right? Simultaneously serves as a medium of exchange and a store value. Right? And you get incentivized to utilize it as store value with the interest that you earn on your savings, etcetera. So then as that money moves out of circulation and into store value function, there's not enough money that's left over to facilitate all the trade that wants to happen. So there's a kind of conflicting directives, conflicting services that that same unit is trying to serve. So, yeah, that creates a lot of friction. And, as far as, you know, blockchain goes, I mean, I I would imagine most people watching this are already familiar with blockchain in simple terms, right, with distributed ledger, right, which records transactions between any number of addresses using any number of tokens, right, which can represent hypothetically any type of value. Right? I I I say that a token is a box. It's not the token isn't what matters. That's just the label on the box. What matters is the value that's inside of it. And what DNLT is enabling is, a new suite of functionality in terms of the ways that we can design value flows in economies, and generate different types of outcomes and benefits and how those are are recognized and shared across everybody that that that they can access that ledger.
So maybe I should stop there. Well, I just wanted to ask real quick. Since you were coming from the, like, from the community currency, I wanna say industry, but, like,
space. Space.
Were you when blockchain started becoming more of a thing, did you, were you excited about it, or were you, like, skeptical about it, or, like, you know because I imagine that coming from, like, the old school I think you guys talked to, like, earlier in the conference, there's, you know, there's some people from the old school like, Matthew Slater, who's a bit, like, who's who's quite critical. So I'm just curious what how you felt in the beginning and Yeah. That's changed over time. Or Yeah. I mean, look, the
one of the fundamental dynamics in play here is just pluralism. Alright? It's there's no one true solution to this. It's, all hands on deck. We need all the solutions on the table that we can get kind of deal. So it's not I I have not fallen into the trap of, like, oh, this this way is better, categorically speaking, than that way. Right? Blockchain is just a a technology platform. Right? What really matters is what we're using it for. So I understood I I mean, I remember when when the Bitcoin white paper hit. I've been watching crypto the entire time. Right? And, you know, can remember when it was, you know, 10 thousandth of a cent. Right? Being in Of course you went all in. Oh, oh, yeah. With all the capital I have as an American millennial who graduated college in 2008. So so anyway, it made total sense to me why we needed, you know, an innovation like blockchain and Bitcoin, right, to start to shift the fundamental paradigm of, like, what monetary policy is and means and where it comes from and who gets to participate in it, etcetera. So it's really, like, breaking things open here that in in creating space for conversations that we had to have. But back in those days, I would walk into local businesses and wanna talk about local currency, and they'd be like, I I I think I need to ask you to leave. Like, it might be illegal for me to talk to you about this. Like, that's how little people knew about the, the the ability for us to create alternative monetary systems and systems of value exchange. As it turns out, you know, legally in The US, there's quite a lot of freedom that you're provided, when it comes to creating these kinds of systems. You know, basically, don't make it mistakeable for the dollar, don't do denominations of less than a dollar, and stay away from coins. Okay? And that's those are fair boundaries. Fine. Right? Whatever. Outside of that, you can create totally new agreement systems for people to exchange goods and services on their own terms outside of any kind of external dependency, which we desperately need in those circumstances that are created by financial system crashes, which we are reminded of in our 2020 experience when the whole global economy shut down with COVID all over again, money stops moving and people are just struggling to earn enough to meet their basic needs. Right? So we need these these backup systems in place so that we can fall back into those and make sure we can meet our needs even when stuff's messed up on higher levels of the economy. I've just understood that crypto is a platform and that there were gonna be a lot more people that were interested in, you know, how to create units of value and to have them serve specific purposes in the world. Right? Because there's a lot of stuff, a lot of need, right, that the traditional economic structures are not meeting. And it's not engineered to serve to meet those needs. It's engineered for other purposes.
