Light-Color Money: Three-dimensional Digital Money That Can Express Uniqueness and Diversity of Value Beyond LETS

Abstract

We understand that changing the way money today will be a breakthrough in overcoming the problems caused by free investment in globalization, which is the long-term tendency of expanding Market for exchange and shrinking Community for reciprocity and State for redistribution. Among community currencies, LETS is the most general form as integrative communications media of money and language and has a significant potential to solve the problems of globalization and create alternative socioeconomic markets independent of capitalist markets. However, conventional money including LETS is scalar money to evaluate things only quantitatively with one-dimension so that it might have defects of monochrome reduction of everything. We thus conduct a thought experiment on light-color money with such three dimensions as RGB so as to qualitatively evaluate not only products and services, including volunteer activity and shadow work, but also social and natural environments and resources more diversely. The several properties of light-color money derived from the rule of complementary colors are unique, so there is a large potential to use it to make our socio-economy non-capitalistic, sustainable, and diverse. Because it is not difficult to implement light-color money in ICT environments, it is worth to carry out a social experiment to test its feasibility and applicability.

SECTION

5th Biennial RAMICS International Congress in Japan September 11th -15th, 2019 Hida- Takayama, Japan 6 The purpose of the "economic media" for CCs is "revitalization of the local economy." One of the causes of the recession and unemployment in the local economy is that money flows out of the region, and there is a lack of money circulating in the area. Even if deflation occurs in Japan as a whole, the seriousness of the problem, which appears as the bankruptcy rate and the unemployment rate, varies from region to region depending on the balance of payments and industrial structure. In general, the situation is more severe in rural areas than in metropolitan areas. Furthermore, every town and village in the nation is suffering from depopulation, an aging society with a declining birthrate, and the decline of shopping districts. Young people go to cities where there are many job opportunities. In addition, more and more local residents have become not to shop at local shopping districts, but instead, drive to large stores in neighboring towns or go to local convenience stores. As a result, purchasing power is flowing out of the region, and the problem is only getting worse. If shopping districts are dismantled, invisible community functions such as crime prevention, mutual aid, childcare, and cultural events will be lost. As a result, the living conditions of not only the elderly who cannot go shopping by cars but also the entire community will deteriorate, accelerating the decline of the local economy.

Under these circumstances, if people can create and manage a CC by themselves that does not flow out of the region and make it circulate within the local area, the regional economy will be revitalized and become relatively self-reliant, thereby promoting the formation of a circular economy based on "local production and local consumption." This is the primary purpose of the implementation of CCs for the purpose of regional economic revitalization.

On the other hand, another purpose is "revitalization of the community" or "strengthening of bond and activation of communication." This corresponds to the "social-cultural media" of the CC. Today, organs, germ cells, carbon emission rights, and even genetic information can be bought with money, expanding the domain of the markets (including black markets). Market fundamentalism is gaining momentum as the market economy increasingly covers the world, and deregulation and liberalization are promoted. In this globalized world where markets are expanding both in quality and quantity, human relations tend to be reduced only to economic trade and legal contract relations. But that would destroy communities that were built on mutual aid and altruism.

Communication between people also tends to be diluted, relying on mobile phones and the Internet, with non-face-to-face and anonymous relations expanding. If people become completely selfish and isolated, they may not be able to help each other or volunteer. Therefore, CCs have come to be used in such trends of market and individualism as a means of reconstructing mutually supportive and reciprocal relations, or as a means of making communication between people "face-to-face" and activating it.

5th Biennial RAMICS International Congress in Japan September 11th -15th, 2019 Hida-Takayama, Japan

3.3 Evolution And Diversification As Ccs

Thus, there are two aspects of CC: monetary and economic medium and linguistic and social and cultural medium. These are intricately combined and integrated into CCs, but it is possible to detect these two aspects. We cannot understand its unique property from one side only. Since one of the two aspects is usually relatively stronger, reflecting its uniqueness and originality of local regions, each CC takes a peculiar form of individuality. The evolution of CCs into species has led to the emergence of a variety of "subspecies." The purposes of introduction and the characteristics of each region are diverse, and the CCs also vary accordingly.

That's not all. The motivations and behaviors of participants and the performance and patterns of their communities influence each other and change over time. Through the media characteristics of CCs, the micro agents and the macro environment change endogenously through interactions. In this evolutionary process, it makes no sense to ask what form of CC is optimal or most efficient. This is because, in the course of evolution, the criteria for evaluation and judgment themselves change, and so do the rules of the game.

