Oceanic: A preview

[Ari Rahikkala]

Terribly sorry for barging in right at this moment when the combined Small Commonwealth economy plan has almost passed, but... I have a better idea. Well, an idea that I think is better.

Oceanic is my name for a plan for an intermicronational payment system based on the Ripple monetary system by Ryan Fugger.

To users who are already part of an economy and only need banking functionality, it will appear as a web bank much like ShireBank, though with a few frills you can ignore. Once you have set up an account (for Shirithians, I expect this will involve a single password change where you get your new password emailed to you) you will be able to just click on pay and pay people, and you will be able to see payments made to and by you, etc.. You *won't* be able to see other people's account balances - this will be private in Oceanic. In essence, life for you will be pretty much the same as it was before. (a state will, however, be able to see how much state-issued money each of its citizens has, simply by looking at its own account)

To people interested in national economic policy such as Andreas and me, well, there's a paper on the Ripple monetary system for us to read: Money as IOUs in Social Trust Networks. They'll have a chance to set exchange rates (the setting is global so the rates will probably be negotiated on a national level instead of determined by the market or such), to watch trade balances (at least of the payments that get routed through the central systems), and regulate the part of international trade where the payments go through central accounts they'll set up. In essence, the people involved with your money will have more tools to make it do things.

To people who don't like what they read in the last paragraph and would like to stay as far as they can from centralised economic regulation - Ripple does not even have a concept of nation, and it will allow you to make credit relationships with whomever you feel you can trust. Of course, this could mean that life's getting interesting - since payments can be routed through any path of credit and credit means what you agree for it to mean with the other guy, you could wake up one day to find out that two people (you don't get to know who - it's part of the system's privacy) have made a trade somewhere in the microworld and now you owe one guy a story and another one owes you a picture. In other words, if you want to do fun things with it, you'll find it ridiculously flexible.

To people in nations that aren't initial signatories who might want to participate in the economy - assuming the money in it does manage to get valuable enough to be worth it - there will be a chance to join in. By the nature of Ripple a single person can act as an economic "gateway" to another that's off the official grid as long as there's mutual trust. If there is actual economic value to be found inside Oceanic, it will be able to spread incrementally, and subsume national economies. This is a pretty significant distinction to the SCUCT where only nations can join.

To summarise the benefits: There will be actual currencies with exchange rates; your account information will be private (I'm somewhat convinced most people prefer it this way); the system will be flexible for the people who want to play with it but work just like before for the people who don't; and it can be adopted more incrementally than the SCUCT.

To summarise reasons you might not want it: If you use the flexibility to make life complicated for yourself, well, life will be more complicated: You could find that you don't have a single account balance anymore, or that you have been used as part of a payment path and have now developed two new debts, one to pay and one to collect. But that's only if you go through the effort to complicate your life; Nations won't be able to enforce regulation very well as your privacy will be protected from micronational jurisdictions; and it *will* take me a while to set everything up to work really smoothly.

There will be more later, much more. I'll just have to actually host this thing first.

[Ari Rahikkala]

A note on the following few posts: The content of the quote in http://shireroth.kuroshiro.net/forum/vi ... 43#p130043 was the original OP. The current OP has been completely rewritten to not sound so confusing. This post's original content OTOH has been obsoleted by the new OP.

[Kaiseress Anandja I]

Just after reading this once it feels too complicated for micronationalism. We have different people with vastly different knowledge in economics for example. That at least is my first impression.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Let me take a moment to rewrite the first post. I'll repost the complicated unstructured explanation here once I'm done.

[Kaiseress Anandja I]

Ah, now I see that you managed to post one more post before my first reply. I think that the main benefit of this system is that it can handle exchange rates. But I've vetoed the currency treaty bill so we have time to discuss this. It will be this one or the other one, those are the only two options.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Here's the complicated version that was originally the OP, with various conjectures and policy proposals and philosophical discussion and unsubstantiated opinions and stuff all rolled into one big confusing mudball. It's proooobably best to just skip over this one.