I wanna add something to that. So I think partially what what is there with the existing monetary systems is a simple recognition that it might not actually have been feasible to both educate people in how flows happen of of values, resources, information, and so on in previous times, as well as make people care enough about using alternative systems. We had very limited technology for network communication, for all these different larger scale coordinate of capacities. So as we're now entering though the digital and the network and the information world and economies, we have the tools available to have awareness of what's happening far away from us, and we have relationships of affinity or of interest with people that aren't actually geographically close to us. And so this conversation on currencies no longer is a game of my town or my region or my nation or even my my like super region, but it is a conversation of, hey I find myself in relationship with all these different people and all these different groups. And we see that there's value within the group in the skills of the people that are there, the resources they have available to them. How can we better facilitate the flows of those assets let's say to meet the needs that that group has. And Blockchain is one way of doing that or rather a a medium on which to construct systems to do that. But really the question always should come back to what are the actual needs of the people that you're trying to serve, and what are the resources they have available to them, and how can you find a mechanism to translate between the surplus on this side and the the the negative on this side. Mhmm.
Mhmm. So, for you, I'm curious because you're so involved in the Holochain community, which is, like,
post blockchain, I guess. Or pre however you wanna define it. Yeah. Something it's a big cousin of blockchain. Right. Right. Right.
So I just wonder if, like
but I guess you're not, like, anti Blockchain. No. No. No. I I would say it like this, like, I think I see Bitcoin as sort of the the grandfather and the, the like the rude and sort of slightly racist grandfather like this. Like fathered a lot of children, you know, like this in the background and like rocking on a chair and like are you damn kids with all your new tools, you know. But really what he did do, he gave us like the capital and the knowledge and the education and the practice of growing up and like seeing oh there's now these new things we can do. He might not agree with what we're doing but he's still there and he gave us the opportunity to even explore those things. So so when is our racist? No. I I wouldn't I wouldn't reduce it to that particular thing. But like to just yeah. Use a meme to to incept in you this idea of somebody who you might not agree with or who isn't the best solution to the problems that are currently, facing us. But that still made it possible for us to even talk about, taking an active role in in designing these systems better. And also not to forget even more important maybe to fund all those weirdos that don't fit into the existing corporate and and normal economic world that are spinning off further away from the local groups that they're usually attached to or their kin groups, but then come back hopefully with some goal that they can share with the community. But if they don't have a way to capitalize on their early sighting of valuable opportunities that they can't even articulate to people around them, then we will never see the fruits of their labor benefit larger groups of people than just themselves. And I think what Bitcoin did is it gave all those nerds an early opportunity to play with an Internet of value and then to be rewarded for putting in resources into that very early on that they've now got to spend on all the successor systems. Right. I guess it is a little bit unfortunate who who some of those nerds were. I could benefit from that in the beginning but Depending who which side you're on, yes.
It is what it is. It is what it is. Right? And and and what's amazing about this space is, you know, it's persistence. Right? It's very clear, you know, who is invested in that system. Right? If you hold those tokens, then you're investing in that whole meme and Mhmm. Worldview, etcetera, which, you know, just to I feel like ice that cake. Right? You can look at the price of Bitcoin as a one on one correlation with humanity's fetish for scarcity. A 100% of Bitcoin's value is derived from its artificial scarcity.
Do you think it's a fetishism of the artificial scarcity? For me, at least my impression is that it's the fetishism of, feeling like someone else doesn't have power over you to a certain extent. With with we just like in that world, it's like very closely linked to, like, you know, the government printing money. Yep. That that's right. And and let's be clear. That is a that is a value proposition that it offers and delivers on. Right? It did create that alternative, that portal into something other than that. Maybe the government doesn't make Bitcoin, but, like, other people make Bitcoin, I guess. That's
right. But it was the first option for us to do that with and for that it deserves respect, etcetera. But that's not where that story ends. That was only where the story began. Right? And I think we would do welding I'm so confused.
What have I done?
The memes, man. They they won't stop. Alright.
