Community Currencies’ failure could be overcome by the MyCurrency App approach
The article linked below explains that community currencies created so far have failed to achieve their goals:
Monetary Alchemy: How to Turn Bad Money into Good
By now, almost everyone has heard of one or more of the many local currency experiments that have sprung up in various places around the world in recent decades. Many of these have gotten a considerable amount of media attention and support from local government, but none of them has achieved the desired results of making their communities stronger, more prosperous and more resilient.
The article notes that most community currencies have followed a model of being convertible into ‘actual’ money:
These currencies are sold for, and can then be redeemed back into, conventional or official money. But even their proponents admit that these currencies have not been effective in achieving economic relocalization.
Which makes them little more than a less useful substitute for actual money. The ‘convertible local currency’ does not increase the local town’s income, since for every dollar of community currency/money that the town gained, they would have to deposit $1 of actual money to back the community currency.
What these towns actually need is MyCurrency’s goods/services backed currencies. The value of these kinds of currencies is not limited by the amount of “actual money”’ available to the town or its businesses. This is a genuinely new source of income for the town, that increases the purchasing power of the town’s residents.
The community currencies are also following a philosophy of ‘a single currency rules’, that nations have grown accustomed to. But in the free market, people should have the option to use more than one currency. For example, a town may have a General Store credit, and loyalty points for a local chain of gas stations, that are both widely accepted, and thus would both be considered ‘community currencies’. By giving people the freedom to choose how they pay for goods/services and how they receive payments, the MyCurrency model ensures that people are using the currencies that best meet their unique and varied needs.