To put it in a brief yet difficult-to-understand way, Ripple is a form of free banking, with automatic routing to allow for payments to be made through arbitrarily complicated credit relationships. You can find a more understandable introduction at Ripple's project homepage. Especially the original paper on decentralized currency is well worth reading, and you probably *will* have to read it is understand everything in this post. A warning is in order, though: When I first learned about Ripple it blew my mind, and I'm still finding some pieces I haven't picked up yet.

Unlike the SCUCT, Oceanic...

- already has almost the exact software that we need implemented, in the form of RipplePay 0.2 (also by Ryan Fugger). Setting up hosting for it will be a little bit complicated but I should be able to do that next week.
- allows an economically sound way to set up currencies of different values and effortlessly manage exchange between them
- provides at least a limited form of automatic tracking for trade balance (limited in that it will be possible to set up trades without being included in it)
- can model complicated credit relationships; for instance, we could set things up so in Shireroth that one duchy could owe money directly to another, or have some sort of banks, etc.
- can quickly adapt to allow people in from other nations in without having to have the entire nation set its economy up with the highly arbitrary 10000 $currency / citizen - all they need to do is set up a credit relationship with *someone* who's in the system already

... and it's also unlike the SCUCT in ways that people might disagree with:

- It is going to be privately hosted, with one administrator - me. All account information will be private to the account holder and I do not intend to reveal any of it to any micronational jurisdiction. (OTOH sharing information voluntarily will be OK, of course, and I might look into ways to automate allowing people to reveal some account information)
- As currently implemented it has no concept of nation except for voluntary involvement with the national credit relationships, making most forms of economic regulation quite impossible. The point of Oceanic is not to show off the cool ways that different nations complicate their economies, it is to try to set up something that works.
- Unless you only subscribe to a single credit relationship (and for a lot of people a single relationship will be enough), you won't have a single definite account balance anymore, but various balances of connections with different people. This is really only the system being more precise than the earlier one: Where before your money was backed by some vague cloud of people known as Shireroth, now you'll have specific knowledge of which people and organisations owe you how much or how much you owe them.

Plus, of course, there's one more thing that might be considered a good or a bad thing: If you've set yourself up as part of a credit path, you might wake up one morning and find that some guy owes you money and you owe some other guy money (read the paper to see why and how this happens). Because credit in Ripple means what you agree with the other guy for it to mean, this could just as well be a source for frustration as for inspiration.


So, how does it work? Well, really, you'll just want to read the paper. Especially if you're in charge of economic policy. Have you read the paper now? Good. This'll get rather Ripple-y from now on.

An economy with a single central source of money - for instance, the Ministry of Trade in Shireroth - that all citizens trust to fully meet its obligations that the money represents, is modeled in Ripple by having each citizen give unlimited or arbitrarily high credit to the central treasury, and the central treasury with no credit but unlimited issuance to everyone, and having the treasury send IOUs equal to each citizen's account equal to the amount of money they had in the old system. In such an economy Ripple implements all payments by having the payer return IOUs to the treasury and the treasury send the same amount of IOUs to the payee.

We could add more layers to this for almost free. For instance we could have duchies give credit to the treasury and their citizens to the duchies. This way each duchy would have a way to follow their own trade balance within the centralised system (though, Ripple being free, not all transactions might *be* inside the centralised system). The "almost" in "almost free" comes from the slight cost that moving between duchies would become more complicated (I can type up an illustrated guide for doing this, it's not that much effort), and also, if we add more complexity to the economy, not an obvious decision to make.

Now that duchies have their own accounts, I think a rather Shirithian way to run the economy would be to have them grant some credit to each other. Suddenly now duchies will be able to owe things to each other - to have debts that they might be able to pay with money from the treasury if they have any, or with whatever one duchy might be able to give another (I recommend Landsraad votes ). (also, of course, a situation where one duchy owes another won't actually occur in this system unless duchies are directly making payments, or they give credit or extra IOUs to their citizens... which, IMO, are both quite interesting plans )

For currency exchange, RipplePay provides by default a feature where an administrator can add currencies (with exchange rates) and users can have accounts in different currencies - currency exchange will then be automatic and done wherever necessary in a chain of credit. Since credit means something arbitrary or, at best, a promise to redeem something that's equal in value to the debt accrued on a connection, there's nothing unsound about "destroying" money in one currency and "creating" it in another. The exchange rates can only be set globally, though... well, at least this makes it difficult to arbitrage them


The site will not be quite as simple for users as the extremely no-frills ShireBank. I'll do something about providing documentation, integrated and otherwise, to make things more understandable. However, I should be able to automate setup steps for centralised economies so that people who just want to make payments to other people will be able to click on pay and enter a name and amount to pay and that will be it.


There will be more to come later once I'm more familiar with the RipplePay code and have set it up as Oceanic on my webhost. Until then, please allay your confusion by asking specific and useful questions . Also, read the paper, and meditate on it. All sorts of things about economic stuff became far more clear to me once I started figuring Ripple out.

[Kaiseress Anandja I]

Um... You've already posted that?

[Ari Rahikkala]

Yeah, that *is* what they mean with repost, you know

[Andreas the Wise]

I'll have to meditate on it more. The ability to effectively create and destroy currency is still annoying me conceptually. The possibility of the government having unlimited credit also annoys me, as it means inflation can be a serious problem (believe me, I've been in post economies where people just get 10 per post, always, unclosed ... do that for a year and you notice the price difference. PRH, have the government make one vastly overpriced transaction and you significantly notice the difference. Suddenly there was twice as much money about!). Not sure I want separate currencies transacting (though if the Dutch sector got involved that would be a bonus and they would need an exchange rate, probably). Also the issue of central bank sovereignty, though if both Shireroth and Gralus have a central bank *their* citizens trust, and exchange rate set at 1:1, it could make adding up relative trade flows easy, provided enough links can go through people like me who are dual cits ...

Hmm. If you have auto-set exchange rates, can you un-trust a currency? Just, it won't be a problem with current nations, but if we added more nations in in the future with all their own central bank, who can create currency on a whim, then we can't trust all of them to not inflate ...

I'll meditate on it more.
Oh, and of course if you can convince me, you still have to come with me to Gralus so we can convince them this is the banking software we want ...

[Ari Rahikkala]

Ahh, *this* is the kind of thing I wanted - specific questions that I can actually give meaningful answers to!

I'll be doing your post out of order because I can explain the concepts better that way...

Also the issue of central bank sovereignty, though if both Shireroth and Gralus have a central bank *their* citizens trust, and exchange rate set at 1:1, it could make adding up relative trade flows easy, provided enough links can go through people like me who are dual cits ...

You don't need payment through dual cits for nations with centralised economies. You can just have the central banks trust each other up to some credit limit that I'm sure we'll have a lot of fun negotiating . Less trusted nations could be joined up with lower credit limits (where, do note, getting credit with just one central bank is enough to allow for payments to be routed through the regulated path into anywhere in the system).

The possibility of the government having unlimited credit also annoys me, as it means inflation can be a serious problem (believe me, I've been in post economies where people just get 10 per post, always, unclosed ... do that for a year and you notice the price difference.

If you don't trust a nation not to inflate their currency to uselessness, you can just give them a low credit limit. Also, do note that a nation with a centralised economy can just decide not to make any payments out of its central bank (only having it as a payment path for other people), in which case its currency will never be inflated except from foreign trade.

(do remember that money can always be created up to the credit limit simply by paying it. I could make an Ari The Second account and give it a billion erb, and it wouldn't lessen the value of the currency for the state. The precise explanation contains some mindblowingness that it's just a bit too late to properly explain at this time of the night.)

Hmm. If you have auto-set exchange rates, can you un-trust a currency? Just, it won't be a problem with current nations, but if we added more nations in in the future with all their own central bank, who can create currency on a whim, then we can't trust all of them to not inflate ...

Can't untrust a currency, but a central bank could untrust another central bank by not allowing them any more credit.



Let's try out a few examples explaining the motions of money inside the system. I'm assuming the simple model of central banks connected with limited mutual credit agreements, citizens of nations giving unlimited credit to their central bank, and central banks not making payments themselves. (this is what most nations will probably use)

I pay 30 erb to Jake for cool wiki work: 30 erb go from my account to the treasury, and from the treasury to Jake's account. In the end, the sum of the treasury's account balances will remain the same, while my account balance will have gone down by 30 erb and Jake's up by the same amount.

I pay 2000 erb in taxes for Straylight: 2000 erb go from my account to the treasury, and from the treasury to the Crown account.

I pay Nargoth 1000 erb for... whatever I might have a cause to pay Nargoth for: 1000 erb go from my account to Shireroth's treasury. Assuming the credit between Shireroth and Gralus is valued in GELT (as long as exchange rates don't change it's an entirely arbitrary choice), an appropriate amount in GELT (1000 as the rate is 1:1) then go from Shireroth's treasury to Gralus's treasury. Then 1000 GELT go from Gralus's treasury to Nargoth. End result: My account is 1000 erb down, Shireroth's treasury is 1000 erb up and 1000 GELT down, Gralus's treasury is at the same summed balance, Nargoth is 1000 GELT up. Looking at Shireroth's treasury, which has the books on both the transactions it's had with me and with Gralus's treasury, we'd see that Shireroth now has a debt of 1000 GELT to Gralus (assuming we started as 0). Similarly if we looked at Gralus's treasury we'd see the surplus from Shireroth's treasury.

If I were from a nation that gave out huge payments from its central bank and thus horribly inflated its currency, I... *would* be able to pay for a lot of stuff around the world. For a while. Then my nation would start hitting its credit limits with all the other nations in the systems and those payment paths would soon become useless to me.

[Scott of Hyperborea]

I think I understand that document. But what micronational problem is this system solving?

If I understand the document correctly, it's a potential solution to to the problem of having centralized banks that charge lots of interest for their services. It's kind of clever and interesting. But this has never been a problem in Shireroth; I don't think we even have an interest rate.

I can't see how Ripple could be used to create a currency that didn't already exist, or exchange a currency that didn't already have an exchange rate. So what do we gain in exchange for all the excess complication?

[Kaiseress Anandja I]

Ah ah ah! Good question. I ask that one too.

[Andreas the Wise]

Ok, meditating and rereading. It's making more sense, but let me explain it back to you to see if I'm right.
(for the record, all the stuff alluded to about bank created currency I understand because I've covered that in economics).

For micronational purposes, each nation has a "Central Bank" account, from which they issue credit equal to the amount of their currency in circulation (so Shireroth issues 100 000, Gralus 200 000 etc). They also have a "Crown Account" or equivalent, which handles how much of the central bank credit the government has to handle its debts. To keep the economy closed, you merely make a rule that the central bank cannot issue more than x amount of currency*.

Everyone in Shireroth trusts "Shirithian Central Bank" credit, which is called Erb. If Ari needs to pay me 100 erb, and we don't trust each-other, then what happens is he gives me 100 Erb, and so effectively he's reduced the "Shirithian Central Bank"'s debt to him by 100, and increased its debt to me by 100. All well and good.

Alternatively, if Ari and I trust eachother, we can skip erb entirely, and he can give me a 100 erb IOU. He can effectively create his own currency. But that's only useful if other people trust Ari too, OR if Ari has 0 erb but knows he's due some bounties soon.

Now, when there are Gralans, I'll have some money in my account as Erb, and some as GELT (IOUs from the Gralan Imperial Treasury). Now, the Gralan Imperial Treasury and the Shirithian Central Bank both have agreements with each other to trade at a 1:1 ratio. So if I want to pay North 100, and only have Erb, and he only wants GELT, then what happens is the 100 erb the Shirithian Central Bank owes me goes back to it, it passes it onto the Gralan Imperial Treasury (so they're owed from the Shirithian Central Bank/have 100 erb), and it owes North an extra 100, so he gets 100 GELT.