The CC aims to restrain the negative function of money as capital as in Luhmann's "diabolic generalization," and restore social stability and sustainability by intentionally limiting the versatility in terms of circulation area, period, objects of transactions, participants, etc. of a modern national currency. If a CC that is overwhelmingly weaker than a current national currency can be maintained evolutionarily, it will slowly have a gradual impact on the values, ethics, and habits of thought that are the inner institutions as shared rules of behavior for such agents as individuals and organizations.

4. Local Exchange Trading System (Lets)

The details of the CC systems are not necessarily the same. For example, CCs include "centralized issue system" in which an administrator or management committee issues paper currency according to the predetermined rules or arbitrarily, and "distributed issue system" (also called "mutual credit system" or "multilateral clearing system") in which participants can voluntarily create money as buyers up to a specific limit or unlimitedly and an administrator registers sales as plus and purchases as minus in the accounts of both sellers and buyers. They can also be categorized into those that link currency values to labor hours, those that link to the national currency, and those that link both as in Ithaka Hours. CC differs according to the time and place in which it was established, and according to its purpose and philosophy. Such diversity indicates the significance and potential of CCs. However, we will take LETS as a typical example to help people understand the actual operation and structure of CCs.

5th Biennial RAMICS International Congress in Japan September 11th -15th, 2019 Hida-Takayama, Japan

3.1 Overview And An Example Of Transactions Of Lets

In February 1983, six members, led by Michael Linton, started LETS in the Comox Valley, a town of 60,000 people on Vancouver Island, Canada. LETS is a network in which participants voluntarily trade goods and services using CC. Linton and his colleagues called the monetary unit "green dollar."

To start LETS, they must first decide on "registry" and "trustee." The registry opens and manages the participant's account, records the transaction, and sends the account statement to the participant every month. The trustee sets transaction fees, monitors the system, regulates anti-social activities, and exchanges information with other LETS, and engages in system development. Participants 1open their accounts and start from zero balance, (2) put the goods or services that they offer (sell) or want (buy) on the item list, 3contact the other party when they find the goods or services they want and negotiate the terms of transaction such as price and quantity, and (4) ask the trustee to record the transactions in which the price agreed is added on sellers' account and the same price is subtracted from buyers' account. The balance of each participant can be negative up to a predetermined limit.

Participants may, at the time of transactions, learn from the registry about the account balance and transaction performance of other participants. No interest is charged or paid on the account balance.

Finally, administrative expenses are paid with internal currency from the participant's account. The system is thus so simple.

The original system, which Linton started, does not allow green dollars to be converted into Canadian dollars, but the two are assumed to have the same currency value. This is to serve as a reference for valuing goods and services, and to allow the price of goods to be expressed as a mixture of cash and green dollars, for example, "$10 (payable by green dollar up to 20%)." The actual exchange is, for example, as follows.

4.2 Four Principles Of Lets

Interests on deposits and loans in bank accounts accumulate, so the balance increases over time. But LETS has no interest in surpluses or deficits. So those who have surpluses will buy goods and services from other participants as much as possible without hoarding them. As a result, CCs in LETS circulate rapidly within the community, stimulating demand within the local economy. In LETS, each participant can create money when buying goods or services and holds the surplus or deficit as a result. It does not represent the position in bilateral legal relations of right/obligation between two parties as in debtor/creditor relation. In the words of Linton, "It is the commitment of the people in the community to the people in the community," not the right/obligation under a legal contract.

The national currency flows as income in the community from the outside eventually flows out as expenditure. LETS aims to complement such money flow into or out of the community and to construct money circulation in which it flows around within the community as much as possible.

LETS is based on freedom in the community and the resulting responsibilities, and follows the four principles of "consent," "no interest," "sharing," and "information disclosure." "consent" means that all transactions, including participation and withdrawal, are based on consent; "no interest" means that there is no interest in either the positive or negative balance of the account; and "sharing" means that one of the LETS appears to be a system with mutually contradictory duality. It is because it has the aspect of making individualism and liberalism in the market economy more thorough, and it also aspires to trust between neighbors and friends in the region and community. The two dimensions of freedom and cooperation are linked to the ethical dimensions of the individual: commitment based on personal choice and the resulting responsibilities. Cooperative nature is by no means a "closed" nature that forces exclusivity and assimilation into communities, and freedom and responsibility do not mean only those as consumers/investors who consider only economic merit.

4.3 Lets As The General Form Of Community Currencies

LETS has the highest degree of freedom and versatility, and it is conceivable that other CCs can be incorporated as a special case of LETS.

