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The Almighty Buck Idle

The People Turning Time Into a Currency (bbc.com) 86

The BBC looks at free websites like TimeRepublik, "which describes itself as 'a timebank for the internet era'." Time banking is in essence a more sophisticated form of bartering. You don't pay someone in money for a job that they do for you. Instead you give that person time credits that they can then use to get a service without financial payment from someone else... A "TimeCoin" credit... accounts to 15 minutes no matter what job you provide, be it cutting the lawn of a neighbour, or maths tuition via a video call. You simply advertise what you are offering and how long it would take in TimeCoins.

"We wanted to distance ourselves from financial transactions and find something that could create relationships between people," says co-founder Gabriele Donati. "Because we truly believe that only through our relationships, you can gain the trust of another person." TimeRepublik is today based in both Lugano, Switzerland and New York, and says it has more than 100,000 users around the world. It makes money by selling the service to companies who then offer it to their staff via their internal websites.

The concept of time banking has been around since the 19th Century. Mr Donati says that he wanted to bring it to a younger, and more digitally-savvy audience.

The first version of TimeRepublik launched in Switzerland in 2012, according to the BBC, though the site expanded internationally "in the past couple of years."

One user told the BBC that with monetary expectations out of the way, "you really get to the core of things and you discover something, I think, that's greater and sort of priceless."
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The People Turning Time Into a Currency

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  • by algaeman ( 600564 ) on Monday May 01, 2023 @12:06AM (#63487982)
    I think you might have some difficulties finding a trial attorney or a thoracic surgeon willing to barter for their time.
    • Death and Taxes (Score:4, Informative)

      by CaptQuark ( 2706165 ) on Monday May 01, 2023 @01:17AM (#63488088)

      And even if you do, you are still required to report the market value of that service to the IRS as "income". If little Any receives free piano lessons in exchange for washing your car for the summer, you also have to report the market value of that. Trade a cow for a used car? Same.

      This type of transaction — bartering or trading — can prove to be useful when cash-flow problems would otherwise prevent you from securing needed goods or services. And, while there is no exchange of cash or credit, the fair market value of the goods or services that were exchanged is taxable to both parties and must be claimed as other income on an individual or business income tax return. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-ut... [irs.gov]

      • Indeed. There is nothing new about this concept.

        Ithaca Hours [wikipedia.org] were introduced decades ago. There have been many other similar tokens.

        The problem is that there is no advantage over just using actual money and many disadvantages.

        • It sounds interesting for trading physical labor costs between people....

          But that seems to be the limit, I mean, how many "time credits" would it cost to go to a store and buy a new Canon R5 camera?

          It doesn't seem to translate well into just buying physical goods.

        • Interesting. I think the only real advantage might be the "buy local" idea of the Ithacas as that can be useful. On another note, the political and criminal classes have well established back doors for bartering "services". I don't think they use vouchers, though.

          I followed up your link by looking at the general article for Labor Vouchers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

          I noticed this, among other things...
          "According to Marx, the introduction of labour vouchers would create a lazy society and economy as th

      • > Trade a cow for a used car?

        What if a farmer gifted an 'extra' cow to his friend, the used-car salesman, for use on his hobby farm?

        Then the next year, the car salesman gifts the farmer a car for his birthday? Do both gifts count as taxable income?

        If not taxable, an economy where the community practises a high level of (unconditional) gift-giving to meet each other's needs is more efficient than a pure market-economy.

        If taxable -- what if the cow died before the car salesman's gift? Or the car run for a

        • Gifts are also taxable.
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • Wow, they are too, in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

            But ....

            Non-taxable gifts
            Generally, the following gifts are not taxable gifts:[6]

            Gifts that are not more than the annual exclusion for the calendar year (last raised to $17,000 per recipient for any one donor, beginning in 2023[7])
            Gifts to a political organization for its use
            Gifts to charities
            Gifts to one's (US Citizen) spouse
            Tuition or medical expenses one pays directly to a medical or educational institution for someone. Donor must pay the expense directly. If donor writes a check to donee and donee then pays the expense, the gift may be subject to tax.

            $17000 covers a lot of cows and secondhand cars.

        • Oh, it's taxable. Otherwise why on earth would anybody every "pay" somebody else instead of exchanging "mutual gifts"?

          an economy where the community practises a high level of (unconditional) gift-giving to meet each other's needs is more efficient than a pure market-economy.

