Salt of the Earth

It seemed to me that the salt battery was the fulcrum that helped us bolt forward. It was developed by a small community in Australia doing research, a continent that was almost uninhabitable because it was so hot. We assumed that they would be hard press to survive, and it was surprising that they were doing this kind of work. Seems that they figured out that they had to do this to go beyond survival and thrive.

They shared their discoveries by sharing the instructions of how to make these batteries over the voice network which had painstakingly come together. Besides the how-to instructions, they spend countless hours helping people putting them together. It didn’t take long for communities throughout the world to come up with improvements and share them.

We had renewable energy storage systems that communities and ensembles could build on.

Energy Harvesting

Then a community from Punta Arenas, in the Pampas shared that they had a rudimentary form of energy harvesting and could capture ambient energy from the environment. The platform that had come up for the sodium-sulphur battery came in very handy to build the energy harvesting technology and the responses came in very rapidly. The whole world was now working together and coming up with tangible results that communities and ensembles of communities could build on.

The salt battery and energy harvesting were the results, we could build on them. But what started it all were decentralization and transparency; fearless sharing and no need for secrecy; the playfulness that allowed us to experiment and learn; communities making it all meaningful and joyful; collaboration instead of ruthless competition.

The other key element was RADs. They allowed everybody to recognize others” contributions and make them tangible.^∇

World-Wide rCoins

Nevertheless we needed money. Well, not pre-cliff fiat money, but we needed “a medium of exchange” that would work anywhere in the world. We didn’t want centralized, pre-cliff banks. We needed a different model, and rCOINs were it.^∇

The old fiat money could be accumulated, with all the problems that arose from it. rCOINs avoided all those problems and it supported decentralized world-wide exchange. We didn’t think of it at first, but it accelerated the next wave of innovations.

rCOINs were transparent, too and each came with a log that detailed who minted them, when, and what, if anything, is backing them. People could decide to accept them or not. Communities accepted rCOINs at whatever value they could afford because they usually knew the people minting them, or people who knew them, or … you get my point. Most importantly, communities wanted these folks to succeed on the chance that they could move their world forward.

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