CCG Chronicles #5 - The Credit Commons, Currency Design, and Totemomics
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. I interviewed Matthew Slater, creator of the Credit Commons Protocol which is a mutual credit accounting software ( which does not use any blockchain). The Credit Commons Protocol allows for ledger to be recursive...
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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 CryptoCommons 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. Place. Yeah. We're here today at the crypto commons gathering with Matthew Slater. So Matthew, you're very I know for sure this is going to be a very interesting interview. You're quite a, a special person in the CCG house because you have so much experience already when it comes to currencies, currency design, well before blockchain or cryptocurrency was ever a thing. And also outside of it, since it was a thing. Of course. So I come to it with a completely different language and world view. Sure. Yeah. We will definitely dig into that. But maybe just for for people who maybe don't know you, you can just give a quick introduction and how you've ended up in this house in the middle of the mountains in Austria.
Well, it all started in February when I set out to write the software for the local exchange trading systems movement. And I produced a nice open source module and, distribution of a website that any lets could download and run and do their accounting on and, social media. But there was also a need for an organization to do that for those groups because it was still quite a technical difficult task. So I became the software developer and maintainer of this distribution for around 300 local groups over time. So that's kept me busy over the last decade.
So you were a software developer by trade beforehand?
Yes. But looking for a mission. Looking for a field of expertise. Looking to make the world in a better place in a way that nobody else quite was. And I found that quite well. While I was doing all of this software development for the community, I got deeper and deeper into the, phenomenology of money, particularly trying to answer to the question myself. How do you configure a currency object? You want to give the community a currency tool. What are the options? And to do that, I had to ask myself, well, what is a currency for? What kinds of currencies exist in the world? And so I've gotten very deeply into monetary theory and read a lot of history and things like that. So in all this time, blockchain was growing, but it's not serving local exchange credit, not serving local exchange trading systems or time banks or any of those community money systems. But the idea behind the blockchain was that somebody would issue a very large number of tokens and then leave it to the market, a global market typically, to give those tokens value based on some narrative or story. This is really, a whole different approach to creating money, making tokens flow, letting the money function as a medium of exchange or a store of value or a vehicle for speculation and finance. So we've been talking very different languages all this time, and I was very happy to be invited to this conference, because I've been too busy to push my world view into the crypto sphere. And it feels like finally I've been invited to share it.
Yeah. So you have, it seems to me like you have quite a bit of experience when it comes to, you know, all these things around currency and money and thinking, well before blockchain has become a thing of course. And before and you said it it sounds like you're coming out of basically what what are the same events that, I mean, arguably, Bitcoin came out of, which was the the financial crash. I assume that is, like, one of the one of the critical moments in time where you said
something has to change, we need something different. In fact, I had had a a go at writing software for lets before, but the financial crash coincided with a moment in my life where I said, I really want to, do some activism on my own account and not as an employee. I want to go a bit more radical, and the economy was right there, and the left movement was right there, with its software ten years behind. And I thought I could really make a difference. Yeah. Right.
So maybe, to start off, I think it would be interesting to ask you, from your view, it's a very broad question, but how is money created? Like, how is money created today and what are the the issues with it?
