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What is wealth?
In the conventional sense, when we say someone is "wealthy", it implies this person has lot's of money in his/her bank account. But wealth, in its essence, expresses something much deeper about reality: the well-being. It begins with essential basic material needs that every human being has a right to access: food, clean water, health, clothing, shelter, education... Humans also need wealth at the immaterial level: love, care, free time, art, beauty, acknowledgment, self-development...
 
Another way to put it: wealth is whatever brings us closer to what is true, good and beautiful.
 
What are the different forms of wealth?
There are 3 forms of wealth: tradable, measurable, acknowledgeable.  Each one is a subset of the other one. All of these together we call integral wealth.
 
    * Tradable wealth:  food, time, energy, services, material resources...
    * Measurable wealth: performance, sustainability, physiological health, quality...
    * Acknowledgeable wealth: fun, love, care, trust, beauty...
 
 
What are currencies?
From its original roots, the Latin word "currere" means to run or to flow. In this original sense, currencies are tools for seeing and changing flows. Therefore we are not using the word currency in the everyday sense where it means the same thing as money. Instead we take our definition from its original and universal purpose, thus: currencies are systems made to express all forms of wealth flowing within a community.
 
Currencies exist everywhere around us, in nature, in our bodies, in our cells... Any social system, and life in general, needs currencies as an intermediary tool to trade, measure, save. They are used to exchange matter or energy (water, light, ATP in our cells...), to measure the state of a system (hormones, nerve impulse...), to acknowledge an experience of reality (a scream of joy, a dance to seduce, a smile, a thank you...).
 
Currencies express the whole spectrum of wealth: what is tradable (partially covered by conventional money), what is measurable, and what is acknowledgeable. The alphabet allowed static representations of reality. If used at their full potential, currencies can offer us a dynamic representation of wealth (flows), in other words a totally new way to represent collective reality.
 
 What is the difference between "money" and "currency"?
Money, as we know it today, is a very specific form of currency. Money's intended purpose is making exchange easy and universal within the community that uses it. It's a unit of measure, a unit of exchange and a store of value. Thus one kilo of potatoes can be exchanged with an hour of gardening or a gallon of oil.
 
However, there are many other forms of wealth that are central in our lives, but they can't be expressed with money (see "wealth"). Trying to express the whole spectrum of wealth with conventional money, as is done today everywhere, degrades universal wealth into a tradable form of it. This places humanity into a mercantile paradigm in which everything can be sold, bought and owned, and this is a huge epistemological mistake. Non-tradadable forms of wealth need to be expressed in a more universal, more encompassing language of flows, not with conventional money. This is what currencies, in our broader sense, are made for. They are symbolic tools we use to express and manage currents within the whole spectrum of wealth. Currencies can function systemically in a number of independent capacities: as a unit of measure, store of value, token of status and a medium of exchange, etc.
 
What is wrong with conventional money?
Conventional money is scarce because it concentrates in the hands of a few and leaves everyone else short of this indispensable means of exchange.
 
Entire communities -- people, villages, cities, regions, companies, NGOs, public services, countries -- are undermonetized. They do have wealth --competencies, resources, time, love, genius, assets, entrepreneurship skills, culture-- but exchanges don't happen. Not because of lack of wealth, but because of lack of transactional units: money. Conventional money is concentrated somewhere else, offers and needs are not fulfilled, poverty follows. This is very much like an ecosystem without  enough water.
 
This phenomenon of wealth condensation on the one hand, and desertification on the other is called the Pareto principle. This vicious circle increases the gap  between rich and poor. At least 80% of humanity lives with less than $10 a day, and almost 50% of humanity lives with less than $1 a day (source: World Bank)
 
Here's a good summary about numbers- Listen to BBC broadcast
 
Close your eyes and imagine the wisest persons you may know on Earth. Now ask them them to play a Monopoly game. If they play by the rules, no matter how wise or good these persons are individually, one will end up rich and the rest will end up poor. The Pareto effect is built into the rules of the game, and has nothing to do with the wisdom of the players. Our conventional monetary system has this same property of wealth condensation.
 
Taxes are meant to redistribute wealth in an equitable manner, but today no tax strategy has ever overcome the Pareto effect. It's just as if the Monopoly game goes on as normal except that every once and a while some of the monopolists properties are given to the poor players. All this does is slow down the general path of the game, or, if the redistribution is large enough, put someone else at the top. But the principles of condensation/desertification remain.
 
Fundamentally the problem is in the system itself.
 
