A Revolution in Network Money

[michielbdejong]

ledgerloops is inbetween LETS and blockchain, it's one ledger, in a distributed representation (each participants remembers the transaction-hops they were one of the parties in, so each transaction-hop is persisted twice).

[michielbdejong]

apart from 'network ledger', could also use 'network money' to mean money that arises from a trustlines network. In the UI, I could use the phrases "use account to pay into network" and "use account to receive from network". That uses "the network" as a vague denominator for "other loop participants on the other side of the tree"

[michielbdejong]

in the current pitch, LedgerLoops is presented as a form of money, and its temporal restriction on value circulation is a particularity. Instead, I could pitch that restriction as the main design goal, like it is with Wallet 2 in https://www.socialtrade.org/cyclos/, and then pitch LedgerLoops as a "revolution in opinionated money", or "in network money".

[michielbdejong]

the term 'network money' is only used in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_currency to mean paying something via a communication network the internet, but it could also refer nicely to network economics and network locality as meant by STRO/Cyclos/LETS.

[michielbdejong]

The plain-old banking system can also be described as a LedgerLoops network, but there all loops are hierarchical, as buyer -> bank -> bank -> bank -> seller -(goods)-> buyer.

[michielbdejong]

What's novel is that there, it's described as 'exchanging money against goods/services', and in LedgerLoops you don't really have any assets that act as money in that way. It's all time-skewed multi-lateral barter.

[michielbdejong]

I'm now starting to use the terms half-trade and half-ledger to better describe how the bookkeeping tool of one participant would work internally.