Definition proposal

According to the definition given in appropriate-economics.org:

Complementary currencies differ from conventional national currencies. They extend our transactional power and complete national currencies. They can harmonize or sometimes be seen as competing national currencies.

Complementary currencies are created to deal with issues that the conventional money (US$, Euro, Sterling Pound and JPY for instance) are hardly able to solve, such as concentration of wealth, undermonetization, sustainable development, local and regional autonomy, disaster zones and crisis situations, medium or long term economic cycles, specific systemic social issues.

Characteristics of complementary currencies

To avoid some of the evils that national currencies tend to have, alternative/complementary currencies are designed to be free from charging interest rate to users. Some are equipped, on the contrary, with demurrage to give rise to some positive effects that ordinary currencies are almost incapable perform.

Discussion

Alternative vs complementary currencies

The expression alternative may implicitly be associated with the "alternative" movements, and partly because to the implications others so often assume that we intend to replace the existing dominant model.

In both cases, alternative and complementary implicitly grant precedence to "real" money (national currencies), as though it is some absolute or fundamental form and those forms are advocated to be somehow derivative and reactive.

We may recall that money is something that is not "real", but it buys things that are real. There are two forms of money - money that is supposed to have value in itself and money that is just an information of flow. From this perspective, conventional money - national legal tender - can be seen not as some dominant fundamental, but more as a degenerate medium necessary for enabling trade in collective pyramidal intelligence? society.

In the forthcoming civilization of CIWC and global collective intelligence, virtual money, community currencies?, etc, aren't in any way "alternative". They are the norm, and national money systems can be seen as archaic systems. See http://www.openmoney.org/way/dif.html and associated pages.

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Links

• money.socioeco.org
• OpenMoney.org
• uniteddiversity money page
• Complementary Currency Systems in the Global South (AKA Third World)