Circles
@aboutcircles
Open protocol for communities to create their own economies. Trust-based money. No gatekeepers.
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In the winter of 1636, Dutch traders were buying and selling tulip bulbs that were still in the ground: paper promises on flowers nobody had seen. The rarest bulbs changed hands for more than a craftsman earned in a decade. In February 1637 the bids stopped, and a tulip went back to being worth a tulip.
Ever since, "tulip" has been the word people reach for whenever the financial system goes nuts. Jan Brueghel the Younger shown it first - painting the speculators as monkeys in merchant dress: one poring over a price list, a table heaped with coins, flowers trampled into the dirt.
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Germans call late July Sauregurkenzeit. The Dutch say komkommertijd. English once said cucumber time: the season when nothing happens and nothing is fresh.
In 1602, Juan Sánchez Cotán hung a quince and a cabbage on strings in a cold, dark larder and painted them with the gravity of an altarpiece. The strings were not decoration. They were how you kept food through a season it could not survive on its own.
We hang money up the same way, for the same reason. It never quite keeps, and we are rarely the ones who decide how fast it goes.
Circles takes the other side of that bet. Money that fades a little when it sits still, because it was built to move, not to be stored.
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There's a difference between a currency that's open and one that's unprotected.
Open means anyone can earn it.
Unprotected means anyone can extract it without contributing.
Healthy community economies need the first, can't survive the second.
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