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Welcome to the homepage of the Biomimicry Credit Exchange (BCX), our first prototype mutual credit facility by and for the biomimicry community. New accounts are currently available to core members of established biomimicry networks (detailed here).
Creating an account means you become part of our credit facility, you can access our internal market of offers and wants, and start trading with other BCX members. During the pilot phase, there is no membership fee and operating costs are covered through voluntary contributions. There is, however, one condition for membership:
To join, you must agree to the principle of reciprocal exchange. In other words, you commit to give and receive in equal amounts within the network over time. Concretely, this means starting with a balance of '0', and returning the balance of your account to '0' before exiting the system in the future. This is how we can be confident of a balanced flow of exchange throughout the community.
Membership size for the prototyping phase will be kept under 150 people, or "Dunbar's number", to be sure we can maintain an adequate level of trust while operating through informal agreements. This can change in the future as our strategies develop, especially considering it is precisely credit that allows human superorganisms to grow beyond Dunbar's number!
Size, however, is not the aim; not quantity, but quality. This is about connecting us to our own abundance. Even a small credit family should soon be able to link up with a larger grassroots credit ecology by adding an import/export facility for intertrading among communities. These are proposed for development in the EU and are technologically foreseeable within the next two years.
BCX is being developed in collaboration with the Biomimicry Network Leaders Community (BNLC) and administered by Biomimicry Switzerland. The software is created and maintained by Community Forge, a non-profit association based in Geneva that also hosts the site.