          I truly don't understand that claim. This is that, except that using money to facilitate exchanges is how we determine the relative worth of apples and oranges, facilitate trade among far-removed strangers, the fairness of receiving

          • Can you really blame them when our government is so corrupt with how it uses the money we do send them in tax revenue?

            Let's take California's homeless "crisis". Every year we spend more money then the prior year but every year the problem gets worse. How can that possibly be? Sure seems like a total waste of tax dollars to me if the problem we are spending more money on is only getting worse.

            Of course, it's all a perspective issue. I'm sure if we asked the homeless charities how things are going, they will

            • I wouldn't call it "corruption" unless money budgeted for homelessness is actually being spent by government officials for their own personal enrichment.

              Let's take California's homeless "crisis". Every year we spend more money then the prior year but every year the problem gets worse. How can that possibly be?

              There are lots of possibilities that, at least, aren't illogical:

              Maybe, as you're hinting at, the spending is creating homelessness, making it possible to survive despite dropping out, getting hook

              • I'd call it corrupt when you have people like Governor Newsom's wife running a homeless charity. She's pulling down a 6 figure salary out of that charity and like most charities, more then 50% of the overhead is administrative costs, aka her salary.

                She's just one of many and I doubt I could find a way to collect data on who's who in the charity business but it's a pretty sweet deal to have your husband signing off on passing money to your charity where you get a nice 6 figure salary for attempting to help h

          • Taxes are well and good, and should exist.

            I think gift giving -- genuine, unconditional gifts given from the heart -- have the opportunity to zing in and fix problems that cold, old mechantile capitalism cannot touch (and does not want to either).

            In the US gifts are taxable ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ) But there's a $17000 exclusion - that covers a lot of cows and secondhand cars.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • See I own a very rare and highly valuable asset. Namely - my ass. Nomen est...
      You'd be surprised the price some people would require for even such a simple service as scratching it. Thus, they set the market price for such a service.

      Yet, to me, scratching my ass is but a simple task.
      The difference in market price and the true cost to me makes me a millionaire. All thanks to the market, where I trade my service for other goods and services.
      And me being the sole shareholder of my ass, makes it a monopoly. Wel

    • That's pretty much the problem. I'd probably rather sell one of my hours as a security consultant and financial auditor and buy a month's worth of time from a cleaning service.

      • To the correct buyer, sure. Though I think most of us would derive more value out of the cleaning service then a security consultant. I mean, how much do you really think I have to lose, after all?

  • by GFS666 ( 6452674 ) on Monday May 01, 2023 @12:06AM (#63487988)
    ...remember the old saying "Time is Money"? Well, to these people, that is what is literally is. So instead of using a easily transferable unit of exchange (I.E. Money), they are using "time for a certain task/service". So essentially, it is a better sounding barter system. We had this system. We got a better one (I.E. exchange services for money). No need to re-invent an older wheel that was good in its time but has been supplanted by a better system
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      I think you are missing the point completely. We never had this bartering system. We had a system where you needed to find someone capable of doing a certain service that was also in need of preciseoy you service.

      This system abstrqcts that in a way where you can do two hoirs of work for person A and get two hoirs of work done from person Z.

      The interesting part is it doesn't matter what you're doing in such a system, your time is just as valuable as anybody else's.

      It is a nice idea but it will fail because a

      • Yes, that is what I came here to say: the fact that this system values all tasks performed by all providers at the same hourly rate right across the board is both a cool upside and perhaps a fatal downside all at the same time.
        I am going to applaud them for trying, though. Neat concept.Laudable philosophy. Not sure that's how the world likes to work.

      • If your time and skills are more in demand, the obvious solution is to insist on two tokens (or three) for each unit of time. Or auction your time to the highest bidder.

        But once the price of labor is set by the market rather than by Karl Marx's Time Value of Money [wikipedia.org], the system falls apart, and you might as well go back to greenback dollars as your medium of exchange.

        • But once the price of labor is set by the market rather than by Karl Marx's Time Value of Money, the system falls apart, and you might as well go back to greenback dollars as your medium of exchange.

          It's kinda telling that there's no such mention of Marx or his "Time Value of Money" on the page you linked.
          On the other hand there exists Marx's "Law of value", a "regulative principle of the economic exchange of products of human work, namely that the relative exchange-values of those products in trade, usually expressed by money-prices, are proportional to the average amounts of human labor-time which are currently socially necessary to produce them within the capitalist mode of production".

