Occcu

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

= alternative currency design with Basic Income feature included

Discussion

Jaromil:

"Alternative forms of money are designed to compete directly against global financial power, and this is a good news. Indeed, on 28 January 2012 at the gates of the World Economic Forum held in Davos, it was presented to the media a new version of community global currency, i.e. the OCCupy-CUrrency or Occcu. The project has been developed in Austria by a team of students led by Roland Alton Scheidl at Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences with the aim to offer a Basic-Income answer as the present double dip recession gives sign of shifting into the Greatest depression.

Starting from a background whereby WEF members gathering in Davos tried to direct the ongoing slow-motion global financial metldown through the report Global Risks 2012, a more valuable contribution for the solution to the crisis came from the demonstrators camping outside the venue of the Forum. The features of the Occcu are explicitly inspired by those of the Terra, a project of a Trade Reference Currency (TRC) and the GraDiDo system and allow to promote concrete monetary fairness:

  • “No interest rates and no bubbles;
  • Fixed fee generating taxes (demurrage) ;
  • Motivate to spend or donate and not to accumulate;
  • Value creation by individuals and their community work.”


Put it symply from Occcu documentation: “A cheque in your wallet allows you to agree on a payment anywhere.” Indeed, Occcu is a P2P horizontal market where anyone – in principle either big or small players – can buy or sell goods and – or services. The core principle leading the designers of Occcu is a principle already formulated, for example, in the ethical architecture of the Italian SCEC: Basic Income as a fundamental principle of currency design. Any member of the Occcu network receives a monthly amount of 100 Occcu (SCEC ‘s network members receive a periodical contribution from the issuer of SCECs). Finally, an up to date information system cheaply run the operation of the Occcu payment system.

All the elements are thus there for overcoming the present monetary paradigm and shift to a new and better one, whereby efficacy rather than efficiency is the goal. In order to reach such objective, one only needs to occupy herself by stopping to protest in the streets as the prerequisite for allowing oneself to start to adhere to ways for dealing with money, which are open to the adoption of the Occcu-like systems while simultaneously migrating from the conventional one:

- “For example, if you are protesting the banks – put down your sign and think about ways of eliminating banks in your life. Get rid of your accounts, pay off loans and don’t get anymore, cut up credit cards, and only use cash. I have done this myself in Canada for a while. Yes, its a pain in the ass to go into a bank and cash a cheque from a bank you are not a member of – and yes, they charge you for this service – yes, they look at you suspiciously – yes, they will try and get you to open an account – yes, you will need to store your cash at your house – yes, you will need to make sure you have enough money on your person when you go out. I know its sounds like a hassle but how much are you going to give up in the name of convenience? Take your power back. Boycott all you can. Its where your power is.”

It won’t be the easiest thing to do for everybody, but the direction is becoming every day more adamant. The Multitude has the technology for monetary autonomy and must start to use it. Why?

[It] will be only then that we may see what it truly means for the working class not just to have power, but to be in power”."