Time-based reciprocity ledger
Established Alternative Game position: Modify
Prototype: hOurworld, TimeBanks USA
Values every contributor's hour identically regardless of skill, with balances netting to zero so accumulation stays structurally impossible.
Structural profile
Topology view
- Mutual credit clearing: Established Alternative · Game: Modify
- Local complementary currency: Emerging Alternative · Game: Modify
- Agent-centric currency framework: Emerging Alternative · Game: Modify
Architecture
- Game position
- Modifies the game; time as unit equalizes hourly value
- Value-signal richness
- Single time-unit; one hour equals one hour regardless of skill
- Accumulation regime
- Sum of balances is zero; net accumulation impossible by design
Medium-of-Exchange Properties
- Divisibility
- Deliberately granular at the hour — 'one hour equals one hour' is the whole design point, not infinitely divisible.
- Uniformity (Fungibility)
- Fungible in the most radical sense — an hour of any skill is interchangeable with any other hour.
- Durability
- Not a stored value — hours are earned and spent as ledger entries, not a token held as a store of value.
- Portability
- Portable within the specific timebank network (hOurworld/TimeBanks USA), not convertible outside it.
- Acceptability
- High within its member network by design (any hour equals any hour), zero outside it.
Operation
- Coordination / discovery
- Bounded-trust mutual; time as common denominator
- Governance & issuance
- Network coordinator; member-collective governance
- Scale & federation
- Local typically; federation through time-bank networks
Anthropological assumptions
- Default ethical orientation
- Rousseauian; assumes equality of hours across persons
- Accumulative drive
- Drive structurally limited; net accumulation impossible
- Status / recognition
- Designed out through hour-equality regardless of skill
- Time preference
- Variable — net-zero accumulation pulls short-term, while the stated purpose of durable mutual-aid relationships pulls long-term; the mechanism itself doesn't resolve the tension.
In Practice
- Track record
-
TimeBanks USA and hOurworld together coordinate a large number of local time-banking networks with a real, long-running (since the 1980s), if modest-scale, track record. - Governance requirements
- Requires a local timebank organization (often volunteer-run or nonprofit) to coordinate membership and record hours.
- Resource requirements
- A ledger to track hours (many networks use free/low-cost software like hOurworld) and a coordinating organization; no capital reserve needed.