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Java Specification Request on Community Currencies

Posted by Hemos on from the come-and-help-out dept.

bernfast writes "I've submitted a Java Specification Request on complementary currencies to the Java Community Process. This specification will allow to implement arbitrary units of exchange as Java currencies. Examples are timedollars and other community currencies. This JSR is still in need of an expert group and will probably not receive too much industry suppport, so any help from the open source community is welcome."

10 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Why by cbrocious · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why is this being made a java-specific thing? I would much rather see this generalized. Making it language-specific limits its use, especially in the industry... as much as most of us hate MS, we have to admit that being able to use something in C# as well as other languages is a big selling point.

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    1. Re:Why by Anonymous+Writer · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Why is this being made a java-specific thing? I would much rather see this generalized.

      Couldn't this be implemented in XML? Except for the encryption, that is.

    2. Re:Why by attonitus · · Score: 5, Interesting
      By all means develop this kind of stuff as a stand alone library (although, as the previous poster suggested, it should be based on a language independent standard to be of any real use) but putting it in the Java spec is like mandating that every car in North America should come with a spare set of snow tyres.

      Snow tyres are very useful if you live in Quebec, but an unnecessary pain in the arse to have to store if you never leave Florida. In general, Quebecers are pretty good at heading down to Canadian Tyre when the white stuff starts settling in for the winter. Java developers can similarly be expected to know what they need in their classpaths.

  2. is it just me by dollargonzo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    or does anyone else find it funny that a slashdot comment is linked to in a JSR?

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  3. What ?is? this? by cybrthng · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Doesn't seem like a spec, a process or anything you would package or get certified. Just sounds like someones idea?

    How about you signup at http://www.sourceforge.net and launch your program there and use the available j2ee protocols to design your application?

  4. Re:Barter and alternate currencies by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Mostly true.

    If you have a currency that is bought and sold, in the US, it must be pegged against the US dollar, and it must be reported as income.

    However, if your currency is strictly tied to time (something like "1 fanastibuck = 10 minutes"), and you prohobit trading for money, then you do not have to pay taxes on it.

    (If I understand correctly.)

    Most serious groups doing this stuff know about the rules, and abide by them.

  5. dBarter by Baldrson · · Score: 5, Interesting
    You might want to look at Dan Brumleve's dBarter. It's a P2P barter system where anyone can "mint" promises from their own bank and exchange them between banks with hard (RSA) encryption. It won most promising new technology at the 1999 Hackers Conference in Santa Rosa. Things went rather haywire what with the dotcon crash and Dan took off back to the midwest for to find work with his family business and left it lying around.

    The only problem is, it is written in C so you may not like it. ;)

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  6. interesting monetary reform site by vinsci · · Score: 2, Interesting
    A number of related books and articles, many with their full text online are available at: http://geldreform.de/ in several languages.

    See for example Margrit Kennedy's 140-page book Interest and Inflation free Money - you'll never look at money the same way again after reading the first chapter.

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  7. Re:These people don't understand... by dkf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    FWIW, many large organizations use fake monetary units in their accounting systems, often because the conversion rate to real currencies depends on factors that are not easy to control.

    For example, supposing you buy (for a fixed price) a share of the total compute time on a supercomputer. How many minutes of CPU time is that a month? Well, that really depends on how much unscheduled down-time there is (ideally none, but this is the Real World here) and you won't know how much that is until the end of the month, and hence you won't know (for reselling purposes) how much each of those minutes of CPU time actually cost you. The easiest way to do that is to charge CPU minutes in a fake currency and reconcile that to real money every so often. You could try monetarizing up front, but that's very tricky to get right and likely to end up with either your customers cross for overcharging or your management furious for undercharging...

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  8. Already tried... this is an instance of JSR 108 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There is a more general proposal alreay out there:

    http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=108

    108 Units Specification

    The ... units package supports programatic unit handling via an abstract Unit class, run-time checking and conversion, unit arithmetic, unit parsing and formatting, and a units database.