Open Source Currencies

With barter increasingly popular among the under and unemployed, and more than 2,500 communities around the world printing their own currencies, alternative currencies aren't all that alternative these days.

But new initiatives in online and open source currencies are pushing the boundaries of what we think of as money. Money and property won in online games is bought and sold for cash. Websites and social networks are using peer-peer currencies to assign a value to things like influence, good deeds, and attention. And a group of activists and programmers are building online, open source infrastructures that would allow different kinds of alternative currencies to interact with each other. You can read more about open source currencies in this fascinating essay by environmental activist and currency geek Jay Standish.

Although alternative currencies can be engineered to build community, support local economies, or limit environmental destruction, they are not automatically "good" for being "alternative." A recent article and short video in the Wall Street Journal explores alternative currencies' uneasy existence between utopian roots and a venture capitalist future. As author Douglas Rushkoff says in the article, “What people want is the ability to transact. They live in a world now where the money they want to use to transact is also being used by speculators to extract value from their communities. And it’s not a tool that can do both jobs well."