So it's arguable that, money, as we know it, has been created the same way for quite a long time. And most of the money that circulates and that we experience is created when it is borrowed into existence. So when I say most, that's like 97%. Money created today, there's you need to think of two different kinds of money. So there's a kind of money that circulates between the treasury, the central bank, and the accounts of the main banks, called base money, but it doesn't leave that circuit. That's not the money that we use. That's kind of used for accounting and management in those circles. The main monetary circuit that we use today includes a bit of cash, which is printed by the government, but that's almost irrelevant amount, and a lot of credit that ordinary people borrow from banks. So that means that when you or a business go to the bank to borrow some money, the money is created at the point of borrowing. They just put it in your account. And that means that, 97% of the money in circulation is bank debt. And interestingly, the where it circulates is only between the banks. So when we experience money as cash, we think that's the real money, but it's the tiny, tiny part. And most of the money that we spend and that moves around is just going between bank accounts, and that's because it doesn't exist outside of the banks. This has some unfortunate consequences for the larger economy because it means that banks control monetary policy, And they do that by controlling, first of all, the amount of money that they are willing to lend, at any one time. And the more money they lend, the faster the economy goes, basically. And the less money they lend, the more we get into recession. So that really matters politically. And those decisions are made according to how best to maximize banks' profits. And the other way that banks affect policy is who they lend the money to. So there's a lot of criticism at the moment, of the way that banks are financing oil extraction and, hence, climate change. And that by pressurizing the banks in public, we might be able to change that policy. But maybe that policy should be in the hands of government or other bodies, not just the banks who happen to have the power to issue it. Yeah. I I want to raise a question of banks being the issuers of money because in cryptocurrency circles, there's a lazy association that says that governments create money. And because we criticize the money system, we implicitly then criticize the government. But it's not directly the government's doing. Of course, you can blame the government for handing over the or privatizing the power to issue money in the first place. That was arguably a very grave mistake. But the people who are actually mismanaging the money system now are the banks.
Yeah. I think that that cuts right through that's criticism that's very prevalent in cryptocurrency circles. It's and it reminds me, like I spoke with, with Brett Scott, before on the podcast and he made the the same very similar, types of criticisms on how crypto people see it and what actually the monetary system, how it actually functions. But it would cash sort of be the form of, like, public money? And then but which is, like, a very small amount of the economy, and then the vast majority of the economy is really private money. It's it's which is, like, what you call bank money. That's a fair
characterization. Although the exact way in which cash is issued might make you question it. Sure. Nominally, cash has got the the queen's head on it in England, and that would make it kind of public money. And the bank money has no nothing on it like that because it's just a digital token. But the the the cash is now kind of minted by the government and then sold to the banks, And so it's not really clear who's issuing it or who owns it.
Right. So then so we can set aside this as sort of like our, as is situation, problems with the monetary system. What are what is the work that you're doing around community currencies? How how does that differ from
this the traditional system, I guess? Well, arguably, the kind of community currencies that I support are not competing with or trying to replace the money system, although they may have intended to in the beginning. The local exchange trading systems tend to create their own units of account, and then they use the payment system or the accounting system to recall and remember and compare how much members of the community have done for each other. And so, it it can be more or less monetary depending on whether that money is expected to be, useful. Does it command resources, or does it merely give you a good reputation because you earned it? And that means when it's issued, is somebody promising something for it, or are they just creating a 100,000,000, billion, trillion, quadrillion of them, in the hopes that someone will want them in at a future date. So the community currency systems have different objectives. Some really do want to, provide an alternative to money, although most of those are, commercial business barter networks. So their units of account will be the same as the national unit of account. They will bring in shops and businesses and try to get them to supply each other, to make a circuit where everyone's consuming and producing the same goods. And then you have a circuit around which the money can go, and consequently, a circuit within which national currency is not needed. So, I think that's a very powerful and important thing we need to get better at, although it's quite difficult within the law of most countries as it stands. So you can create these, business barter networks, but there's not really much advantage to businesses to using them because of their, inferior position in the law. So the other community currency projects like Time Banks and like Letts, they acknowledge, more social forms of value. People cooperating for each other, neighbor neighbors helping out, lending things. And they're really good for building community, building solidarity. People get to know each other and trust each other within these quite small systems, But they don't touch on the larger problem of money being issued by banks and everything being done in the name of profit of the already rich.
Mhmm. So then, what are the type of like, what are the how do you go about designing these type of systems? Like what what are you looking for when, say, someone reaches out to you and says, I want to start a community community currency project in my little village. What are where do you start from? What's the position you start with?
