What makes Ripple “community-oriented”?
In national monetary systems, control over the creation and allocation of money is in the hands of a small group of centralized, hierarchical, corporate institutions. Ask yourself why the government vouches for bank IOUs through deposit insurance but won’t vouch for people’s IOUs, when bank IOUs are backed by people’s IOUs? Corporate banks are given a near-monopoly on intermediating economic exchanges. Is it any wonder that corporations receive economic priority while the human communities in which we all must live slowly disintegrate? Money is just a way to keep score in the big economic game that we are all playing, so why do only a few people have control of the scorekeeping process? Why keep the units of measurement scarce when needed projects go undone for their lack? It’s as though we were carpenters trying to build a house, but the foreman insisted on controlling how many inches each of us was allocated. It makes what could be a cooperative economy into a power game for those se
