Censored from the Archive of the World Wide Web (see link in upper left corner of that page—all other prior WWW copies of the software and documentation pages have been similarly purged from the archive.org) Majority Rights now links to the forbidden software packaged for a distributed barter system. 

Why is this important?  Well, you could ask GT but you might also want to read what I wrote about it a few years after Dan Brumleve programmed the ‘alpha version’ based on the design he and I worked out around 2000…

While it is true that money is backed by promises, and those can be classified as one of:

• Promises to do something of value on presentation of a token. (ie: commodity-backed money)
• Promises to not do something damaging on presentation of a token. (ie: protection-racket money otherwise known as “fiat” money which is backed by the promise not to throw you in jail if you present it as legal tender for taxes)

...people seem to think that it is important to have only one currency as “the standard”.

Prior to desktop automatons pushing electrons around as tokens and ‘zero-risk’ arbitrage algorithms for money markets, this may have been necessary but discovery and transaction costs are now so low there is no reason for it.

In steps DBarter.

How DBarter Works

DBarter is a simple way for people to create and exchange value.

Value creation is similar to money creation in that someone creates a transferable promise of some sort.  All similar promises belong to the same “symbol” of value.  In normal money the promise is something like “I, the Victorian era Bank of England, will give a pound of sterling silver to the bearer of one of this symbol upon its return to any of my offices.”  A symbol can also have the same behavior as other financial instruments, such as insurance claims, mortage bonds, coupons, stock certificates, etc.

In any case, there are, presumably, some people somewhere who value the promise and are therefore willing to give up something of their own in order to acquire some quantity of the associated symbol. If what they give up is a quantity of another symbol, “barter”  occurs.

Value transfer is similar to money payment in that someone gives value to someone else.

To be precise, what is transferred is a bunch of values, possibly of various symbols, called a portfolio.  To be even more precise, what is transferred is a note for a portfolio.  A note is created by withdrawing a portfolio from an account.  The note is mailed to another account.  The note is then deposited by the other account thereby cancelling the note.

For example, Bob withdraws 15 Amazon Dollars, 10 eBay Dollars and 50 Bob Dollars creating a note.  Bob signs the note over to Cindy and mails it to her.  Cindy then deposits the note in her account.

In summary, the DBarter Server:

• allows banker accounts to create other accounts of any type.
• allows “minting” accounts to create new symbols.
• allows accounts to withdraw notes, which can be sent via mail.
• lets accounts send mail to other accounts electronically.
• allows accounts to deposit notes.
• keeps a history of all of these activities.

All steps that might be vulnerable to fraud are protected by public key encryption.

Anyone can run a DBarter server on their own computer, minting their own currency and communicating with other DBarter servers.