          I.e. Price of

        • But doesn't that defeat the point of this program? I agree with you, but we're essentially saying "Person A's time is more valuable than Person B's" which leads to Person A charging more tokens per hour than Person B. Replace the word "tokens" with "dollars" and we're just talking wages, landing us back into traditional monetary systems.

          I think the value of this system rests on trading hours for effort that doesn't require significant training. Need someone to walk your dog, or pick up groceries for you?

          • I think the value of this system rests on trading hours for effort that doesn't require significant training.

            So it is only useful to unskilled people who want to hire other unskilled workers.

            Which is basically nobody.

            • Well, no I think it's useful for unskilled labor, not unskilled laborers. A spinal surgeon could use it to find someone to walk their dog, and they could pick up someone's groceries. It's the labor that would have to be unskilled, not the people. And by unskilled I don't mean absolutely unskilled, but labor that doesn't require significant training.

              • A spinal surgeon could use it to find someone to walk their dog, and they could pick up someone's groceries.

                I'm pretty sure exactly zero spinal surgeons are interested in picking up someone else's groceries to save ten bucks.

        • by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

          Aaaand we're back to money. Money is nothing but a token with an associated value and then you set an hourly rate of these tokens based on marketability. So why not just use the money in the first place?

          Look, I'm not saying the idea will work. Just what the intention behind it is.

      • "If one task takes much more experience and education, THAT time needs to be paid for as well..."

        Which is why we skipped or dropped this intermediate pseudo-currency and went to one that accounts for skill, training, and other factors that make time spent on one task more valuable than time spent on another.

      • This system abstrqcts that in a way where you can do two hoirs of work for person A and get two hoirs of work done from person Z.

        Except we did have this kind of bartering system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Bartering was abstracted away from 2 specific people into a trading platform over 30 years ago.

        Also why does the u key not work on your keyboard specifically when trying to spell hours?

        • by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

          Touch screens and I are just not compatible. Then my eyes give the text a once-over or don't. Even if they do, such errors are often skipped by my brain and as we all know, Slashdot does not allow editing of comments.

          I have just given up on ever producing text on my phone that doesn't make me look like an uneducated hick.

      • It is a nice idea but it will fail because as much as I think we're undervaluing menial labor today I also don't find it fair to compare what a surgeon or an IT specialist does to a street cleaner.

        If one task takes much more experience and education, THAT time needs to be paid for as well...

        Traditional crash transactions have a similar weakness however, but rather than being between different laborers it's between laborers and the ownership class - business owners and executives rake in huge and ever-expanding amounts of money for doing unremarkable work requiring low to moderate levels of skill or education (or sometimes no effort at all), while any kind of laborer would need to do real skilled work for orders of magnitude longer to earn the same. The apparent value discrepancy in time bankin

      • I'll give you 1 dozen eggs and 1 hour(s) of website work for that comment.
      • Arbitrage.
        Suppose I need an hour of IT work done. I can pay $75 / hour... but I know a guy who takes time credits.
        So I talk to the street cleaner. He makes $15 / hour, but he can work for credits as well, so he'll put in an extra hour and give me the credit in exchange for $30.

        Once this has been going on for a while, the IT guy will stop taking time credits, and people will stop paying the street sweeper in time credits.
      • The interesting part is it doesn't matter what you're doing in such a system, your time is just as valuable as anybody else's.

        And in such a system there's a disincentive to become more productive. Say I'm digging a ditch for an hour and get paid 60 TimeCoins. But then I figure out a way to make a steam-powered shovel and can dig the ditch in half the time. Now I'm only getting 30 TimeCoins and I've cut my income in half. I need to find twice as many people who need ditches dug in order to earn the same inc

      • Depends on the menial task I suppose. You may be capable of doing something "hard" while someone else might be willing to do something "gross". At that point, you may be very happy to trade a hour of "hard" time to avoid doing that hour of "gross" time.

    • putting on my economics professor hat . . .

      *Yawn*.

      It's just another round of Karl Marx's "labor theory of value", in which the value of something is simply the time put in to produce it.

      I charge $450/hour as a lawyer.

      I'm not going to trade an hour of my time, and the attached liabilities, overhead, etc., for an hour of yard work.

      Let alone a deduction from that for the overhead of the crack-headed exchange . . .

      doc hawk

  • the TAX MAN will find an way to stop this or change it.
    Also just wait for some shitty corps to make this into the next gig work rip off.
    At amazon we now pay in TimeCoin that can only be used at the amazon store.