The process is not, a cookie cutter thing. It happens very rarely that people starting community currencies look for experts and reach out and seek consulting. So it doesn't actually happen to me that much. What's more likely to happen is somebody says, we need some software. What's the best software to do this? And then I have to come in and say, well, what is it that you're actually doing? And try to understand in a coherent way before I can make software recommendations. But, the main design choices are, in my opinion, first and foremost, when you're issuing these units, are you offering anything back for them, or are you not? Are they issued in acknowledgment of something that's already done, or are they issued as a promise for something that you or someone else will do in the future? Are they going to be pulled through the economy back to the issuer, Or are they just going to run out of momentum very very quickly and sit in someone's account as an acknowledgement of what they have done? That's the first thing. But then also there's questions like, well, do you want to have a payment system with cash, or do you want an app, or do you want a point of sale system that would sit in the shops? Do you want to integrate it with existing credit cards? Or or do you want what I provide, which is a content management system with an accounting system built in? That's a comparatively rare demand. But it's what the Let's and the time banks use.
Yeah. Alright. So then now what I'm curious to hear is what are your criticisms of cryptocurrency projects that are now thinking about currency design? We've had, I mean, for this conference, we've had quite a few people talk about currency design. Mhmm. And it's usually, I think, up I mean, 99% of the time, if not all of it, it's within the context of a blockchain system.
It's assumed very much, yeah, as if, we couldn't have tokens or currencies before we had blockchains. In the systems I design, we're doing accounting just with a MySQL database. Very, very standard stuff. And there's a question, well, what extra would a blockchain give you? And I don't think those systems need or want blockchains. Sorry, what's the question?
So I guess, what are your, criticisms of the assumptions being made in the crypto world when it comes to currency design? So every currency design that happens in crypto
starts with the issuance of a thousand million, billion, trillion, quadrillion tokens. And then the questions are asked about, well, what do these tokens mean? How do they circulate? Do these tokens confer rights on their holders? Would there be a tax on using the token? How do you trans how do you sell the token in order to buy another token, like, particularly dollars? Is the token behind a wall where you have to go through an exchange? And the what would how is the exchange rate determined in that case? So those are all the kinds of questions, and nobody really asks, as far as I can see. We're issuing these tokens. What obligations, are on us as a result? Are we going to redeem these tokens? Are we going to close the circuit so that they're issued out and then they come back to us and the circuit is closed and the exchange is complete? So when we issue, we kind of get something for the tokens. People buy the tokens if they're not given away, and so we finance ourselves. But then at the end of the circuit, we, take the tokens back in payment and we give the goods and services and complete the exchange. So that whole notion, that idea of a circuit is not really there in cryptocurrency. You issue the tokens and they stay out there. And if there's an exchange, it's not part of the it's not built in. It's coincidental. Or there might be an exchange, but it might be unequal value. And so what I've been learning this week is that, the mechanistic systems being produced in cryptocurrencies are actually not in the paradigm of exchange at all. They're serving an economy where, a lot there's a lot of philanthropy going on. There's a lot of speculation going on, but they're not serving the real economy where businesses need a medium of exchange. They need the value to be stable. They need to be able to hold it for a while sometimes. They need to manage their liquidity, their their cash flow, and they need that, in order to then go and produce real value in their business. So my criticism is that, tokenomics is evolving around kind of the the wishes, demands, dreams of millennial crypto millionaires, to serve that kind of economy. But my question is, is that going to go any further and support the productive economy? In the commons, that's, in a sense, a very new space that's opening up. And the hope in this conference is that a lot of these mechanisms where you just distribute a lot of tokens or hope for some goodwill or acknowledge contributions that people have made, people are hoping that that will be enough to manage, a a commons using the crypto tools. We'll have to wait and see about that. It it could also be that exchange currencies are not appropriate for the commons either.
So you mentioned, tokenomics, which is like a very, it's a big buzzword nowadays when it comes to, you know, token design, systems engineering, in this particular space. What so during your talks you preferred a different term, which is totemomics.
Totemomics. Totemomics. We make a meme of it. Totememomics.
There's been a lot of memes going around of totemomics indeed. Maybe you can explain why you prefer this term, totemomics, as opposed to tokenomics.