How do free currencies solve what's wrong with money?
Flowplaces and their flowing free currencies allow the making of sufficient --and not scarce-- currencies for tradable wealth :
 
  • If the currency condensates in one place (which can happen because of an intense economic activity, which is very common), it doesn't need to leave the rest of the social ecosystem. There will simply be issuance of more currency where it lacks, or consumption of it where there is too much. This principle can be understood like for air or water: when an emptiness happens, new quantities are sucked up. When an excess happens, the surplus is evacuated.
    Regulation of the monetary mass has always been a puzzle for countries and economists. It was necessary to build centralized organizations to analyze the market and make decisions for everyone, provoking the mistakes and abuse we know. At the age of Internet, regulation mechanisms of the monetary mass can become distributed at every level of the system. Every player becomes a regulator of the global monetary mass. No more need for centralized authority.  On the other hand holoptical structures are necessary for this.
  • Sufficiency implies the monetary mass of the community is always proportional, and an expression of, the capacity to exchange and produce. There should never be too much or not enough.
  • This rule also applies to people: if you have wealth to create or exchange, then you will immediately and freely, have the necessary monetary mass to perform the transaction. No more, no less. What counts is that the "wealth balance" is always positive for everyone. The currency is the tool that will enable this.
 
Flowplaces and free currencies embody this fundamental and universal claim that any citizen, any community, any organization has the right to create tools for wealth to flow. No individuals, no community should be dependent on monopolistic and private currencies, unless they have decided so.
 
Why the name "free currencies"?
"Free" as in freedom. Nothing says that currencies should be a monopoly controlled by the few. All communities have the right to create the currencies they need so that integral wealth can flow and grow.
 
"Free" as in cost. Why would one have to pay to buy what is a public commodity? Of course there will always be infrastructural costs to make it work, but they are marginal.  Thus the cost should not include a premium that a monopolistic issuer can extract.
 
"Currencies" because this is the most universal term, whereas "money" is a particular form of what currencies can be. 

When water moves in a river that’s called a current and it was an old French meaning of “run” from the root word that gave us this meaning that in fact runs all the way back to Latin. The reason that money is called currency is that it flows from person to person through the economy. The first person to use this metaphor for money flowing from hand to hand was John Locke back in 1699. John Locke was a pretty important philosopher in England back in a time when it was sometimes dangerous to take a strong stance on things like human nature, government and religion. As a consequence he had to keep moving out of the country to keep out of trouble. (Listen to the source on podictionary.com) 
 
Why the name "flowplace"?
Because it's not just a conventional marketplace. It's a space in which flows of wealth can be expressed with free currencies, and wealth is much more than goods and services.
 
I / We want to create a new currency for our community/organization... Which one should I choose?
There is already a mistake in the question. Asking "what is the currency I need?" is like asking "do I need a screwdriver or a hammer to build my house?". You need both, and many other tools. This is the same with currencies. Every community will need an appropriate set of different currencies that will work together in a systemic way. You will certainly need at least a currency to trade (buy/sell), maybe some currencies to measure (performance, number of transactions, energy, carbon emission, etc), and some currencies to acknowledge (someone's expertise, someone's level of trust given by the community, like in eBay, someone's coolness, and so on).
 
If you decide to create a mutual credit currency for trading, you may want to link it with someone's reputation in the community to establish credit limits. The more trust this person has gained, the more he/she can go positive or negative.
 
As you see, we are moving from the stone age -- one currency for everything -- to the era of multi-currencies that, finally, express social life in a much more evolved way!
 
What does "MetaCurrency" mean?
MetaCurrency is the name for the infrastructure and protocols necessary for an open source economy, and free currencies to flow in an interoperable and standardized way. This requires new technological capacities which need to function in a non-monopolizable manner. 
 
  • Open Identity: Create, manage and own your identity in a trustworthy manner, independent of any central authority.
  • Open Rules: Know the rules of any currency you participate in and see when they change.
  • Open Transport: A protocol to enable a participant to transact with any other participant and a currency to interact with any other currency.
  • Open Data: The ability to share, decentralize and distribute data (like your account balance) and ensure its integrity and privacy… also, to allow you to be a reliable authority of your own data. (You can represent your own accounts, and I can validate your data.)
 
