Demurrage currency
Established Alternative Game position: Modify
Prototype: Chiemgauer (Bavaria)
Charges a small periodic fee on idle balances, so holders are pushed to circulate money quickly instead of hoarding it — Gesell's old proposal.
Structural profile
Topology view
- Agent-centric currency framework: Emerging Alternative · Game: Modify
- Local complementary currency: Emerging Alternative · Game: Modify
- Asset-backed digital stablecoin: Crypto-native incumbent · Game: Accept
Architecture
- Game position
- Modifies the game; adds negative carry to circulate money
- Value-signal richness
- Single rational unit with built-in negative carry cost
- Accumulation regime
- Penalizes accumulation through holding fees
Medium-of-Exchange Properties
- Divisibility
- Finely divisible like conventional currency — the holding fee doesn't change the unit's granularity.
- Uniformity (Fungibility)
- Fungible — one note is interchangeable with any other; only the holding cost differs by time held.
- Durability
- Durable as a note or ledger entry, but the holding-cost design actively discourages sitting still — built to circulate, not to be hoarded.
- Portability
- Portable within its circulation area (Chiemgauer-style), typically locally bounded like other complementary currencies.
- Acceptability
- Narrow — accepted within its regional merchant network by design.
Operation
- Coordination / discovery
- Price-aggregation with built-in carry cost driving circulation
- Governance & issuance
- Variable: community, regional authority, or bank
- Scale & federation
- Local to regional typically; federation rare historically
Anthropological assumptions
- Default ethical orientation
- Smithian; carry cost disciplines self-interest
- Accumulative drive
- Drive moderated through carry cost
- Status / recognition
- Partially encoded but discouraged from accumulation
- Time preference
- Short — the holding fee that solves unbounded accumulation does so by forcing quick circulation, orienting the mechanism short-term as a side effect.
In Practice
- Track record
-
The Chiemgauer has circulated in Bavaria since 2003 , one of the longer-running, better-documented complementary-currency deployments. - Governance requirements
- Requires an issuing association or cooperative to manage the currency and the demurrage mechanism; local merchants must opt in to accept it.
- Resource requirements
- An issuing organization and a network of participating local merchants; largely paper-note-based systems need minimal digital infrastructure.