Note: the original Google Doc reveals the many ongoing conversations about how weird we can make money. You can explore the code here.

The word “weird” can be traced to “wyrd”, meaning destiny. To call someone “weird” is to say they are destined: their presence has that strange and sometimes unsettling sense of something greater. To make something weird is to wire it to reach its destination, knowing well that each thing is destined for the origin from whence it emerged.

Weird is the way back home.

More practically, money originates from local networks of social credit. Being a measure of what we value in relationship with others, money was made as it was needed and forgiven once the obligation it represented was fulfilled. We propose here a kind of money which recalls this. With one simple twist, we can undo our reward-oriented hierarchy: holding money is a measure of obligation, not wealth.

Great humorists like Rabelais¹, and great humanitarians like Gandhi and Mandela, all worked by inversion. Hold up what everyone takes for granted and reveal its cracks, and the people will laugh. Face what everyone fears and reveal it as the ground of liberation, and the people will love. Gandhi and Mandela were actually imprisoned in the same place in South Africa. That building is now the constitutional court.

The single idea that underpins the reward-oriented hierarchy is this: money must be earned. This ideology makes us believe that our value is measured by how much we have and control. Even people who think money shouldn’t be earned, but given (as in UBI), still operate in the same paradigm: money is an asset; a good thing to have.

Money is really an obligation; a promise to return in due course what you have been given. Most modern money is created from debt anyway. What if we represented this more truthfully? What does it look like if having money is not a good thing, but a measure of your promises²?

The system is instantiated by means of two, simple contracts. One adapts the ERC20 token standard by removing any ability to transfer, or approve other accounts to transfer on your behalf. This contract is responsible for creating and destroying HON, and tracking the balance associated with each account. The other contract holds the logic for proposing and forgiving HON, which is done via two simple mappings³.

Firstly, when money is a liability, you don’t pay when buying goods or receiving a service, you take on more tokens. This is always consensual: the provider proposes an obligation, in HON, and you accept it in order to get the goods. To emphasise the strangeness here: buying stuff increases your balance, rather than decreasing it. Your account balance is a good proxy for your reputation, because the bigger it is, the less creditworthy you are.

Transactions either create new HON, or the proposer can ask the recipient to forgive some of the existing HON of the proposer. Money is created as needed and, when it is not needed, it is forgiven back out of our shared reality. All transactions are consensual and prosocial.

This does not mean the goal when using the system is to keep a zero balance. One way of defining “community” is as a group of people who are all a little bit indebted to each other. Having tokens is useful for communicating facts (which are just values-in-time); for teaching and learning based on said values; and for establishing common knowledge about trust and association.

For instance, you may need to accept some HON to join a community using a token-gated chat room. This is a marvellous thing! Now, you get access to the community, but you are incentivised to connect with someone you can serve so they will help you forgive some HON, rather than to speculate on the future value of the token and how it might be used to govern others (an ideology which manages to merge tyranny and market capitalism efficiently).

In old communities, you never paid people back the exact value they had given you. To do this was to signify an end to the relationship. Being in debt, or being owed something, is a good reason to go on talking, visiting, arguing, and loving one another. Similarly, anyone with a zero balance is no longer an active participant in the community.

This post is dedicated to Brett Scott, for all he continues to do with altered states of monetary consciousness.

Footnotes¶

1. “He made the top and bottom change places, intentionally mixed the hierarchical levels in order to discover the core of the object’s concrete reality, to free it from its shell and to show its material bodily aspect - the real being outside all hierarchical norms and values” (Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 403).
2. "It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know in the times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in the times to come, later on or perhaps never. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise." - Jacques Derrida
3. "After his conversion, he lived the rest of his life in an entirely different economy--the nonsensical economy of grace, where two plus two equals a hundred and deficits are somehow an advantage" - Richard Rohr, writing about Francis of Assisi in Eager to Love
4. Admittedly, gossip works well in physical localities, where people can warn their friends against those who do not reciprocate by virtue of their physical attributes. However, behavioural traits and memetic locality are approximately as difficult to change or spoof as physical location and attributes. We can leverage this to create authentic online communication channels which help encourage ongoing reciprocity and operate alongside the simple contracts.
5. See below: