der to do it. Our
transaction is brokered by the Federal Reserve, who has a monopoly on
this closed source currency.

Meanwhile, the actual value of this currency, and the effort required
to obtain it, is decided much more by market speculators than its
actual users. Speculation accounts for over 90 percent of US currency
transactions in any given day. By this measure, real spending and the
real economy are a tiny and secondary function of money: the dog is
being wagged by its tail.

What if currency were to become open source? In some communities it
already is. They are not printing counterfeit bills but catalysing
regional economies through the use of local currencies, locally
created 'scrip' that can be exchanged throughout a particular region
in lieu of Federal Reserve notes or real cash. The use of these
currencies, as promoted by organisations such as the E.F. Schumacher
Society, has been shown to accelerate the exchange of goods and
services in a region by increasing the purchasing power of its
members. There is no Federal Reserve surcharge on the creation and
maintenance of cash, and no danger of government currency depreciation
due to matters that have nothing to do with actual production and
consumption.

Like any other bottom-up system, the creation of local currency
develops transactional models appropriate to the scale of the actual
transactions and the communities in which they occur. While Federal
notes, or Euros for that matter, might be appropriate for a merchant
to use across state or national boundaries, local currencies make for
greater fluidity and accountability between members of the same
community.

Thanks to the dynamic relationships permitted in a networked society,
we need not choose between local and closed currencies. A
post-renaissance perspective on economic issues has room for both to
exist, simultaneously functioning on different orders of magnitude.

In a society modelled on open source ideals, 'think globally, act
locally' becomes more than just a catch phrase. The relationship of an
individual or local community's action to the whole system can be
experienced quite readily. For example, an open source software
developer who writes just a few useful lines of code, say the protocol
for enabling infrared communications to work on the Linux operating
system, will see his or her contribution interpolated into the kernel
of the operating system and then spread to everyone who uses it