Cryptocurrency VS Abolishing Currency

In this episode of What Would Save the World? #cryptocurrency VS the idea of #abolishingcurrency is discussed with crypto-enthusiast and expert Jodi Coyote & The Transition Team's Seed Nicole Bienfang.

The following is a list of resources pertaining to the topics discussed during this interview:

Zeitgeist Movement

https://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/

Zeitgeist: Addendum Documentary

http://www.thetransition.org/zeitgeist_addendum

Cryptocurrency

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency

Jodi Coyote

https://www.facebook.com/jodi.carothers

Nicole Bienfang

www.nicolebienfang.com

The Venus Project

https://www.thevenusproject.com/

Resource Based Economy

https://www.thevenusproject.com/faq/what-is-a-resource-based-economy/

Places that Accept Bitcoin

https://99bitcoins.com/who-accepts-bitcoins-payment-companies-stores-take-bitcoins/

https://letgocrypto.com/

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/prnewswire/press_releases/Texas/2018/01/16/SF89644

https://www.coinspeaker.com/2018/01/27/brisbane-airport-now-accepts-cryptocurrency-payments-terminal-shopping/

Cryptocurrency Mining

https://www.lifewire.com/cryptocoin-mining-for-beginners-2483064

School of Rock Reference

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0332379/

Nicole’s Sustainable Living Podcast Interview

http://www.thetransition.org/the_transition_featured_on_the_sustainable_living_podcast

Sharing Economy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharing_economy

Foreclosures and Homelessness

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-skip-bronson/post_733_b_692546.html

Watch Your Thoughts...Frank Outlaw

https://quoteinvestigator.com/category/frank-outlaw/

1%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_percent

99%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_are_the_99%25

Solidarity

http://www.thetransition.org/when_someone_says_solidarity_not_charity_what_does_that_mean

Mutual Aid

http://www.thetransition.org/what_is_mutual_aid

-Isms and Hierarchy

http://www.thetransition.org/when_someone_is_talking_about_isms_to_what_are_they_referring

Trump Voters

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/who-are-donald-trumps-supporters-really/471714/

Bottom Up Movements for Social Change

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/democracy_and_education/2012/05/bottom-up_organizing_transformative_movements_can_only_be_realized_with_authentic_grassroots_leaders.html

Founded in 1977 by ex-vacuum salesman Bert Potter, Centrepoint was an alternative lifestyle settlement that promoted intimate communal living, along with personal and sexual freedom. This documentary observes members' struggles to reconcile the values of their new home with the outside world. Director Geoff Steven threatened to take his name off the credits, in a successful bid to avoid the cutting of emotional scenes of 'encounter group' style psychotherapy. Potter and others were later convicted for a spate of child sex abuse and drugs charges. (This movie is in two parts so be sure to wait a few minutes for the second part to start about 30 min into the film)

A great way to show your support and help grow The Transition is to distribute copies of the films found in our Movie Vault to people who are not yet a part of our movement. They make great:

• Gifts
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• Movie screenings possible!

Your purchase also monetarily helps The Transition cover our overhead costs as well as strengthen our Buzz Bucks and The Cooking Pot programs.

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Another goal of The Transition is the creation of opportunities for self-empowerment. The way to do this within a BUD is to create an environment where every member is encouraged to participate in decision-making, take initiative, and fill the various roles necessary for smooth functioning of the BUD.

We make decisions by consensus rather than by voting. One of the significant effects of consensus process is getting the results you want from a group decision-making process is not about being on the side of the majority and getting your way, but by participating.

In voting, to get what you want you both have to participate and also be able to get the majority of votes so you win. Voting is a win or lose model in which people are often more concerned about the numbers it takes to win a majority than they are in the issue itself.