From the technical perspective, how does it work?
The flowplace is an open source Ruby-on-Rails based web-application. It is hosted on our own servers (TheTransitioner.org). Anyone with server space and Rails experience can download the source code (which is freely available on github and run their own flowplace. The flowplace is being developed in close synergy with the metacurrency project, and as such it includes the first implementation of the metacurrency project's eXtensible Game Format Language (XGFL) an XML based language that we have developed for specifying currency types. The flowplace will closely track other metacurrency developments as they become available, especially those components that will help deploy a global metacurrency network so the flowplace will integrate seamlessly into the large ecosystem of currencies that the metacurrency infrastructure with enable.
 
Are free currencies legal?
There is no law in any country that covers the whole range of what we call currencies, but there are many laws that cover aspects of them.  For example, in the U.S. there are federal tax reporting regulations about barter exchanges.  Some uses of free currencies may be seen as breaking these regulations if participants don't do the necessary reporting.  But notice that other countries have no such laws, so there will be very interesting legal cases around transactions in free currencies between people across national borders.Another example: certain countries and many U.S. states have laws that cover businesses issuing coupons.  Some free currencies may be seen a coupons under these laws and thus be subject to them.So the legality of a particular currency will depend on its particular rules of operation, and how the governing jurisdiction interprets them.
 
The fundamental challenge is that free currencies are a paradigm shift. They require a new understanding of how currencies are actually a large family of related wealth building information systems.  They require agreement that creating these systems is a fundamental right of all communities.  This paradigm shift creates new social evolution, laws will follow much later. This was the case for the abolition of slavery, equality of gender and races, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, etc.
 
So, on the one hand Nations claim their sovereign right to issue money in the name of citizens, but on the other hand this right has been abandoned to the private banking sector. On the one hand Constitutions declare the rights of citizens to equal treatment and safety, but on the other, conventional money works in opposition to these declarations.  Free currencies will hopefully, in time, release us from these fundamental contradictions.
 
Are flowplaces and its free currencies a way to avoid taxes?

Absolutely not. Taxes are not tied to a given currency, but to a country and its citizens, regardless of the currency. Transactions conducted using tradable wealth currencies in a flowplace remain taxable if the law that governs the jurisdiction of the transaction says they are.  Thus, in the flowplace we will make it is as easy as possible to implement the national tax system in the rules of currencies that need them. But note that other tax systems can also be designed, because the players in many currencies may want to redistribute some wealth among themselves regardless of particular  jurisdictions!

Aren't governments going to be upset with free currencies?

Governments may or may not be upset by free currencies.  There is one very typical scenario where governments embody the old paradigm and do everything to keep it in place.  By doing so they stir up creative forces that open innovative paths towards new paradigms. Once upon a time slavery was legal and defended by States on the basis that large parts of the nation's economy was based on that slavery. Today's economy is built on money and there will certainly be many people to say that there is no possible future without keeping money in its current form.

 
But there are other scenarios too.  In the face of great difficulties, governments do sometimes embrace change that visionaries bring forward that show a path forward.  We believe that free currencies encompass more universal values and will provide a better and safer economy for citizens. De facto they carry the founding values of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights! In the end, which government will want  to stop this evolutionary wave? Eventually free currencies will become the norm.
 
Aren't the banks going to be even more upset?

Like governments, there are many scenarios on how banks will respond.  In practice, banks will soon lose their monopoly on issuing expensive money. Many of them will be very upset and will do everything in their power to maintain that privilege.  But more and more leaders inside the banks themselves understand the deep systemic problems built into debt issuance of money, and are looking for ways out.The original purpose of banking (as a profession), is that it is to help people wisely manage and invest with their savings. It is a relatively recent historical addition that banking has become a for-profit business which makes money by issuing money.

 
Some banks will hopefully be more clever and visionary than others. They will see a wonderful opportunity to create new, useful services in the free currency world. They will return to their original mission statement and become trustworthy again.
 
Are you against the banks and the governments?

Not at all. We work for a fair world in which human rights, transparency and accountability are applied. Rather than fighting against the current order, we prefer to actively search for innovations that work and will thus inspire change. Our deepest hope is that governments and banks will see an opportunity in the free currencies and flowplaces, so they can evolve and do what they are meant for.

 
Won't free currencies cause inflation?
Inflation is a property of a single currency.  It occurs as a response of the currency users, when the currency fails to accurately track the value that the currency is supposed to be tracking.  Particular free currencies may indeed be inflationary if their rules of issuance don't work well. 
 
So, some free currencies may indeed be inflationary.  But fundamentally, free currencies as a whole will solve the problem of inflation by virtue of creating a competitive space for currencies.  If people have free choice to choose the currencies they want, they will choose the ones that actually do help build wealth for them, which will be the ones that don't have inflationary tendencies built into them unlike conventional money.