Ah, now there it gets ... odd. If we just had a centralised SCU, then there would be no Shirithian Central Bank, and no Gralan Imperial Treasury. There would just be "The Bank", only one currency, and North would get 100 of it from me. If he chooses to call what he gets GELT, and I choose to call what I give him Erb, it makes no difference. But under Oceanic, there is a difference. Whereas before there was 100 000 erb, and 200 000 GELT, there is now 99 900 Erb in Shireroth, 100 Erb in the Gralan Imperial Treasury, and 200 100 GELT in Gralus. Which could work, if banks only increase their credit issued to citizens when they hold IOUs from eachother. But if the RBX (of eXamplestan) decides that its government needs another 20 grand to avoid taxes, and give 20 grand to the government account, then that 20 grand can filter through into Erbs and GELT, and inflate them. And because nobody can view anybody elses' account, they can get away with that. We'd only pick it up if the Shirithian Central Bank and the Gralan Imperial Treasury find themselves with a large amount of RBX IOUs, but the problem is, they could legitimately accumulate those IOUs through normal exchanges if there was no extra currency printed and Examplestanians just liked buying Shirithian and Gralan goods.

Now, we can work around this by having a Small Commonwealth Central Bank which issues the IOUs. This stops unknown inflation. But if we do that, then we still do have to issue the arbitrary 10 000 per new citizen, which Ari wanted to avoid, I believe. And we can no longer see which nation has changed their currency share easily. In Erik's bank, we can just do it like we currently do Duchies - they all have the same currency, but we can see an added up summary of how much currency is held by each Duchy. In the same way, we could see how much currency was held by Shirithian registered bank accounts, and how much by Gralan registered bank accounts etc. But we can't do this in Ripple if we have a centralised Central Bank.


Now, the cool bit about Ripple is that we can do bank created money (why do I object to government inflated currency and not bank inflated currency? Well, the story of bank created currency is just much cooler. Or maybe its ideological, I don't know ...). Someone can start up a bank, and properly take accounts and loans in "Bank IOUs", because the bank can always issue extra IOUs to cover a time when they have more loans than credit accounts. But I still doubt that'd work too well ...
Cool bit two (if I read it right) is that you can create other thinks for the trade - like, as Ari said, owe "one story" or "one picture".
Final cool bit - we can put the whole micronational world on this, and involve the Dutch easily, if they're interested. But, in fairness, we could do that with Erik's bank too, and set exchange rates (you said it could handle multiple currencies, right?) If its kept closed and on the same bank software, it should be fine. It's when its on separate banks and people have to manually create or delete currency that things get dodgy ...

I'm still ambivalent, but I think I'm informedly ambivalent now.


*I'd been treating the "central bank" and "crown account" in my head as the same thing, which is what was confusing me. Separating them makes it so much easier.

[Ari Rahikkala]

I think I understand that document. But what micronational problem is this system solving?

If I understand the document correctly, it's a potential solution to to the problem of having centralized banks that charge lots of interest for their services. It's kind of clever and interesting. But this has never been a problem in Shireroth; I don't think we even have an interest rate.

I can't see how Ripple could be used to create a currency that didn't already exist, or exchange a currency that didn't already have an exchange rate. So what do we gain in exchange for all the excess complication?

Yes, that was the problem Ripple was designed to solve. We're just adapting the system to solve a different problem, the same one as SCUCT: How to build an intermicronational economy. It just makes different tradeoffs: It's more nontraditional in order to be flexible, it regulates international trade (or, rather, allows pairs of nations to regulate trade between each other) instead of intranational financial policy, etc..

To reiterate the biggest benefits of Oceanic vs. SCUCT: Oceanic allows us to do away with the 10000 currency / citizen figure in favour of more flexible credit arrangements, and the software for it comes with a means to handle currency exchange, allowing nations that already have an established currency to join in. More minor benefits are that people can join the payment network without their nation getting in, and that the system allows more general kinds of economic structure for those who like that kind of thing and a limited kind of regulation of trade (I concede the point about tracking trade balances to Andreas, though).

