SUGGESTED AGENDA ITEM FOR NEXT MEETING:
EXPLORE USE OF EARTH DOLLAR ON OSCE DAYS PLATFORM FOR DIGITAL VALUE EXCHANGE
I would like to propose discussing the possibility of using ethereum-based Earth Dollars at OSCE Days for value exchange on whatever digital collaboration platform we happen to be using. This will allow designers and anyone else to make valuable contributions to a circular project and have their time and contribution tracked and compensated, either in realtime or stored for future.
I have been involved with the group of programmers who have applied ethereum to the Earth Dollar.
BACKGROUND
I interviewed David Kam, one of the principal founders of Mother Earth Trust at last year’s OSCE Days:
http://motherearthtrust.com/home/
David has a programming team that met up with programmer, researcher Nick Luck, based in Berlin and part of the United Earth collective:
SRG is member of United Earth as well.
Nick and David’s programming team were using bitcoin to develop Earth Dollar but I suggested they use Ethereum instead and they switched over. That was late last year. They are now testing ED running on Ethereum. I will get feedback before the next meeting about its status but they hope to launch in midyear, just around the time of OSCE Days.
Natural capital economist Mark Anielski has been working on the project:
He’s the author of “The Economy of Happiness”
and advised the Nepalese govt on the Gross National Happiness concept.
The ED will initially be backed by the natural capital assets of 14 million HA of land owned by the Algonquin people of Canada, spanning Ontario and Quebec. Mark has valuated the conservative value of the natural resources to be $3 trillion USD. The Algonquin people have been working with Motherearth Trust and the 1.5 million Algonquin indigenous people will be using the ED for their local economy. It will be available to any other group to use as well.
Backing up ED with natural capital means there is incentive to keep the land wild. If it is exploited and the net balance changes…ie…lose forests, lose rivers, etc due to excessive natural resource use, then the ED value goes down. Hence, everyone who uses it has incentive to keep the nature protected by ED conserved and wild.
We can use ED for digital value exchange. This value exchange has been part of the SRG digital collaboration platform that we have envisioned for building a global commons.
As the ED rolls out, SRG’s idea is to take the next step and engage the indigenous people of South Africa, then Africa and explain the concept to them and see if they would like to also add their land to be protected by the ED. In this way, the tribal peoples who contribute land will have value returns for providing their land to the natural asset pool, have ED to use within their own community and have ED protect their land from natural resource plunder by resource extraction capitalists. This is a very powerful economic incentive for circular economy as it will strongly encourage reuse, redesign, remanufacture of all technical nutrients.
We will engage the indigenous people’s of South America and Asia in the same manner.
As a side note, I will be looking at developing an Open Source digital collab platform using:
Neo4j
R
ED
and other critical software
independently at SRG to see how far we can go. The hackathon Tim and I are organizing later on can only help accelerate the development. This is all open source so we want to share everything.
OSCE DAY USE
ED can provide a secure, encrypted value exchange medium that will incentify participation in projects. People working on any project can be rewarded with ED. If we can bring more people into accepting ED, it builds a bigger and bigger parallel, alternative economy. In particular, ED is meant to be used by environmentally aware users as it is backed by real natural capital. Hence, in principle, it cannot support any business that is knowingly ecologically destructive. This also applies to people as well. It can only support socially and ecologically responsible businesses.
For the OSCE Days community, it can help to create local economies that use OS Circular designs. It is also suportive of OSCE because by its very nature of being backed by $3 Trillion USD of wild nature, it encourages keeping whatever protected land to remain protected or to rewild even more of nature. Hence, the direct consequence is that it means we have to find ways to build just societies that don’t use more raw virgin natural resources AND eliminates pollution…this is exactly circular economies. So if we are going to choose a digital cryptocurrency to use for value exchange, the ED is a perfect match to use for OSCE Days
Kindest