LETS does not reduce the value of money to an absolute measure of labor time. The 1: 1 ratio between the CC and the national currency is presupposed in LETSystem, but it is possible to remove it so that LETS can be independent of the pricing system of the external market and the parties to the exchange can determine the price comprehensively taking into account the more pluralistic values. Such endogenous and independent pricing decisions that do not depend on a single external measure imply that LETS is a system with a large degree of freedom that can encompass cultural, social, and ethical values other than economic values.

Also, LETS does not exogenously determine the amount of issue for circulation, as in the case of Robert Then what is the significance and possibility of LETS?

First of all, LETS has a limited range of circulation for its currency as other CCs, its "community" is not a preexisting territorial or kinship community, nor a closed community that demands a single membership, but a topological neighborhood space in which participants commit positively in resonance with hobbies, interests, or ideas. Such a "community" can be realized by the use of information communication technology such as the Internet and smartphones. A CC deficit is called a "commitment" because it implies the responsibility for the "community" of one's choice, not for the "debt" nor "liability" to another particular individual. Instead, participants multilaterally lend and borrow via the community, and they do not stand in bilateral debtor/creditor relations. So, the crucial point is that we should understand the money created and multilaterally canceled in LETS as IOC (I Owe Community), not IOU (I Owe You). It is because the relations of participants in LETS are formed by the 'pay-forward' principle of multiple parties rather than the 'pay-back' principle between two parties.

The 'zero-sum principle' that the summation of balances in all participants' accounts in LETS amounts to zero means that money can seemingly appear only locally on the micro level but does not exist globally as the aggregation on the macro level. In other words, the money in LETS is not a thing as a material entity that can exist independently, but an event as the whole record information or collective memory on balances through all transactions in the past. The unique property of LETS lies in the fact that LETS constitutes a multilateral clearing system as a "community" where "money" is bilaterally created and multilaterally canceled among all participants as members of the community. Here a community is regarded as the group of individuals as well as the field of reciprocal exchange conducted by members.

LETS simply depicts the modern image of an ideal community that keeps existing only as a collection of individuals and keeps being continuously sustained by mutual aids and cooperation among members in a community.

4.5 Multi-Lets: Multiple Attribution Of Individuals And Glocal Community Of Interest

Also, since we can simultaneously participate in an arbitrary combination of multiple LETS as many as possible, we can express our identities regarding interests and values by selecting a unique blend of 'multi-LETS.' The different diversity of multi-LETS that each one chooses exhibits the uniqueness of individuals.

Through such pluralistic attribution of individuals to multiple CCs, the meaning of "community" is extended from a "closed community" to an "open community" and the implications of "liberty" and "responsibility" are also extended from the freedom and self-responsibility of consumers and investors in the single global market to the freedom of choice and responsibility of multiple belongings to multi-LETS.

5th Biennial RAMICS International Congress in Japan September 11th -15th, 2019 Hida-Takayama, Japan

If each individual simultaneously belongs to multiple LETS, the situation is called Multi-LETS. In general, "local" means a close area or a neighborhood as an opposite concept of "global" representing a global area or a wide area. The term "local" in CC refers specifically to geographical regions ranging from neighborhood to elementary school districts, local shopping districts, and municipalities. In the past, many attempts at CC, regardless of its purpose or method, have been made "local" in this geographical sense.

However, these include "communities" who share specific issues, values, and interests, such as the conservation of the environment and nursing care. In this case, they can be considered as "communities of interest (COI)" that refer not only to the physical space or geographical region but also to the topological space of the neighborhood of meaning. In other words, the space in which people gather on specific themes, interests, hobbies, values, and ideas is also "local." Such locality may be more easily understood as circles, communities, or associations sharing some meanings. It does not necessarily depend on geographical proximity. If we can share values and interests, it can be broader. The development of 5th Biennial RAMICS International Congress in Japan September 11th -15th, 2019 Hida-Takayama, Japan information and communications technology represented as the Internet, WIFI, and smartphones as products of globalization is making it much easier to create such virtual communities.

There already exist countless websites and blogs, and communities on such SNS as Facebook are virtual "communities." When we want to know the latest information about environmental issues and discuss them, we don't care where they are in the world. Such "communities" are "global" in the sense that they can participate from anywhere on the earth, and "local" in the sense that they form autonomous COIs. In other words, "virtual" communities are, by its very nature, glocal, global and local at the same time. And such glocal CCs on the Internet enable such a variety of virtual "communities."

The reason why CCs can be said to be counter-media against globalization is not because they deny

4.6 Change In The Concept Of Time

Second, the significance of LETS that is interest-free money is that it prevents the accumulation of money and the self-augmentation of capital, and stimulates the "use" of money rather than the "possession,"

thereby increasing the velocity of circulation and promoting both buying and selling. Minus interest like

Gesell's money (Gesell 1916) to depreciate might be possible in LETS. In this way, the circulation of goods and services within the region is enhanced.

