I have been doing my homework on alternative and complementary currencies for a good few years now and am now confident enough in my thinking to propose a couple of standardised valuation principles for discussion, debate, and agreement. But before I do that, I do want to quote from Piketty, just to prove that I think I know what I’m talking about.

Piketty tells us that capital includes all forms of wealth that individuals can own and that can be transferred or traded through the markets “on a permanent basis.” Capital and wealth are the same, except capital doesn’t include land, whereas wealth does. Some definitions of capital hold that the term should only apply to those components of wealth directly employed in the production process. But broadly speaking, insofar as Piketty is concerned, wealth equals capital.

“Forms of wealth” are useful and productive and reflect capital’s two major economic functions. For example, residential real estate can be seen as a capital asset that provides housing services whose value is measured by their rental equivalent. Capital and wealth have a market value, meaning they can be traded.

So, there’s my background research.

What Then Is This New Kind of Wealth?

It would do well to remember that wealth must be a) ownable and b) tradable. That’s what the Potteries Pound does. It tokenises the stored value that is unlocked when an economically inactive human chooses to become an actively engaged citizen by volunteering their time rather than wasting it by doing nothing, thus enabling the stored value of that volunteering decision to be owned and traded. The stored value that is unlocked has a name: “Community Social Value,” and it is measured in units of Potteries Pounds. Community Social Value thus is the result of your contribution to our Community.

Contribution to Community

To qualify as a “contribution to community,” actions or acts must pass two tests:

  1. Usefulness: They must produce advantageous and/or beneficial outcomes, i.e., they must do good.
  2. Productiveness: They must produce goods or services that have exchange value.

By standardising what it means to contribute to community, a new approach to citizenship can begin to emerge.

Our Community and Platform Cooperative

Our Community is “The #bekind Community Benefit Society trading as ‘The Stoke Model’ — a co-operative mission with a co-operative business model and bank account. We’ve been talking of late about the fundamentals of a platform cooperative and what those might look like. Platform cooperatives represent a transformative approach to digital business, combining the benefits of cooperative principles with the power of digital platforms. By prioritizing democratic governance, equitable wealth distribution, and community benefits, platform cooperatives offer a sustainable and ethical alternative to traditional platform businesses.

An Ethical Unit of Account

An ethical alternative requires an ethical unit of account that can unlock stored value, store that value in a wallet or an account that can be owned and traded by the individual that earned it into existence. Bitcoin — which is mined into existence — isn’t the ethical unit of account that we need. Bitcoin is a good idea insofar as it offers an alternative to the traditional financial system, but because it is neither useful nor productive, it lacks the intrinsic value that society needs to redress the inequalities that persist. Though, as we have seen, it is useful in the sense that it can, reasonably successfully, store value; it just can’t create value.

Building a Platform Cooperative

This is why Bitcoin isn’t our token of choice for what we are building. What we are building is a platform cooperative that uses a co-operative community benefit token to unlock stored value, build community, and generate national wealth without the need for more spending.

The Potteries Pound has the potential to transparently measure the performance of each and every left-behind economy as it strives to eliminate waste. As it strives to become more socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable, this isn’t “de-growth” — this is “re-growth.” This is a payments-media where the medium is the message, and the message is “don’t-be-a-waster.”

A New Capital Market

A payments-media where tokens of community benefit unlock stored value, build community, and are traded on a social stock exchange to generate recurring revenues for those organizations that issue, redeem, and defend the value of the Potteries Pound. Turning waste into an economic incentive costs nothing, and everyone benefits. A new capital market is being developed to clear this value before it perishes. This knowledge and know-how is now the collective intellectual property of the people of the Potteries.

But it could also be yours. To create your own version of the Potteries Pound for your left-behind community, then do get in touch at The Stoke Model as we would love to hear from you.

4o