Recursive mutual credit protocol
Prototype / conceptual Game position: Modify
Prototype: Credit Commons Collective
A meta-protocol letting independently governed mutual-credit networks nest inside one another recursively, inheriting a parent network's rules while federating by design.
Structural profile
Topology view
Architecture
- Game position
- Modifies the game; meta-protocol for nesting credit networks
- Value-signal richness
- Inherits parent network's units; supports plural sub-units
- Accumulation regime
- Inherits parent network's accumulation regime; supports plural
Medium-of-Exchange Properties
- Divisibility
- Inherits the parent network's divisibility — the meta-protocol doesn't fix this itself.
- Uniformity (Fungibility)
- Inherits the parent network's fungibility, while supporting plural sub-units across federated networks.
- Durability
- Inherits whatever durability property the parent network's units have — the protocol itself doesn't fix this.
- Portability
- Portable across the federated network of nested mutual-credit groups, but not outside that federation.
- Acceptability
- Bound to whichever network(s) federate under the protocol — narrow relative to fiat, potentially broad within a large federation.
Operation
- Coordination / discovery
- Bounded-trust mutual at each node; recursive at protocol level — coordination emerges organically from bilateral trust relationships between account-holders, not from a top-down designed mechanism layer.
- Governance & issuance
- Per-ledger governance; protocol-level rules for nesting
- Scale & federation
- Designed for recursive federation; scales through nesting
Anthropological assumptions
- Default ethical orientation
- Smithian by default; inherits whichever parent network's assumptions it's federated with, with no signal of its own pointing elsewhere — the taxonomy's default reading applies.
- Accumulative drive
- Inherits parent network's accumulation regime
- Status / recognition
- Inherits parent network's status logic
- Time preference
- Variable — inherits whatever time-preference orientation its parent network encodes; it has none of its own.
In Practice
- Track record
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The Credit Commons Collective's protocol remains early-stage — a specification and reference implementation exist, but widescale federation of mutual-credit networks under it hasn't yet occurred. - Governance requirements
- Requires each participating mutual-credit network to agree to the federation protocol's rules for inter-network settlement.
- Resource requirements
- Existing mutual-credit network infrastructure willing to federate; the meta-protocol itself adds coordination overhead, not new capital requirements.