    • Their only question is where's my cut? Scrip isn't normally a problem as long as it was taxed on the way in, taxed on the way out and accounted for in the balance sheet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. It might be a problem if you annoy the wrong people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. Not even the joker will take on the IRS https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com].
    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday May 01, 2023 @02:16AM (#63488144)

      Barter and alternative currencies are legal in America, but they are fully taxable.

    • the TAX MAN will find an way to stop this or change it. Also just wait for some shitty corps to make this into the next gig work rip off. At amazon we now pay in TimeCoin that can only be used at the amazon store.

      The real issue for the tax man, or the government at large, will be not getting a cut of it. If they can figure out how to tax time itself? Hold onto your hats. We'll all be conscripted to "pay" a certain amount of our lives to government service.

      • The real issue for the tax man, or the government at large, will be not getting a cut of it. If they can figure out how to tax time itself? Hold onto your hats. We'll all be conscripted to "pay" a certain amount of our lives to government service.

        Well, Government By the People...

        • The real issue for the tax man, or the government at large, will be not getting a cut of it. If they can figure out how to tax time itself? Hold onto your hats. We'll all be conscripted to "pay" a certain amount of our lives to government service.

          Well, Government By the People...

          Hey, if they let the common idiot on the street run congress for a bit, it may actually be an overall improvement. Especially if they keep the rotation rate up high enough to prevent it being profitable to bribe somebody. By the time the vote comes the big business paid for, they've swapped out the cogs doing the votes! BRILLIANT!

  • Find out why money doctors hate this one simple trick!
  • So... money? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Monday May 01, 2023 @12:15AM (#63488000)
    Congrats, you reinvented "money" and called it "not money" then got investors to pay you "money" for it. I wonder why you didn't accept "not money", is there something wrong with your "not money" guys?
    • In a sense yes.
      In another sense it's a Marxist theory which gives me the gut instinct of dismissing when failing to show me one time this worked in any place at any time without people suffering on mass.
      The more workable one we've seen is reputation like stack exchange https://stackoverflow.com/help... [stackoverflow.com]. I can "cash in" my points for someone else to solve problems I have. I'm assuming this is a ponzi scheme based on the theory backing it and the people. The problem with pure capitalism is the endless ponzi
    • is there something wrong with your "not money" guys?

      We will quickly find out. Alternative currencies are not a new idea. They have been tried many times, and within days, they are bought and sold on the street for real money. To find out what they are "worth", just look at the exchange rate (usually significantly less than their face value).

    • No they invented bartering. Money was created to address the shortcomings of bartering time.

    • They say 15mn is worth $X whatever you do or who you are. The coin thing is a gimmick or probably a way to avoid taxes in some countries.
  • For free labor. All in the name of ???. Sounds great. Let me put that in a bottle.

  • Does Mr. Donati take his salary in time credits?

    This just seems like another riff on the local barter / currency systems that keep failing to gain traction in various places.

  • I'm guessing there was a silly purchase or two like a 4 year university course on cooking or a car loan. I wonder if we did a random credit check on them how much money is owed.
    Wazowski: Oh, that darn paperwork. Wouldn't it be easier if it all just blew away?
    Roz: Don't let it happen again.
    Wazowski: Yes, well, I'll, uh... I'll try to be less careless.
    Roz: I'm watching you, Wazowski. Always watching.
  • by ClueHammer ( 6261830 ) on Monday May 01, 2023 @01:16AM (#63488082)
    You think your getting payed for a job? no, your getting paid for wasting part of your life (ie time) to do something for someone else.
    • The problem with time as a currency is that it has no common base. Different people value time differently. The whole reason money replaced bartering was to address this shortcoming.

      • Time is time, but not all tasks are equal.

        You generally expect to be compensated for your time at a rate based on the risk, responsibility, and skill/knowledge required by the task.

        This 'time as currency' idea is a non-starter except for the most basic stuff where nobody really cares about that stuff. What people would normally call 'favours'. Adding a ledger to favours means they're no longer favours, they're jobs. And generally people will want to be compensated for that with money at market rates.

    • Exactly. Anytime you willingly exchange a portion of your life (time) for government issued fiat currency, you empower that government for better...or usually for worse!
      • Don't you mean - any time you engage in productive economic activity, you strengthen the economy?
        • Well, no. Your salary usually has very little to do with your value to the economy.

