Disqus - Latest Comments for glebleu

Re: Self-Issued Credit in the Middle Ages

Guillaume Lebleu — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 12:50:51 -0000

Hi Eli, yes getting into debt in someone else's currency is slavery, getting debt into your own currency is freedom. We should be able to provide good enough liquidity without having having to rely on leverage of central entities, but through acceptance agreements and automated clearing of notes issued by productive entities themselves. There is empirical and theoretical support for this.

Re: Hey Techrunch: This is What’s really happening in Payments in 2011

Guillaume Lebleu — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:48:38 -0000

I think the key for a startup is to start outside of payments and focus indeed on e-wallet but for loyalty, coupons, rewards and the likes. Create value and get adoption there without the inertia of banks and networks. Then bring in the banks and networks with a revenue-sharing agreement.

Re: From currency of ideas to currency of exchange/reciprocity

Guillaume Lebleu — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:36:26 -0000

When I talk about reciprocity, I don't mean direct reciprocity of course, I just mean reciprocity: knowing that you will get when you'll need it at some point in the future, more or less what you have given out.

My point here is exactly yours I think: best is not to focus on currencies that build on obligation or expectation of reciprocity, but simply on currencies that offer the possibility of reciprocity, simply by recording more formally what is going on.

Re: SXSW 2012 - The New Age of Money

Guillaume Lebleu — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 12:27:42 -0000

Voted!

Re: Personal views on the Fed

Guillaume Lebleu — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 20:25:57 -0000

Thanks Anthony. It will be interesting to see whether the political debate gets in the way of the Fed before Bernanke can press some more red buttons.

Re: QE creating an opportunity for peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding

Guillaume Lebleu — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 12:02:37 -0000

Job creation is what matters right now. I think a good place to start would be to have good numbers on the efficiency of crowdfunding/peerfunding in terms of job creation, vs the Government/Fed actions of the past few years.

Re: Defining “currency”

Guillaume Lebleu — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 10:52:23 -0000

Thank you Anthony. I think the paper does provide answers to the "how does a currency scale" part of the emergence question. But does not answer the question: how do people come up with using a common symbol of value to set balances and credit limits between each other?

Re: Defining “currency”

Guillaume Lebleu — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:23:52 -0000

I used the term "attributable" to distinguish from any symbol, to reflect that it is an expression from someone about something or someone.

I like the simple: "a currency is a commonly accepted symbol of value". I think what flows differently though isn't value, it's available energy, attention, productive and creative capacity.

"Like" is a currency. RT are a currency. The flows they shape is our limited attention.

There is no limit to what symbols we can use to express value, but there is a limit to expressing all things of values as multiples of one symbol (especially one enforced through violence), and of course a limit to our creative/productive capacity.

Re: Account metrics beyond the account balance

Guillaume Lebleu — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:56:35 -0000

http://timebank.sfbace.org/

Re: Why do CUs oppose ‘Reasonable Fees’ in card payment amendment

Guillaume Lebleu — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 03:21:03 -0000

I also tend to support cheaper payments. To replace the cash back programs, I think FIs need to work with merchants to design attractive programs that benefit both merchants in term of $ costs of processing and in term of value given as reward to the cardholder.

Re: What can we learn from Japan

Guillaume Lebleu — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:51:36 -0000

Hi John. Thank you for the comment. The question is what do businesses do with the social currency they accept.

One option is to write them off if the percentage is low enough and they consider this program to provide a cheaper customer acquisition mechanism. If they don't write them off, either the social dollars have value to them, or they have value to parties they do business with (suppliers, customers, employees). The social dollar can have either collectible value, reputation value, or redemption value for goods/services or for tax dues (voluntary tax), or any combination of the above.

Here is something I have mentioned here http://lebleu.org/blog/2010... where a community of merchants accept certain receipts b/c they have previously agreed to a local voluntary tax.

imagine a school in need of a bus+driver to go on a field trip. The community would vote this project as worthy of a receipt. A bus company would accept to provide the service in exchange for these receipts. They could use the receipts at accepting merchants. Merchants would be interested to collect the receipts since that’s what they could pay their local taxes with.

Here's another one for funding public art: http://lebleu.org/blog/2009...

The art project would issue acknowledgments for in-kind or monetary donations made to the project. Issuance would be made public.
Businesses could show their support by accepting some of these acknowledgments for partial payment of goods/services they provide.
The notes, if printed in paper, could bear an artist rendering of the public art piece to be built.
After it is built, the public art piece would likely attract tourists to whom the notes could be sold as a “piece” of the art piece, likely for many times the face value in dollar, since originals would be in limited supplies. This would provide a natural way for the currency to disappear from circulation, and be replaced by new ones for new projects.