In consensus, to get what you want, all you have to do is participate. Consensus is a process of synthesis, bringing together diverse elements and blending them into a decision which is acceptable to the entire BUD. In essence, it is a qualitative rather than quantitative method of decision-making. Each person’s ideas are valued and become part of the decision. There is no winning. There is no sides. This is not just rhetoric. Within every group, for every decision, there is some outcome that is in the best interests of the group. Everyone in the group will benefit if the decision is truly in the best interest of the group. Consensus is a group decision-making process that regularly produces decisions that are truly in the best interest of the group. Another significant effect of consensus process on the culture of the group is the shift of focus from the ego to the collective. Allowing for ideas to mingle as collective property creates the opportunity for the creative interplay of ideas. Individuals are free to use their own ideas and borrow from other’s ideas to mix and match until, almost magically, an idea comes forward from the collective idea pool that satisfies enough concerns as to reach consensus from the group.

Many times, it would be impossible to say exactly who came up with the idea. This shift away from having a personal attachment or investment in ideas will be very difficult for some folks. Anyone whose identity is wrapped up in being the “person with the solution” may have a hard time letting go of control and let ideas have collective ownership. After all, ideas don’t care who has them.

When everyone participates in the discussion of an idea, trust develops and people feel valued and committed to the result. A proposal is stronger when everyone works together to create the best possible decision for the BUD. Any idea can be considered, but only those ideas everyone thinks are in the best interest of the BUD are adopted.

This is probably the most radical shift from where we are today into the paradigm of consensus decision making. In choosing to use the consensus process, one is intentionally letting go of personal control over both the flow of ideas and the outcome of the decision.With the ownership of ideas type of process, individuals retain significant power by controlling how their idea is used. The owner can define it and redefine it, withdraw it from discussion, decided which other ideas are “friendly amendments” and which are not, and even control over who else can “borrow” the idea. People go to meetings intending to argue for their ideas. They will convince others to their own point of view and even intentional attack another idea if it is deemed a threat. None of these behaviours or attitudes towards ideas is appropriate during the consensus process.

Anyone who has ever said, before going to a meeting using consensus process, that they were going to block a decision, has fundamentally misunderstood the concept. During the consensus process, it is never one person who decides what happens at any Level, and especially when there is a free flow of ideas that can interplay creatively producing results that would be unimaginable beforehand. It is completely out of order for an individual to even try to control the outcome.

It is out-of-process in that individuals are never asked to make any decision in consensus; it is always a group decision making process. And it is not in the spirit of democracy because it is making the fundamental assumption that an individual can make a better decision for the group than the group can make for itself.

Letting go of personal control over both the flow of ideas and the outcome of the decision us really at the core of democracy. Democracy is more than a process to empower the majority to do what it wants. At its core, it is about the revolutionary shift from personal power to collective power.

Methods of decision-making can be seen on a continuum with one person having total authority on one end to everyone sharing power and responsibility on the other. The level of participation increases along this decision-making continuum. Oligarchies and Autocracies offer no participation to many of those who are directly affected. Representative majority rule, and consensus democracies involved everybody, to different degrees.

From the start of recorded history when the United States (US) was founded, the idea that every person (defined at the time as “white male adult landowner”) who lived in a certain geographical area had the right to participate in the decision making (vote) just because he lived there created a radically new system of governance. It involved more people in the decision making than ever before. “One person-one vote” was a new concept. Voting was just developing as a system for governance of a nation.

Unfortunately, before democracy could take root in the USA, a system of voting was created that became the defining characteristic of the USA decision making process. In it, the concept of democracy was limited to the ability to elect the individual representatives who made the actual decisions.

The individual people of the “one person-one vote” definition of democracy do not actually participate in the real decision making that affects their lives. These people elect the decision maker by popular majority vote. The people elected are the legal decision makers. They are not everyone. By definition, this structure is an oligarchy.

What Americans have in the USA is more accurately called a “representative oligarchy” because the democratic part is that we, the people elect representatives. This type of structure in decision making is called an oligarchy.

The ideas within this website are intended to reawaken our collective desire to make the world a true democracy.

Sources: On Conflict & Consensus

Contributors: Amy Rothstein, C.T. Butler

Recommended Books: On Conflict & Consensus