The Economy & Information

The top of the stack: money members issue themselves, and claims anyone can check. The economy is mutual credit — created at the moment of exchange, one balance down and one up, always summing to zero, backed not by a reserve but by members' covenant and their capacity to deliver real work. Nine decades of evidence stand behind it: Switzerland's WIR since 1934, Sardex across Sardinia, Kenya's Sarafu through the COVID shock, and Ireland's economy still growing through six months with its banks closed. The recurring finding is not that these systems survive but that they stabilise — and what every one of them also had was a central operator its members simply had to trust. That is the gap this layer closes. The information half shares the layer because a front end is already a place where people exchange information: they describe what they make, teach each other, and vouch for what worked, before any credit moves. The same rails that make trade trustworthy make claims trustworthy — a committed record can anchor a claim and make it citable, with the covenant rating the claimant as it rates a trading partner. The one rule that guards it: the commons anchors and weighs claims, it never certifies them. This module has the sharpest refusals in the course, because this is where the pressure to drift is strongest and best-funded. Credit is earned, never bought; spend-only, never redeemable; sovereign and separate per platform. And since P1-001 v1.0 the refusals are matched by duties an operator can be held to: disclose who holds prosumer funds and how they are recovered if you disappear, annotate defaults by kind and publish the trailing default rate, set one credit limit for everyone, and ship the function by which a prosumer joins and votes in the Governance channel — never touching that vote.