But so then I guess a few more. It's like, what does a Holochain bring for currency design that you think is, like, a new
that that is, like, different than what blockchain can bring or, like, that goes beyond, I guess, the limitations of blockchain. I think I'll set some context first before I directly answer that, which is Holochain itself isn't sort of this thing jumping out of the void at us. It's it's basically a one of the latest iterations and and sort of, growth out of, a number of projects that are sort of have a longer history than that. So, you were joking earlier about like is it post blockchain, is it pre blockchain? The basic designs for it were already in store before bitcoin came out, but I'm not making that claim often because like, so this this game of like who came first, right, it's not actually operational which is a huge difference, right? I I I think we owe much more respect to things that are working even if they're imperfect than to things that are perfect in theory but not actually working in practice. So in in any way, so that Holochain itself comes out of a larger effort called Sceptre, which is a way to rewrite computing from top to bottom. I won't go into that here, but the more important part is that Scepter is the technical side of an even larger project or another project of that which is called, Metacurrency Project. And the Metacurrency Project is sort of a semi loose association of people who, have worked and lived in this sort of alternative currency, community currency space for at least the last two decades, and, that see themselves as advancing the development and the ideation of the tools we need for the next economy, being the information economy and no longer the industrial economy. And so all that history then ended up leading to the design for Holochain, which is markedly different from the from the blockchain designs, simply because they recognize that the most performance, scalable, and robust systems are to be found in nature and not in in machines. If you look at your body, your body is a huge coordinate of dance between trillions of cells, each of which don't write their states to a global ledger. Right? Like they they embody their own internal state, they send out signals to the ones around them, they coordinate by forming into larger groups of organs and of, other sort of units, like my my my arm has all these different muscle systems and so on. So looking at those kind of systems, both the body but also the ecology of of life in in a region, helps you understand that you have to make things local and have to make local things visible to context other than local. And that that basic insight produces in a very different architecture than having a flat surface within which things get moved around. Mhmm. And which is the blockchain architecture in a sense. And of course blockchain space itself is discovering the same thing, just that they started from that blank sheet. They're not trying to do this Internet of Blockchains and sidechains and sharding and all this stuff, which is basically also recognition of the inherent limits to that flat sheet, by linking those flat sheets together, but Whole Chain started from that recognition and therefore was able to, start from local and then build, more extended structures on top of that. So that's sort of the the difference I think in in origin. And to relate now back to currency, the people behind Holochain have built over 120 currency systems I wanna say. I don't have knowledge of all of those, but basically what they did was they started off as a software company trying to figure out how to have processes of coordination work well within groups or organizations, and they ended up building these systems for employee bonus programs, for water management, for fishery, like making sure that fishers, keep don't over fish their their fishing grounds. Like a vast variety and diversity of application spaces and through that embodied experience and knowledge of of doing these systems there, they then saw that there's a need for actual technology that is different than the technology that they had available and that was where Holochain came from. So the intention with Holochain is not just to be a competitor to blockchain, but to actually aikido some of that energy from the blockchain space. That's also why it's called Holochain. There's no other reason really for it. There is no chain. Oh, it's not a blockchain. There are chains but there's not the chain. Exactly. Yeah. And and so like you have the energy back into here are the tools you have for a group to organize its own flows. And so the the definition of currency that the Metacurrency project uses is a formal symbol system that enables shapes and measures, flows of resources of value information, etcetera, within or across a community of people. And so this definition, really emphasizes the formal nature of it, that you have something that has a clear link, that has a clear boundary, and that has a clear purpose, and that isn't sort of just this thing that we unintentionally use, for for all kind of things.
Mhmm. But I guess for you as a currency designer, don't a lot of these, like, technological advances how does that affect your job? I mean, I mean, how does it always get to date with, like, pretty technical stuff sometimes?
