Open Source Money?  

Lately I've been reading more and more about some ways in which society as a whole, and the economy in particular are going to change due to technology. One of the big forces on today's scene is open source software. This site for one is based on the open source system Drupal. The amount of power and flexibility just this one particular piece of programming gives an individual is amazing. Using this freely available tool, a single person can put together in just a few days a site that a few years ago would have taken a team of coders months to put together.

Now we are seeing the concept of open source move into non-electronic forms. I've heard about desktop manufacturing before, but I'm hearing about it more these days. It allows individuals and small businesses to out-compete the big manufacturing companies - at least for small jobs. But this interesting blog suggests we should think about the economy as a whole as an opportunity to apply open source principles. Of course, an open source economy will need to be based on open source monetary systems.

I hadn't thought of that before, but one of the original concepts behind Shire Silver was to create what is essentially an open source currency. In the original plan, we had thought that we could produce die sets that dozens to hundreds of people could use to set up their own mini-mints. Unfortunately, the overhead cost of producing die sets is prohibitive for small operations. It also requires more infrastructure than we'd like. However, the problem of capital requirements got our creatice juices flowing, and we think we now have a far better solution. This one should require less than $200 in capital equipment, but even that can easily be borrowed or leased - this will be far less expensive than a die set and some sort of press.

For those who are still interested in producing round coin-like tokens, using a traditional die set, I suggest you visit the American Open Currency Standard, which is not quite open source, but comes close enough for many purposes.

We plan on not only producing the product ourselves, but publishing detailed instructions on how to do this yourselves. A true open source currency could arise from this, allowing countless home businesses to compete with the Federal Reserve as well as each other.