Re: Account metrics beyond the account balance

Guillaume Lebleu — Tue, 04 May 2010 10:09:38 -0000

What a painful name! but yes, it's a valuable metric that could be displayed on a profile page.

Note I'm not talking about credit limits here, as I think it is difficult to come up with a rule that will work w/o human input in all context. I see these metrics more as various "visualizations" that can help people make decisions about trading with or gifting someone.

Re: Account metrics beyond the account balance

Guillaume Lebleu — Tue, 04 May 2010 10:02:04 -0000

The well-being of the society requires trade happening. Even if someone is able to manipulate how many times the cross zero, they still have contributed positively to society while minimizing risk by trading.

I like Ripple too, but as a payment routing protocol that alleviates the need for a hierarchical, centralized, known single path of settlement. On the other hand, I think that specifying credit limits for each of your friends seems unpractical. Most people in the real world seem to be quite happy to leave this to a credit intermediary.

Re: Are shared units of wealth still relevant in a world of open data?

Guillaume Lebleu — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 10:32:57 -0000

Yes, I think it is possible we might see a payment-related activity (Facebook has in the past been testing the idea of making microdonations to content posted by friends).

But in a way, my point is: it's not needed since we can rely on "Mark as Liked" or "Mark as Favorite" - which are more meaningful - to then compute how to direct our energy (in the case of flattr.com, how to split our monthly $ commitment).

Reusing the existing Twitter functionality "Mark as liked" and computing automatically a fixed $ amount sounds like a great idea.

Re: Saving our schools in SF: call for solution ideas

Guillaume Lebleu — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 17:11:26 -0000

Hi Tom. Yes, I'm aware of the Saber currency, but it requires the backing of the Universities. That said, the contributions of students could be accounted for in Charles Brass model so that they don't have to pay the increased fee. Corrected link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Re: Saving our schools in SF: call for solution ideas

Guillaume Lebleu — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 17:09:00 -0000

Thank you Charles. Yes, this is essentially what I had in mind. It amounts to a new tax/fee but that people can pay with what they have in abundance of, which isn't the case of banking money in periods of deflation. Why was the idea canned? what was it replaced with? increased fees in legal tender?

Re: The inevitable change in our monetary system?

Guillaume Lebleu — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:32:37 -0000

Thanks for the comment. With regards to Haiti, It's nice to see money flowing faster where it's needed, but I'm looking at a deeper change. I wish every donor could receive a digital certificate of their donation, which they then could take to the businesses/retailers they go to and ask them to accept inlieu of regular money. In other words, circulating good deeds, rather than bad debts. Thanks for the quote too.

Re: Traditional economy vs. Knowledge economy

Guillaume Lebleu — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:59:53 -0000

Can you elaborate on the second? Thank you in advance.

Re: Making moving your money easy

Guillaume Lebleu — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:48:18 -0000

Thank you for the comment. Virtual account numbers would be a solution for direct deposit as well.

Re: Traditional economy vs. Knowledge economy

Guillaume Lebleu — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 02:38:56 -0000

Thank you Eric. If taxes are voluntary, how would they be any different than gifts?

Re: The great inflation/deflation debate and a message of hope

Guillaume Lebleu — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:31:11 -0000

Thank you Eric. Yes, I agree with you. I wonder how much compared to GDP this could represent, say in 10 years from now.

Re: A qualified ReTweet microsyntax idea

Guillaume Lebleu — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:30:00 -0000

Hello Otto, thank you for the comment. I think "RT 2 #CO2 #saving @giyom" is a bit out-of-scope for what I intended this microsyntax to be: a way to qualify a RT to make all RTs not equal.
You might want to take a look at http://microsyntax.pbworks...., add your sightings and proposals there. I also wrote a RTip proposal http://microsyntax.pbworks.....

Re: Funding public art with community currency?

Guillaume Lebleu — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:58:03 -0000

I don't have to be convinced of that, no. Rather, I'm interested in any historical accounts of the funding process. How money was raised? what was offered in exchange (redemption, vanity nameplate, etc.)? how in-kind versus monetary donations were accounted for? what was the role of financial intermediaries? whether the type of money used influence these behaviors? what impact the contribution had on the contributor's business? etc.

Re: Funding public art with community currency?

Guillaume Lebleu — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:22:56 -0000

Thank you Eric for the link.

Re: Funding public art with community currency?

Guillaume Lebleu — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:43:19 -0000

Thank you @cityislander. Would love if you could point me to some historical resources. I don't think that @rushkoff underappreciates the hubris factor. I think he points to the fact that the sort of money that was accumulated back then by merchants had to be spent anyhow, so they'd rather spend it on building reputation by investing it in having their name associated with the construction of the cathedral.