Time Currency

A proposal: that the fifteen-minute Period of Action, freely given to everyone alike, be the fundamental and equal basis of exchange between conscious agents.

Every living person receives the same quantity of the one thing that cannot be manufactured, hoarded across a lifetime, or inherited: a day. Ninety-six quarter-hours of it. Money is distributed by history, by position, and by luck; Time is distributed by existence. A currency denominated in time therefore starts from an equality that no monetary currency has ever started from (Periods of Action · TimeEnergy).

The proposal is simple to state. A Period of Action spent on work the Circle validates as meaningful counts as one unit of value, and those units are what participants exchange (Meaningful Work · Exchange · Proof-of-contribution). Its immediate effects are the interesting part: an hour of anyone's honest contribution is an hour, so the vast spreads that money puts between kinds of work do not arise in the first place (Compressed Pay Ratios · Dignity); and work that no market pays for becomes countable (Meaningful Work).

It sits beside the other instruments rather than replacing them. LUV circulates as broader goodwill; Time-Energy Accounting is the practice of keeping books in time and energy rather than in money; and ordinary money still exists at the edge, where the body touches the world it lives inside (Money · Underwriting The New Economy).

The canon marks this page work in progress on its second line, and the honesty is worth keeping. The open questions are real ones: an hour of skilled work and an hour of unskilled work are not equally useful, and a scheme that ignores that has to explain how capability gets developed; validation has to be trustworthy or the unit is worthless; and any unit of account eventually attracts the behaviours that units of account attract (Usury · Extraction Of Wealth · Waste). None of these is fatal, and none of them has been answered.

Also called: time as currency Stands on: Time · Periods of Action · Meaningful Work · Value Opens onto: LUV · TimeEnergy · Time-Energy Accounting · Compressed Pay Ratios · Exchange · Trade · Economy · Money · Pillar III — Sacred Economy and CurrentSee In play: the table, where contribution is recorded and validated Sources: Time Currency (root page, draft — marks itself Work in Progress on line 2; the fifteen-minute unit and the equal-basis proposal) · Meaningful Work (root page, draft, where the unit is tied to validation) · Periods of Action (root page, stub) · lionsberg.wiki: Time Currency Open: Declared a proposal by the canon itself and never taken further; nothing in the corpus tests it, prices anything in it, or records anyone having used it. · The canon derives it from a Meta Game, a frame the Field carries under The Great Game, so the lineage line reads oddly.