In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the Encointer community “Nyota” has developed its own ways of leveraging digital currencies. In this article, we present how Nyota has blended its cultural habits...
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MONEY BY THE PEOPLE,
FOR THE PEOPLE
Encointer enables communities everywhere to generate their own, autonomous currency, and use it to stimulate the local economy.
WHY IT MATTERS
Economically deprived areas often struggle to generate growth. People have skills and products to sell, but lack the purchasing power to buy from others.
Encointer’s free, easy-to-use technology enables any community to generate their own currency and distribute it regularly and equally among all active participants to boost local economic activity.
HOW IT HELPS
Community-led economic uplift
Local currency for local needs
Encointer provides a way to increase the local money supply and keep it circulating. The value of each community currency is determined by local supply and demand, rather than changeable macroeconomic factors.
Keeps value flowing
Each Encointer currency is subject to demurrage, which means that if you store it in an account, the value will decrease each month. This encourages all participants to spend rather than hoard their Encointer income, so everyone benefits.
Unique digital identity
Each participant attends regular physical key-signing events to show that they are a unique person, which prevents anyone from claiming multiple incomes. In this way, the Encointer protocol establishes a community web of trust without demanding proof of identity.
Inclusive
Around 1 billion people have no official proof of identity, according to World Bank data. That’s no barrier to using Encointer, because no state-issued ID is required. Encointer income is accessible to any human with a smartphone.
HOW IT WORKS
The community web of trust
Encointer community currencies are distributed unconditionally, at regular intervals, to all active participants. But if anyone can join and nobody needs an official ID, how is misuse prevented? For example, how can users be sure that an individual participant cannot claim the currency twice under two different identities?
Encointer’s unique, practical identity system is based on the fact that a person can only be in one place at one time. Here’s how it works:
01.
Every participant agrees to make themselves available in person for key-signing meetups, which are held simultaneously at regular intervals in all locations.
02.
Each time a key-signing event occurs, random selections of participants meet at random locations in the community to prove that they are unique individuals.
03.
This requirement to prove personhood on site makes Encointer more secure, ensuring that so long as the majority of a community is honest, misuse is not possible.
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