Metacurrency Project
About
The Metacurrency Project is a discussion group started by author/entrepreneur John Robb with the goal of designing and marketing software to handle metacurrency, which Robb defines (with some editing) as:
an accounting or currency system that:
- captures the all of the contributions made by the participants in a specific venture
- can be used to confer ownership in that company in exchange for their participation
That [ownership] equity can be traded internally (between participants), externally (sold to non-participants), retained for dividends (from the company's earnings), between systems (for other metacurrencies), or unbundled (where the metacurrency is broken into component parts).
The Project's objective is to design a metacurrency "that contains the nuts and bolts of a specific Internet venture in its construction", refine it, implement it in software, and launch it as a venture. If the venture succeeds, the profits can be used to help repeat the process with another metacurrency-based venture.
The project has a Yahoo! Group for forum-style discussion and is also frequently the topic in posts on Robb's blog, Global Guerillas.
Concepts
- /OSV (open-source venture)
Notes
This area is for notes on specific ideas discussed; it may later be expanded into a work area.
- WIR Bank is an independent complementary currency system in Switzerland founded in 1934 in response to currency shortages after the stock market crash of 1929. It apparently originally operated on the "free money" system, but renounced this in 1952.