Well, it comes down to a sociological understanding of what's happening. And of course, the idea of the totem is maybe anthropological, because that's an adjacent field. And so, with, Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency paradigm, it's all about the token, how the tokens are issued, how many tokens you have, and how much you can sell them for. And that tends to lead to, fetishization, you might say, or a totemization, or, sociologists would say, a reification of the token object. But at the same time, we understand that the token isn't really the object. It's a symbol for the object, but we kind of forget that. And it's when we forget that that it things get a bit dangerous, intellectually speaking. And so it's important to keep in mind when dealing with tokens that even if we can imagine them as a physical object, it only exists because of what it represents. And what it represents is not a thing, not a piece of gold, not an a valuable object, but, a set of relationships or a contract between members of a community in society, and a set of expectations and rights, and all things which are very often not very clearly defined. And so when we do token engineering, we have to remember that whole underlying mushy sociological system and not imagine that this is purely a mathematical equation that we're trying to solve. And this is something that happened in the in the boom before 2008. The the hedge funds and the banks and the high level finance, they were starting to treat money in this way, and forgetting a lot of the underlying mush and the risk, and the systemic risk. And they thought, well, if we just do our numbers right, or even if we can just show some impressive numbers, then, we can make some money for ourselves. And this kind of thinking enabled the building of a whole pyramid of cards, which was able to fall down very quickly.
Yeah. Well, I I think we would agree on that. Like, I think the impression that a lot of people have here at the very least is that I mean, something like Bitcoin is very much, it's an empty token on its own and there's like nothing really backing it or there's nothing inside of it. But what I think at this point we can pretty safely say is that what it has the most is like a community that fetishizes it, and has sort of imparted its own narrative into it. And that's where the value is sort of driven. It's purely narrative even though at the same time it looks like a commodity.
Well, the narrative works. And if the fetishization is enough to create a demand or a flow of the Bitcoin, that's enough for them. But I would draw attention to the way that narrative is changing and more people are coming in, And, Bitcoin is no longer just a fetish object. It's starting to be used in much more straight laced conventional financial circles as they're adding it to their portfolios. And looking at it in a way very similar to how gold is treated in a financial portfolios. And of course, maybe you can say that's fetishization just on a different level by a more respectable crowd. But either way, it serves to give the currency legitimacy and the ability to circulate and serve a function in society, rather than just be at the whim of a few crypto heads.
And I guess is is there a particular reason you think that, like, something like this has happened to Bitcoin, but it has not happened to, like, a let system or, like, you know, a community currency? Like, it doesn't suffer from this same issue that something like Bitcoin has.
There were people, many more people in the early days of Let's who were evangelical about it in the way that many people have become evangelical about Bitcoin. And also, let's was seem to be solving a problem, in the couple of recessions, like there was a recession in the eighties and nineties. So there are people going around saying, we need to do this on a global scale. It will solve the economic problems. It didn't catch on in those days, in the way that Bitcoin has, probably for a number of reasons. The principal one, I guess, is that Bitcoin set up this fantastic game dynamic where you're mining and you get financial rewards for mining. And also because there's no underlying value of Bitcoin, the price becomes purely an object of speculation. So as attention grew to Bitcoin, the price grew, and, that was a self reinforcing feedback loop. And it meant, not only did Bitcoin make people rich, but then that wealth was funneled back into the ecosystem. And, it's been very, very successful over the last ten years. Yeah. And he's got a lot of advocates. But you listen to some of those advocates, and you would think that Bitcoin was all about getting rich. And that's not a very healthy thing if it means that you get rich because not by creating value, but because, someone who earned money has put it into the bitcoin ecosystem, and you happened to be holding bitcoin. You're not gonna fix the problems by transferring the wealth from the people who don't hold bitcoin to the people who do. Right.
But I guess, my impression I know I'm no expert in in let systems, but it seems to me that, a let system doesn't even allow that. But the way that it's sort of designed the way it's set up is that it doesn't even allow for
Yeah. It's not a money of speculation. Exactly. Yeah. It's not an asset with nothing but a market value. It's just a unit of account with a fixed value, which, which is agreed only between the members of the group, and which they use to keep track of what they're doing for each other. It's not of interest to anybody outside the group. You couldn't even steal it. Like I can't I can't invest in lets or something like that. No. It would be pointless. Right. Yeah. I mean, you could give a lets some money and they could spend it on photocopying or they could give it to me to maintain the website. But it's not going to increase the value of the currency. Mhmm.
