Via Michel Bauwens’ FB profile I heard that Bernard Lietaer has died today. The former Belgian central banker, Euro-architect, hedge fund manager, and very active alternate currencies champion. I have learned a lot from his writings. I’m taking his passing as a trigger to (re)read his books. His arguments on how to create abundance and sustainable growth strike me as more convincing than the singularity style techno-optimists’. He was a very approachable man, and patiently entertaining my layman’s questions to him when I mailed him years ago.
Tag: lets
Suggested Reading: Barcelona, LETS, Freedom of Speech and more
Some links I thought worth reading the past few days
- CTO Francesca Bria says “We are reversing the smart city paradigm”, creating “a new social pact — a new deal on data”: Fighting back against surveillance capitalism in Barcelona (leading the ‘fearless cities’ network)
- I had to miss it at the time itself, but enjoyed watching it afterwards, part of my braintrust Bryan Alexander hosts a Future Trends Forum with Cory Doctorow on Walkaway: Talking education and technology, the Walkaway perspective.
- The first example I’ve come across that looks at using blockchain for a local exchange and trading system (LETS), a local currency. Not sure why fiat currency related fears like ‘managing supply and demand’ of coins are mentioned, when you tie creation to a transaction like they describe: Hullcoin: can blockchain unlock the hidden value in Hull’s economy?
- Dealing with asymmetries in power over transmission, gatekeeping, scoring: Nibbling away at The New Octopus
- Last month XML-RPC was 20 years old. I should not be surprised Dave Winer helped create it. Twenty years on my webhoster blocks it to prevent brute force attacks on my blog: Dave Winer looks back on 4 years of XML-RPC in 2002.
- Trolling Trump with the US Constitution: Twitter blocking violates First Amendment
- Once more a way how geo data is part of privacy discussions: Open Street Map preparing for GDPR