What can a community currency like SpyCat do for me?
Many people think that the concept of starting another currency is too complicated to get their head around. But communities all around the world have succesfully implemented them, proving that they can really work.
- SpyCat helps mobilize the real wealth of our community. Dollars drain away a community's resources, while a local currency will keep circulating, generating employment and income for all involved. Those of us who have accumulated a wide range of skills and abilities suddenly become highly valued members of the community.
- SpyCat makes you feel good and helps you be more independent. Because of inflation and un(der)employment, increasing numbers of people are unable to get their needs met. At present a person's ability to access many goods and services is proportional to their purchasing power. The community currency system breaks this bottleneck, by making it more possible to match someone's need with another's available labour. People neither have to go without, nor resort to trying to get things for free.
- Increase your savings & disposable income. Because members can get local goods and services through a community currency, they can substitute it for the national currency. Disposable income in conventional money, available after basic needs are met, actually increases. Those who regularly trade with community currencies will find they have more money left in their pockets at the end of each week. The rate of community savings, and therefore of community investment and capital generation, actually improves.
- Become a member of a community support network.
The increasingly transient, temporary and mobile lifestyle in the world today has seriously damaged our sense of belonging to a meaningful community. Because a community currency builds local relationships, it is a powerful means of regenerating a sense of trust among members, a necessary component to the health of any community. As communities become more self-aware and self-reliant through the use of a community currency, isolation, fear and loneliness diminishes and everyone benefits. You will be amazed at how friendly people on this network are. - Feel empowered. The money we use in our daily lives is provided by the corporate financial system as a profit-making enterprise, not by the government as a public service to the community. As such, the money we use does not belong to the commons and so we have little control over how it is spent and who it benefits. A community currency brings the "money power" back to the people because its users can decide how that power is exerted. In SpyCat, you have a lot more control!
Even more benefits
- SpyCat "money" is abundant and can never be in short supply
- SpyCat "money" can never be in oversupply (inflation)
- It eliminates usury. Its money is 'free' (i.e. interest free)
- It keeps wealth where it is created
- It eliminates cheating, theft and fraud (of money)
- It eliminates the problem of sellers not being paid for what they supply
- It reconciles the accounts of buyers and sellers immediately
- It promotes honesty because one can never "run out of money"
- It levels the playing field: everyone starts from zero and those who deliver real value to others are the ones who get "rich" (In the dollar system, many people who don't actually do anything acquire their wealth by manipulating the currency)
- It gives local suppliers preference. Bye-bye Walmart, hello neighbor.
- It eliminates the waste of transporting goods from all over because of its local focus
- It destroys the notion that the source of money is a job: the source of money is the delivery of value from one entity (person, company etc.) to another
- It streamlines transactions and eliminates wasted effort (e.g. sending accounts, debt collecting)
- It cooks you breakfast in the morning. Just kidding.
- It mobilizes the real wealth of a community through the knowledge and skills of its people
- It fosters self-reliance and self esteem
- It fosters social justice and equality