          • Except being a metric for it? Anyhow, my point isn't about what is valued how by whom, just that productive economic activity benefits the economy. Which is just a restatement of the comment I responded to with the generalized rage and sophomoric politics removed.
    • Technically, yes, but there's still a considerable difference: An hour of my time is not paid the same amount as an hour of the cleaning lady's time.

      Supply and demand also applies to skill sets, not just goods and services. My skill set is rare and companies want it. Low supply, high demand. Cleaning staff is in practically limitless supply (let's be honest, pushing a broom across a floor is not a job that requires a few years of training, with only 5% of the population having the necessary abilities to eve

    • Major problem with your premise is the presumption that it's "wasting part of your life" to do paid labor for someone else.

      Maybe it's this idea that's the real crux of the debate we seem to have in modern society about younger workers being "lazy" or expecting too much for given jobs? I'm not sure? But I do know I've never really worked for someone else and considered it a "waste of time" to do so. There are a whole LOT of tasks I would have never had the opportunity to do if I was only focused on doing wha

  • It's money with extra steps.

    All money is is a measure of debt. These are no different except that they replace the one-on-one trust relationships between individuals with a website that is an expense and a single point of failure.

  • My guess is they are trying to conceive this as a way to get away with tax evasion. The more of your service economy you can keep out of bank records, the better. At least for criminals.

    How many participants are going to report these services on their taxes as fair market value?

    Small time business operators are almost all tax criminals in my experience. It's absolutely rampant.

    • Fuck, you are one useless parasitic sack of shit. My guess is that you are so pathetic, even your mother is ashamed of you. Someone needs to wipe up the shit stain that you are.
  • Made me think of Rick and Morty [wikipedia.org], The Ricks Must Be Crazy [wikipedia.org] (s2e6):

    Rick: They work for each other, Morty. They pay each other, they buy houses, they get married and make children that replace them when they get too old to make power.

    Morty: That just sounds like slavery with extra steps!

    [Pro Tip: Ignore all random thoughts that feel ... spidery.]

  • From Volunteers [wikipedia.org]:

    Chung Mee: Opium is my business. The bridge mean more traffic. More traffic mean more business. More business mean money. More money mean more power.

    Lawrence Bourne II: Yeah, well, before I commit any of that to memory, would there be anything in this for me?

    Chung Mee: Speed is important in business. Time is money.

    Lawrence Bourne III: You said opium was money.

    Chung Mee: Money is Money.

    Lawrence Bourne III: Well then, what is time again?

  • by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Monday May 01, 2023 @05:35AM (#63488398)

    They even made a movie [imdb.com] about this concept. Overall, it doesn't end well.

  • I've helped friends with programming and they've helped me with what they're good at too, and I would say what was given was quite valuable on both ends. And I was thinking, who do they think they are, to get in the way of friends giving each other their time? How would they even enforce that?

    I know between 'friends' might be the operative word here, but the IRS (according to what I've read) doesn't make that distinction, and they can't. You get this spectrum of interaction between friends, then friends o
  • This implements only one special case of money's function (where all time is of equal value). It's less functional than the existing process, so I don't think anything has been gained.

  • I'll get some folks to landscape my rather expansive yard, pay for the materials, and then opt out of the system.

  • FIrst step to... (Score:4, Informative)

    by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Monday May 01, 2023 @10:09AM (#63488866) Journal

    That "In Time" movie where time is currency?

  • My cousin earned 2 credits for fitting shelves for a lady. Two years later and they are married!
  • Late-stage Socialism
  • You give them your time, and they pay for it. This is probably one of the oldest economic concepts known to humanity.

    This isn't even a new concept in the crypto space... you gave them processing time on your mining rigs, and they returned the favor for internet funny money.

  • The concept of time as a currency is an intriguing one. It highlights the importance of valuing our time and using it effectively. However, while time is undoubtedly a precious resource, it's not always easy to monetize it. That's where resources like https://gamblebeaver.com/real-... [gamblebeaver.com] come in. This website provides a platform for individuals to earn money by playing casino games online. While gambling can be a risky endeavor, it can also be a lucrative one if done responsibly.
  • Even across the "minimum wage, entry level" jobs there is a wide range of quality. Someone experienced in waiting tables might not necessarily be good at cleaning the dishes, and likewise someone that could assembly IKEA furniture might not be the best person to help with a math homework.

    And...

    We already have a system that takes both time and skill into equation. And it is called: money.

    It is the least worst thing we currently have, and erasing a major part from its equation will not make it any better.

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