That that's true and it's not true. I mean, like, there's so much that's going on. There's no way to track everything that's happening. You know, basically, the way that, I operate in the space is I encounter someone who has an idea or, you know, already a company or whatever, and they have some sort of mission, some community. They're trying to accomplish some aim. Right? And they're like, oh, I want a token. I wanna do an ICO. Like, this is recognizing the potential of tokenization for a fundraising solution. And, you know, I say, okay. Great. Well, then raising some funds with tokens is something that you're after. It's a design goal for us, but let's first be very clear about what is the, you know, new story of value that you're trying to tell here. Like, what is it in the world that you're trying to correct, you know, basically, and then how are you inspiring people to do things that they weren't already doing it, doing it before, or to do that in, you know, greater amounts and faster, etcetera, because we have so many crises that we're facing that clearly our normal economic structures are just not resolving. So, you know, having the different protocols like, Holochain and Ethereum and Stellar, etcetera, they all provide just an environment within which you can orchestrate value systems and flows of value within that system. And so the protocol just kind of defines how you're gonna recognize different players and different assets and how those can can connect and the different kinds of rules that you can do here, there, and other places, like what mechanisms are available and the like. But, yeah, I come at it from a very, kind of fundamentals approach of, you know, what's the the shared purpose. Right? Who are the stakeholders in play that are aligned around that or have something to do with that? What is kind of our our our our technical need? Right? What what what does the solution need to look like as far as we know? Right? And then how are we going to be working with those stakeholders and the solution in service of the shared purpose? You know? And just having that mapped out and very clear from the outset makes everything else much easier.
How have you guys enjoyed the CryptoCommons gathering?
It's great. We like it here.
It's a lot about real value. Yes.
Real value is a major thing. It's a meme. Yeah. The the the memes group is is fantastic. Not gonna lie. But I I I would say really the the the most rewarding aspect of this for me is just having, this active community of people who understand, you know, what a commons is and how it operates and how to be a commoner and what commoning looks and feels like and, you know, really just opening up into a shared space of shared value where we can basically do whatever we want at any time and it's all more or less great. You know? Like, and there's there's there's food that's being prepared, you know, regularly. We have a lovely fire outside that people can come and hang out around all the time. We're taking beautiful hikes out there and having some of the most awesome sessions at a kind of conference
esque gathering that I've ever, you know. Most informal conference I've ever been to yesterday. That too.
Which is somewhat strength. Yeah. Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is about organization.
Yeah. Yeah. And and, you know, we recognize that we're a subset of a greater global community that, you know, many others have wanted to attend this, but it's really awesome just to kind of have that community bonding space where we're able to get to know each other as people and not our logos and projects and business interests etc. Right, right. I am more than just my Twitter. That's true.
Yeah. I mean, I I second that. I I don't have much to add. I I find most valuable to, make these real human connections, which are then the ground on which we can either help the existing projects or find new ways to free up energy that's already latent in the system. And, yeah, just support each other in supporting the people that we service.
Alright. So now I need to ask you guys to access everyone. What do the crypto commons mean to you? Who wants to start?
I don't really have a definition for that. I do somehow think of it as sort of it's a recognition that there's a new suite of tools available to us to organize ourselves, some of which you can get very technically competent in or just understand the fundamental principles of. And then there's also recognition that that that's not the real point. The point is to do valuable things. And so
With real value. Yes, real value.
And so it's simply people who who have those two things, if they understand there are cool things out there that we can use to do cool shit with, and then there's cool shit we want to do and that's important. It's not just cool shit we want to do for us, but cool shit we want to do for everybody. Then you're welcome here and then you're gonna find brothers and sisters for doing the things you wanna do or or or co collaborators basically. So, yeah. Cool people. Cool people. Cool people. Cool shit.
I mean, Crypto Commons, I've I mean, frankly, I think it's essential. I'm I'm I'm thankful that this is a community that is cohering and, you know, kind of congealing. And the reason for that is because so far, blockchain and crypto have been leveraged, I would say, more by people that are more privately interested. You know, they're interested in this as a as a way to generate wealth and to become rich themselves and to, you know, kind of further extract value. It shows up in different ways, and that could be more subtle than, you know, the system that we're trying to escape from, I would say, where it just gets absolutely horrendous. But, CryptoCommons, and CryptoComminers is recognizing that crypto is actually more powerful when it's used to support shared value. Right? Sharing value across communities, and empowering those communities, you know, with the the the capacity to share share value for shared purpose. Right? Because, you know, like we've said, there it's not like this stuff is done just out of some academic curiosity. You know, these are systems level evolutions, in ways that we're able to coordinate ourselves, so that we can meet some very pressing challenges. You know, climate chaos is upon us, basically. You know, we have wildfires raging year round. The the ocean caught fire in the Gulf Of Mexico. Right? This stuff is insane. You know, and the only way to address problems on that scale is to coordinate on that scale, and to do that in a way that isn't motivated by private, extractive financial interest. So crypto and crypto commons in particular enable us with an infrastructure that gives us those capabilities.