Third, LETS, which takes the form of voluntary issuance by participants, allows participants to issue money as needed for their purchases without being affected by the malicious discretion of central bank issuance and monetary policy or the lending policies of financial institutions. Of course, participants are responsible for their own "commitments" and have to manage themselves, which also stimulates buying and selling. 5th Biennial RAMICS International Congress in Japan September 11th -15th, 2019 Hida-Takayama, Japan LETS can also pay for services that are generally not priced in the market. It thus promotes non-profit activities and cooperatives by targeting volunteers and 'shadow works' that were not previously traded in money. That is to say, we will be able to vanish the conflict occurring between volunteer and business, and between altruism and selfishness. In this sense, LETS can be conceived as not just economic media but also ethical and cultural media.

4.7 Lets As A Trust Money

Fifth, LETS is a "trust money" formed by participants' commitment to a "community" and trust among them. Attribution and solidarity of participants are spontaneously fostered based on trust. This allows participants to cultivate creativity and demonstrate originality actively and to confirm their dignity. For example, those who have lost their confidence after losing their jobs will empower themselves by thinking about what they can put on the offer list and developing their capability.

Finally, in LETS, the very meaning of money ownership and choice diversifies. The portfolio mix of multi-LETS in which we participate in and use is no longer determined in terms of maximizing economic value.

There is a wide range of potential for cultural, ideological, and normative values to be reflected. Thus, However, if we can invent multi-dimensional money beyond LETS in order to extend the possibility as the integrative communication media, we can express uniqueness and diversity of value of things and evaluate goods and occupations not only by price/ salary but also by its high quality and safety, social significance, conservation of the natural environment, individual enjoyment. We will be free of uniform measurement that fundamentally causes economic, social, and cultural disasters so that we can adequately express and experience the potentiality of the various richness of our world.

We understand that LETS is a high potential social experiment to overcome defects of money and globalization. But there is still the traditional concept of money in LETS as the one-dimensional quantity that hinders us from seeking the true happiness and developing high QOL based on individuality and diversity of value. There are still vast unknown fields for the future of money that seemed to be no longer remained. But we cannot detect such fields under the prevailing institutions, rules, and concepts that look impossible to change at present. They can only be identified only in a thought experiment in which we assume that they are modifiable. This is the reason why we need to conduct a thought experiment on the future of money.

5. Light-Color Money As The Three-Dimensional Extension Of Lets

We understand that the fundamental defect of conventional money, as well as LETS, is its one-We understand that the fundamental defect of conventional money including LETS is its one-dimensional 5th Biennial RAMICS International Congress in Japan September 11th -15th, 2019 Hida-Takayama, Japan representation and create a new concept of money with multi-dimensions that can provide the solution to the various problems caused by such "diabolical generalization" on the "uniform media" as economic instability in bubble collapses and severe depressions, substantial income and asset disparities between individuals and regions, and dissolutions of various community caused by excessive popularization of the spirit of free investment capitalism.

Capitalism is a world in which self-augmenting capital is omnipresent. In order for capital to quantitatively expand, an amount of money should increase. Therefore, a one-dimensional unit for a measure of value to calculate the amount of money, for example, the weight of gold or silver, pounds, dollars, or yen, is

required. If such a unit cannot be specified, capital self-augmentation does not make sense. In other words, capitalism is an economic system that derives from the one-dimensional nature of money. Accordingly, to make capitalism cease to exist, we have only to introduce multi-dimensional money.

The question of the system selection between capitalism and socialism in the 20th century was regarded as two binary options of "private ownership and the free market Based on such a motif, we have considered the problem of designing a monetary system. One example was the Hokkaido Virtual Community Currency. Here "Hokkaido" is not necessarily a geographical area, but a virtual community that consists of people sharing the same value and interest. It is envisioned that the LETS type of virtual regional currency circulated in this area would allow a reciprocal exchange market economy beyond the capitalist market economy. However, even under such an innovative media design of money, there was an implicit assumption about money. The fundamental characteristic of money thus far is that it represents one-dimensional value with positive and negative values. The same is true for LETS.

Even in the case of multi-LETS, where an individual or a group of individuals simultaneously participates in mutually overlapping but different LETS and is multi-attributed to many different communities, and individuals or groups of individuals belonging to the same community trade using a community-specific LETS, there are only many types of one-dimensional currency.

