“Crypto Currency for Permaculture?” An Interview with Steve Cran, Green Warrior Permaculture

“Crypto Currency for Permaculture?”

An Interview with Steve Cran, Green Warrior Permaculture.
By Willi Paul, Planetshifter.com

- excerpt -

Willi: Debt runs the banks, our mortgages, educations, our credit cards - and most farms. Are you saying that a crypto scheme can eliminate debt?

Steve: Debt is a form of slavery. We don’t need it. We don’t need banks that just suck from the system without giving back. I’m saying a totally new economy based on permaculture principles and ethics could emerge and leave the old system to compost. What is education? It’s brainwashing to keep the current system in business for all generations. We can run our own community-based education. Credit cards? Not required. Most of the useless consumer products we buy are with credit cards.

http://www.planetshifter.com/myth/2520

I posted part of this reply on the kickstarter american perma tour, then i found that Willi had started a thread about crypto-currency here...
Blockchain and crypto could help the whole empire's funding...very much in line with plotting for world domination....create a permie's token ( the"PAUL" Permaculture Account Unit Ledger)...launch a initial coin offering on one of the ethereum like platforms. Use the coin for rewards for good comments, up voting and so on....like steam does it...and much more.

There are youtube videos from Ivan on Tech that show how to create a coin, or a ICO in 15 minutes...of course, working out the why's and how's would ask major brainpower. But we could start here...
I know that ethically, there are drawbacks like the amount of energy these algorithm based technologies use. Ethereum platforms and other like Eos, Stellar Lumens and other arrivals seem to adres somewhat the energy problem. But I am confident that energy won't be a real issue in the future with solar and battery power becoming better and decentralized...and trough these soon to be cheap energies, desalinization and transport of fresh water will open the world to greening the world...but it might make permaculture not a priority anymore till we hit 100 billion humans....
I am no tecky, but I guess Paul has a pool of savy people on java ranch that could maybe implement such a cryptocurrency, Josiah is also competent in software....Jack Spirko, Vin Armani...all extraordinary people who are into both crypto and permaculture could maybe spare some time (wouldn't know where, i couldn't do a tenth of there output...) to just brainstorm and use the power of the permies empire with theirs to accelerate these topics that are so needed.
There are youtube videos from Ivan on Tech that show how to create a coin, or a ICO in 15 minutes...of course, working out the why's and how's would ask major brainpower. But we could start here...

These proposals (a permaculture currency) pop up from time to time. They haven't led anywhere yet, and for good reason. They fail to consider the purposes of currency, and are a profound step backwards in many ways.

1) Currency works because it is highly liquid. I know that I can take my £10 note into literally any shop in the country and buy £10 worth of goods.
2) A "private" currency is by its very nature less liquid. If I want to spend my  special permaculture credits I need to find a shop that will accept them (adding cost and inconvenience) or I need to exchange them back to common currency (adding cost and inconvenience).
3) Historically, private currencies were used as a means to entrap and exploit workforces. The employer would pay the workers in their own company currency. They would house the workers on site, charging them rent in their own private currency. The workers would buy goods at shops owned by their employer, with rates fixed in the private currency. These rents and prices were considerably higher than the equivalents outside of the private economy. When workers wanted to spend money outside they had to exchange currency, for which they were charged and made a loss.

So, as a consumer or producer, any private currency needs to be sufficiently appealing to overcome these burdens in inconvenience and cost. In fact they have to go further than that - they need to overcome those burdens AND be more appealing than all the other widely accepted (and therefore more liquid) crypto-currencies. Typically at this point there is an appeal to some kind of moral imperative - "banks a bad so we should stop using their money" - but people in reality don't act that way. They won't voluntarily choose to have less wealth, by opting to use a currency that is more expensive/less efficient.

I'm not sure how any debt is left behind by changing the currency you exchange. If you have debt in US dollars or Euros today, tomorrow you still do but you also have some crypto currency and you decide to exchange that with select people. Crypto currency is handy for avoiding currency fees when needing to convert typical currencies, but it is also extremely volatile. Many people are scrambling to try and make a quick buck by "investing" in them, but that's like investing in baseball cards or beanie babies- they only have value because people think they do, with no intrinsic value beyond that desire. The prices jump up as buyers jump on the wagon, and eventually the wheels roll off and the value plummets (like it seems to do every month or two).

While I love the idea of a currency that's not tied to a particular country and its more or less volatile economy, I don't think there is any sure-fire currency in existence. Many love gold or silver, but it's not much different than beanie babies-if we don't all agree that a particular metal has value, then it doesn't beyond its industrial applications. Crypto currency is the same, but even worse in certain respects. No electricity? How do you prove you have any crypto currency? Lost the hard drive that stores your proof of ownership, or it gets corrupted without a good backup? Same issue. You have nothing tangible as proof of ownership. If your economy is web based, and with net neutrality official canned, I think some issues of content access could repeat as it did 10 years ago. Instead of banks being the bad guys, it's ISPs and content producers/distributers affecting access to data.

I may sound like a broken record, but I fail to see how cryptocurrency plays any part in a permaculture mindset. Permaculture to me is first and foremost about abundance and removing artificial scarcity. Cryptocurrency at it's core takes an abundant resource and expends energy doing math problems such that it becomes a scarce resource. It not only wastes energy (burning fossil fuels), but invents artificial scarcity in the process. It is anti-environment at it's core.

I agree that most altcoins have no intrinsic value yet, their utility apps haven't been developed or do not perform the desired function. So most of them will be worthless...just like in the .com bubble, where most web based firms dissapeared.
Some applications, some blockchain uses will become widespread. Those apps, like for instance dtube on steamit using ipfs, try to become ad free, censor free you tube replacements that also reward their content creators.....but these daps have to become more user friendly, and that is difficult, especially as it's only a couple of developers working on them, and youtube has a plethora.
As a permaculture currency I would envisage a kind of lets system where the local would be permies, so a permaculture exchange trading system...pets...
It could be used in lieu of the apples...create a market, digital and real world, for services, seed exchanges, courses....
We are at very early stages of these developments, payments in cryptocurrency are becoming fast and almost fee less, like cointext that uses sms texting from any phone without any intermediary...
As for the arguments made that if there is no electricity, crypto does not exist anymore...it would be necessary for that to happen that the whole earth be without electricity, and I think we'd have other worries by that time.
Also, about the loss of cryptos, there is a lot of redundancy you can put into safeguarding your coins...you just have to have the discipline to do it...
I think we would be stacking functions if we could add these new technologies...