Ah, now there it gets ... odd. If we just had a centralised SCU, then there would be no Shirithian Central Bank, and no Gralan Imperial Treasury. There would just be "The Bank", only one currency, and North would get 100 of it from me. If he chooses to call what he gets GELT, and I choose to call what I give him Erb, it makes no difference. But under Oceanic, there is a difference. Whereas before there was 100 000 erb, and 200 000 GELT, there is now 99 900 Erb in Shireroth, 100 Erb in the Gralan Imperial Treasury, and 200 100 GELT in Gralus. Which could work, if banks only increase their credit issued to citizens when they hold IOUs from eachother. But if the RBX (of eXamplestan) decides that its government needs another 20 grand to avoid taxes, and give 20 grand to the government account, then that 20 grand can filter through into Erbs and GELT, and inflate them. And because nobody can view anybody elses' account, they can get away with that. We'd only pick it up if the Shirithian Central Bank and the Gralan Imperial Treasury find themselves with a large amount of RBX IOUs, but the problem is, they could legitimately accumulate those IOUs through normal exchanges if there was no extra currency printed and Examplestanians just liked buying Shirithian and Gralan goods.

First, as a tangential note, I thought about how international credit should be denominated, and the answer seems fairly simple: Nations grant credit in their own currency. For instance, Gralus should grant credit to Shireroth in GELT, and Shireroth to Gralus in erb. Well, I'll have to check if the software supports that properly first. But it seems right to me: When a Shirithian pays a Gralan, Shireroth *should* end up owing GELT to Gralus, and erb vice versa.

Now, to the problem itself. You're afraid that Examplestan might inflate their currency instead of maintaining appropriate financial policy (maybe they're democratic and could *shiver* just decide to elect a new MiniTrade one day). In other words, you don't fully trust Examplestan. And you know what? That's OK! That's why you give them limited credit. Supposing the least favourable situation possible - Examplestan being a couple of complete strangers-to-you who have just very recently formed a nation - and the simplest possible terms - something like "take what you like, pay back sometime if you can" it would be perfectly good and right to provide something like 500 erb worth of credit. Or even less. It's not like they couldn't commission a picture from a Shirithian for 100, for instance - 500 would get you a comic already . Then you can ask and see what they did with the money - that's what creditors do - and if it's good and they seem to be good people (and better yet if they're providing workable services worth money), provide more.

Yes, this does mean that you have to look in occasionally and size up the nations you do business with. There's going to be possibilities for fraud and freeloading and various other impoliteness. But they can only hurt you up to the credit you give them. And if you don't trust them, you could just refuse to offer credit to them at all. As long as *someone* picks up the slack the system will be able to route payments between you and them.

Compare this to the situation with SCUCT where you'd have to vet a new nation carefully to see if you can really trust them to perhaps get 10000 units per citizen of what's essentially your currency. For reference, that kind of money is enough to buy 12 smilies visible on the posting page on Shireroth's forum (or 50 behind "view more smilies"), and you might remember the time when that amount was paid to buy a dukal position . Oceanic thus provides *far* better protection against economic damage from nations with a self-serving financial policy.

*I'd been treating the "central bank" and "crown account" in my head as the same thing, which is what was confusing me. Separating them makes it so much easier.

Yeah, I figured I'd been a bit confusing about that, hence the example with taxation. Incidentally, people could "burn banknotes" in Oceanic by sending money to their nation's treasury... but, eh, that would hardly be a problem, you can just issue new money to your equivalent of the crown account in accordance with your financial policy.

(tired. More on other matters tomorrow-ish)

[Kaiseress Anandja I]

Ari, do you have a timetable for this? I mean, when there actually is an infrastructure to look at? I am getting more and more intrigued.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Well, I'm currently being delayed by a spot of unexpected trouble with my webhost involving an old scanner, a driver's license, and an irascible support staff member. Next weekend might be a good time to expect to see something up, but I'm reallly not sure yet.

