What alternative currencies/currency-rules you think should be experimented?
My room-mate and I talked about what money is. There is fiat money, which is what everywhere has now, and there is commodity money, based on a product almost people, and will therefore accept. Gold & silver are the common examples of commodity money, but that is because economists do not understand what people actually have traded (I am an economist – I should know). They are terrible examples. The vast majority of people throughout history never saw a gold coin in their lives – most never saw silver either. They mostly traded among friends and family as described in the Sociologist Marcel Mauss’ 1925 book “Essai sur le don” about the Gift economy, which is never mentioned in economics books, but is a foundational text. So with people you know and interact with daily, gifts determine the balance of exchange between you and others. But if you are trading with someone you don’t know, you would use barter (my knife and bow for your woman), or domestic animals (chickens, sheep & goats, cows, camels) or grains. Both animals and grains are what should be called “commodity money”.
So: alternative currencies. It depends. If, for example, you want to go right back to Paleolithic society, and organize society in groups of the so-called “Dunbar’s number”, which has been proposed as the approximate number of people in early bands of hunter-gatherers, and seems to be the number of people one can know and get along with well, from studies of interactions on Facebook, etc.,then you could use a “gift economy” inside the group, organize it as a separate governing entity with every set of about 150 people being self-organizing and more or less anarchistic, but interacting with others on an occasional basis, then maybe a couple of people in the group could act as “traders” who use a kind of universal trading currency (call it “credits”) and a central overarching bank that keeps track (corruption at the bank would be a problem to be solved). So that’s one.
Another might be to use data. You have people who are much better at figuring out how this works than I. Some variant of blockchain technology would keep track of transactions – this would enable a non-governmentally controlled currency.
Just a caveat: in 21st century US and Japan, and even Europe, the central government’s independent central bank has been pretty much all that stood between people and catastrophic economic meltdown. So even though we of course all hate the government and bureaucrats and all, some bureaucrats have saved our skins – twice in the last 11 years or so. Food for thought.
A third option would be what "the Machines do, in the Isaac Asimov short story “The Inevitable Conflict” – the last in the book “I, Robot” from maybe 1950. In this story there have been positronic brains developed to such a state of perfection that they run the global economy, telling companies what to produce, where to sell it, and on and on, for the optimization of the well-being of humankind. Asimov never actually mentions in this story what currency (if any) is used in the trade of goods and services coordinated by the Machines. But it is entirely possible that because of the unimaginable complexity of the Machines, they could effectively revert to the kind of barter system which economists currently say is impossible – goods and services for goods & services, but in a very complicated dance which sends diapers here, foodstuffs there, steel elsewhere, and educating the kiddies and the workers… and it is all coordinated so perfectly that Josip receives goods in accordance not only with his need, but also with the amount of productive work he performed at the factory; Aduana the same, along with the dance lessons she craves and works for, Gen the farmer is recompensed similarly not only for the crops they raised but also for the value of the crops that failed due to lack of rain that season, etc., up to the entire global population in exquisitely perfect complexity.