That out. So, next thing I wanna talk about is that you had us play a game during, the conference. Trading floor game. Yes. Trading floor game. And I was wondering if you could maybe quickly explain what we had to do for that game, and sort of, like, the purpose of it. What did what did you want to show sort of through that game and maybe how that relates to crypto?
I'll try and explain it without giving the game away. Okay. As it were. So I have developed a game with an old girlfriend, many years ago. I've run it maybe 20 times, with her and with a couple of other colleagues. And the idea is to compress the activities of the marketplace down into a one hour workshop and to give people different media of exchange, and for them to experience the marketplace with different media of exchange. So in the first round, we do it without a medium of exchange. And what players have to do is swap random playing cards to make a set of four. And they end up with the problem of the double coincidence of once, because you can only swap a card that you need with one that someone else needs. So it's very very inefficient. You have to go around and find someone with the right card. And we measure the efficiency of the marketplace by giving people a sweet, or in this case it was a chickpea, every time they make a set. And so in the second round, we introduce a, medium of exchange instrument, and players are able to earn a lot more of the chickpeas, and they feel better, and it's much easier. And so we've shown how the medium of exchange makes a more efficient marketplace, and it changes the experience of trading. But then in subsequent rounds, you can change the rules around the medium of exchange to make a point about how the medium exchange affects your experience of the marketplace. The game was designed really to show how debt money works. So it wasn't perfect for the workshop this week, but I think a lot of people enjoyed it anyway. Because you could after each round, we'll separate, sit down, calm down, because it's very panicky, and reflect on the experience, and ask some pertinent economic questions. And then you can start bringing in lots and lots of monetary theory depending how much time you have.
Yes. I so I was I was very entranced, absorbed by the game when I was playing it, and what I noticed by playing in the beginning when you're first trying to start out, you're sort of like going up to someone and saying, Hey, do you have, you know, the card that I need, and do I have a card that you need? And you sort of first it's like a kind discussion, then at a certain point you realize this is a lot harder to find this coincidence of wands. And then at a certain point, I'm just not looking at whose face I'm interacting with, I'm just looking at people's cards. And for me it was like, it felt like a very good, metaphor for the alienation that's felt under, like, a free market like like this one how it was set up. I thought it was very interesting. But at the end of the game, you had you had introduced these, this medium of exchange to make it easier for for the trading of, of the cards. But then, you know, the people who were issuing this medium of exchange were essentially, it felt to me, like basically the bank. And the bank, if you took out these medium of exchange, you're basically taking out a loan. And, you know, in the next gain you had to pay off your loan. But the amount that you had to pay off was more than in the total supply of the the medium of exchange. So I don't know, like then it made me think, like, is this really how insanely our monetary system is currently designed? Like, is it really that banks are lending out to the the populace? And then they're asking for more money than is even available to give off to pay off our debts.
Yes. And I wrote a paper on that issue itself this year. It's not quite as simple as the game, suggests Yeah. That the bank is simply withdrawing more money from circulation than they're putting in, and thus creating a demand for new loans in order to help pay off the old ones plus interest. The problem is more that, money is taken out of circulation by rich people and put into tax havens, and that money not circulating is then not available for debtors to earn back. And so, the debtors who can't pay their debts back because they can't earn the money, they have to borrow more in order to continue to service their debts. Consequently, the economy itself is forced to grow. As a consequence of money being taken out of circulation, more debt must be brought into circulation, and that must be paid back by ever more work and production.