In the beginning of the conference, you mentioned the crypto commons as being kind of leftist. Would you like to expand on that?
Yeah. I mean, fundamentally, I think, you know, I'm I'm I'm a left libertarian. Right? I'm in the bottom left quadrant of the political compass, and I I see this very much about, you know, it's it's it's not relying on government. Right? It's not an authoritarian solution. This crypto commons basically creates a construct where there's a plurality of communities and economies that one can opt into participating within, that are more or less self governed, themselves. So it's kind of libertarian in in that aspect. Right? Very kind of cooperativist. You know, but it's, I would say more progressively minded. Right? We recognize that this isn't just something so that we can extract financial wealth, but it's something that is driven by, shared purpose in those communities.
Would you agree with them, Lawrence?
I think I I I see the connection you're making, and I agree that that's a valuable connection to make. I tried to step out of that compass, but I also recognize that I naturally fall on some some position there, and it tends to be sometimes all over the place. But, I tend to be more on the writer side, I think. Although, actually, whenever I talk with somebody, that is more on the left side, I always agree. It's like that I'm valuable to do, that are valuable to do, but then I then I sometimes try to bore into how do you actually mean to achieve that. Mhmm. And usually there's some like like papering over something or being so heartbroken by an issue that is so terrible which I recognize that you make concedes that are actually then dooming the next evolution of that or the next solution to that to also failure. So I I don't know, I don't think I don't really conceive it really in a political sense. I just conceive it more as groups wanna do things, they need tools to do that, and, if they you don't really have individuals to be able to gather enough resources to fund things that are on a scale that far exceeds their their capacity. And I think the story I would sort of more tell is that with all these system failures and state failures and other body failures, in our global society, it's really good to be able to bring the lowest necessary unit or smallest possible unit of using those kind of tools down so that, we have a lot of bottom up capacity to experiment and to learn and to mutually support, and from that then build emerging systems that are that are adding on top of an evolutionary process not just a top down institution of, or imposition of a particular system that again, yeah, has has all kinds of drawbacks. Mhmm. So, yeah, I see it like in a neutral sense but I also find value in seeing it politically. Yeah. Yeah.
Just to piggyback on that, the way that I've explained it and for community currency, right, I see community currency as a very useful solution set to work with because I find it at a political crossroads. Right? And basically, the the story is this, there's pain in the world. Everybody knows that. The main contention when it comes to left and right is how do we address that. Right? People on the left want something to happen to help people immediately, and if the government needs to do it, fine. So what? The right says, well, that's that that those are our tax dollars, and I don't know you. Not with my tax money. We'll handle it in, like, you know, churches and the social economy space. Right? That's a problem for them. The community currencies and crypto commoning provide a solution that satisfies both requirements. Right? We get to go and mobilize around helping people, meeting those needs, and it's not predicated on coercion and taxation from the state. Right? So it's something that I think provides us an opportunity for, political harmonization, which is essential today when we're becoming more and more politically polarized than ever before, at least in The US. I can only speak to that context, but I think it's something that we're seeing in other places as well.
Have you found that,
I guess, a good range of people being interested in community currencies in your experience?
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
Yeah. Nice. Well, I think, that it's been really interesting to have two people on, I think, for the first time, together. But so maybe to just finish off if you guys want to just plug where people can keep up with you and your work.
Go ahead. Okay. Well, I got deleted from Facebook and Instagram, so that's no longer an option. But for the meantime, I'm still available on Twitter at beerling m, my last name plus an m for Moritz. And other than that, you can also send me an email to moritzbierlinghey dot com, h e y dot com. And, yeah, all the other socials I try to be available on through as well.
Great. And you can find me on Twitter as c s underscore morris. Hit me up on Telegram as at tokenjedi or email me at the tokenjedi@gmail.com. Oh, yeah.
That's an incredible name. Alright. Thanks a lot. And,
I mean, we'll hang up. Thanks, man.