[Andreas the Wise]

I'm definitely going to withhold a final commitment for or against until I've had a chance to mess around with the interface a bit.

Something to consider in the meantime however, and an objection you wouldn't have realised (because you aren't Gralan) - we wanted our currency to have a physical presence (for Gralans) so that it could be stolen in GROWL (our recwar thing). We knew that this wouldn't apply to anyone not involved in GROWL (ie no non Gralans could be stolen from). I was assuming that 'stealing' would be managed by the GROWL Judge moving money from the stealee to the theif after the battle/theft has been resolved, via an admin account. That's dead easy with the old Shirebank. But is that even possible in Ripple?

[Kaiseress Anandja I]

I'm definitely going to withhold a final commitment for or against until I've had a chance to mess around with the interface a bit.

I agree completely.

[Ari Rahikkala]

OK, I've got ssh access with my host now and will be on DSL on Sunday. Unless my computer blows up or something (and the way its fans have sounded recently that might just happen) I should have something good up by next week.

[Austi_Scot]

I like this idea but want to put in my two Erb worth as it may be, at this point.

I'm thinking everyone is referring to a 1:1 exchange rate just for an easy way to talk about the examples given, at least I hope that is the reason. However I also think it important to note that an exchange rate of 1:1 will not work if one nation has 100,000 in currrency and the other 200,000. A 1:2 exchange rate is more likely to work, all other factors being equal - which they won't be. eg: the value of one thing or another done in one nation compared to the value of it in the other.

As already taken note of, the increase of an overall national currency somewhere and the fact that all nations which join may not have the same amount of currecny also makes a 1:1 ration impracticable. If all nations do have a 1:1 exchange ratio it would be better to have a single currency system.

With that said I believe it would be easier to get more nations to join if they can keep their own currency and the amount of currency they have already created, and be required to notify the 'Inter-micronational Central Bank' of changes in their currency amount. This of course would mean other nations need to adjust their credit line and the exchange rate with their currency. Thus calling for more interactions between member nations.

All of this makes the Ministry of the Exterior a very interesting place to be is such negotiations are put in that department. Both for bringing in more nations to such an economic system and for keeping up on the economic changes in other nations.

It also seems a barter system has been mentioned, albeit not by that name. The mention of owing a painting or a story was because of being a trusted exchange point was in a post. If a painting or a stroy can be listed as owed to someone it also needs to be listed as an exchangable asset. The list of these items could grow endless - troops, planes, ships, programs, anything a person wants. The barter list could get too long to manage and therefore I'm thinking there would need to be a free entry field to list the potential items a person owns that are availaable for barter.

This could make such a system very difficult to manage. I suggest leaving the bank exchange to currencies and the exchange of goods and services to businessess.

I actually like the idea brought forth by Andreas = a way to steal the cash held by others - this brings in other aspects to micronationalism (for those who wish to be involved in that aspect) it brings in different crime, laws about how to do it and how to catch a person, police, jails, and making the court system more active.

Perhaps a field that shows "cash help on person", "cash held in home" (or wherever). Maybe all cash has to be considered held by the person for a given length of time. Maybe goods can be stolen from a business or a person, but maybe that would require the business or person to keep an updated good list.

Oh well, ignore that last part - it's only add on to the idea of an inter-micronational banking system and economy - which I like.

[Andreas the Wise]

For the first part Austi - it is a unified currency. That's what the Small Commonwealth Unified Currency Treaty is about. Some nations have more than others based on the amount of citizens in the nation, which is actually a reasonably fair way to determine starting currency. However, if we go with Ripple instead of just a Shirebank, it'll be unified but printed by each separate nation, and so, will be like 1:1 currency. I do think if we do this we should require each nation to release the state of their bank accounts every month or so (at least, how many debts they have outstanding in each currency).

Others could join the bank and not be part of the above treaty - so they have their own currency and a different exchange rate worked out by the market or via negotiation with the Small Commonwealth - eg the Dutch nations.

[Austi_Scot]

ah, well - it's a start toward a good goal of Inter-micronational economics.