Yes. This is I mean, I love that you said that because I have heard, especially Bitcoiners argue that a deflationary currency would be good for climate change. Because you wouldn't be that their ideas that inflation is a reason why we have to,
Inflation is the root of all evil, especially if it's inflation of your assets. Right. I haven't actually seen that argument, but I have seen some very insubstantial assertions coming out of the crypto community, which I would very much like to have the chance to address. Right. I mean, what is the mechanism by which deflation helps to reduce climate change? And have you looked at the power relations behind them? And do you understand that deflation favors creditors over debtors? Deflation makes it much harder for debtors, which is most of us, to pay our debts back to creditors. So is that is deflation supposed to empower us? But then if you're a cryptocurrency expert, do you even understand about debt? Bitcoins are not really lent in the sense that money is lent, and that's the whole point in Bitcoin. You can't create a loan. You can't mint tokens, out of nothing. The the tokens are a pure asset with no liability side. They come from an algorithm. And if you lend them, you're doing that off the blockchain and therefore outside of the system. And so that doesn't really happen. There's no credit creation, and therefore no inflation. Right. But is that for the best? I don't know.
So I guess based on your experience, it's been a few days now being at the the crypto commons gathering. Has have you learned anything? Or have you, has anything any of your thinking sort of shifted? Or are you, yeah, I guess, what what are your thoughts on the conference and and what's your thoughts on nature so far? Well, I'm trying to locate
my body of work next to this tokenomics and, commons tokenomics field, which is very well advanced. And I'm happy to see that there are some very responsible, competent, clever, even wise, people around doing, the tokenomics.
Is that a surprise to you?
I haven't been looking very closely until now. But, the problems about tokenomics discourse, as I said earlier, it can be very shallow. And maybe the wise people aren't the noisiest ones. Yeah. So, what I've learned is, if I didn't say that already before, is that the demand for a medium of exchange currency, which is also the kind that is issued by, a debt obligation with or without interest, isn't really there in the economy that is being built up by crypto. Because Bitcoin was designed as a non debt asset only system, the economics that's coming out of it is the same. And because you don't never really know the value of the tokens until you sell them on a market, you end up with a nonreciprocal system. And so this system is working very well for the, the crypto millionaires, people who want to speculate, people who want to give, people who want to acknowledge gifts, but it's not going to fit most people's idea of trade and commerce as most of the world does it. Maybe it can bridge a gap, but I think it's quite a big cultural, if not also financial gap. And so I think, at least for the time being, there needs to be more, attention given to credit instruments, which are not natively crypto. Like, the credit instruments go back to the Babylonian empire. It's a really fundamental mechanism for issuing a medium exchange or also, manifesting the power of the leader or the credit issuer. It serves many functions. But we need to understand those better and bring them into the toolkit Because when it comes to what are the needs of businesses, they will need, amongst other things, the ability to issue credit. Banks these days are issuing less and less credit, for example, to small businesses. So they can really use tools where they can finance minor expansions or even start a business by, getting credit from the crowd or from other people. In any case, they need to get money in, and they need to promise future goods, and services for that, for the tokens they issue in exchange for the money. So that's just how business finance works and how everyone expects it to work, with or without the bank. And we need to learn to do it without the bank. Do you have any suggestions for people in the crypto world who are in this space? Yes. They should do my money and society MOOC But I co authored with professor Jem Bendel of the University of Cumbria. Nice. You didn't just hear.
Maybe okay. So I I'm asking this question to everyone and I know, it's a question that you may not like. But, what does the, what does CryptoCommons mean to you?
At the moment, it looks like an effort to claim the commoning space by making it work in a particular way in terms of financing it. And I think it's a worthwhile effort. How many people who already work in the commons who may not recognize their work as such, will take up these instruments remains to be seen. So it's still very much a niche, and it can't claim to speak for the whole commons, But building these tools seems like a worthwhile exercise, especially insofar as the crypto millionaires and and maybe lesser wealthy people want to engage with the commons and want to support the commons and want to share their financial benefits with the commons. These these could be great instruments.
Wow. That was a much nicer answer than I was expecting.
Nicer than the one I gave before.
Well, thanks a lot for taking the time. Maybe just finish off if you want to leave, let people know where they can, keep up with you and your work. Do you mean Yeah. Do you mean Yeah. Along the bottom. It's mook1.communityforge.net,
but you can find all the links on my website. Because I've done other things like reading audio books and the template for the game is on the website, and I've got a blog. It's all on mattslats.net, mheslhes.net.
I'll try to burn it there. Alright. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much.