In other words, conventional money, including CCs, is a much simpler medium than language and mathematics and is close to numbers. However, it is not a countable set with the same cardinality as natural 5th Biennial RAMICS International Congress in Japan September 11th -15th, 2019 Hida-Takayama, Japan numbers, but an uncountable set as the same cardinality as real numbers. The evaluation of pleasure/ displeasure or happiness/ unhappiness with a single scalar currency is to express the richly colored world in monochrome black and white (though, in reality, black and red). The time thieves in Michael Ende's Momo bleach the world and turn everything gray (Ende 1985) . It is because even if things in the world are multidimensional and richly colored, in other words, they have qualia, the quantitative texture as individual experiences, money evaluates and expresses them all in one dimension. By doing so, we eliminate the singularities that are unique and specified to individual persons and things and reduce them all to sets that are commensurable, replaceable, and substitute. We, just like Momo, cannot feel genuine excitement and happiness in such a dull world without qualia and singularity. Is there any money that can express the most vibrant colors of the world and keep us happy? Here we call such money light-color money and carry out a thought experiment on them.

Now we explore a thought experiment on light-color money and analyze its possible merits and demerits.

First, we distinguish monochrome money as conventional money and light-color money as a new one.

1) monochrome money (black-red money) is expressed as a scalar that is quantity without direction and has a linear measure of surplus (the black, +), deficit (the red, -), or zero. All conventional money including LETS is based on this idea.

2) chrome money (color money) is expressed as a vector that has three elements of three primary colors such as Red, Blue, and Green (RGB) of light, or Cyan, Magenta, Yellow (CMY) of color, each of which is a real number that is zero or larger than 0 (Figure 4) . 5th Biennial RAMICS International Congress in Japan September 11th -15th, 2019 Hida-Takayama, Japan by mixing three primary colors in a particular ratio. In other words, all colors are linear combinations of primary colors.

What about light-color money? The three primary colors of light make any color when red, green, and blue light are simultaneously projected on the white screen in a pitch-dark room just like a color TV or PC display. Adding light to color in this way is called additive color mixing.

W R+G+B C=G+B M=R+B Y=R G

On the other hand, the three primary colors of color make any color when a mixture of cyan, magenta, and yellow pigments illuminated by white light on a white canvas just like color photographs and inkjet interpreters. Mixing paints to produce different colors means that more light is absorbed, and fewer wavelengths of light are reflected by the paint to reach our eyes. Such subtraction of light to produce color is called subtractive color mixing.

K=C+M+Y R=M+Y G=Y+C B=C+M

It should be noted that each factor of a vector of light or color takes only zero or positive values and does not take negative values.

What should be recalled here is the relationship between the three primary colors of light and the three primary colors of color. Red, Green, Blue (RGB), which are the three primary colors of light and Cyan, Magenta, Yellow (CMY), which are the three primary colors of color, are complementary colors. Let us denote the complementary color by adding the sign "~" after the color.

In Therefore, when the buyer pays in light-color money, the seller increases the paid color, and the buyer normally decrease the paid color. However, the buyer might be able to increase the complementary color according to the rule of complementary color, instead of decreasing the color. In this case, the color money of, say, Red can turn into the color money of Cyan after the payment of Red like radiation of radioactive elements. It would be possible even though it looks very strange to our common sense in which we think the money must be decreased in quantity after payment. It just depends on whether or not the rule of complementary color is permitted in the system. Also, the original color and the complementary color make "white" in additive mixing of light money and, in contrast, "black" in subtractive mixing of color money as we can see in Figure 4 .

Light-color money is a three-dimensional vector written as = ( $ , & , ' ) in RGB cube and CMY cube with = (0, 0, 0) and = (255, 255, 255) in 8-bit notation in Cartesian coordinate system depicted as in Figure 5 . Therefore, we cannot compare any two vectors of light-color money in quantity.

There is simply a difference in brightness of the same color. As to red, there are a dark red (1, 0, 0) and a bright red (255, 0, 0). Similarly, there is dark cyan (0, 1, 1) or bright cyan (0, 255, 255). For monochrome, there is darker gray orbrighter gray between black and white. Both light money and color money is possible, and the difference between them lies in the initial balance of each account, "white" for light money or "black" for color money. While in light money all accounts start from white light, say, ( , , ) = (1, 1, 1) in a unit cube, in color money all accounts start from black darkness ( , , ) = (0, 0, 0). Suppose a buyer of a good or service pays 1 in Red in a trade in the case of light money. The red element in the seller's money is incremented by 1 so that its balance will be (2, 1, 1),

5th Biennial RAMICS International Congress in Japan September 11th -15th, 2019 Hida-Takayama, Japan 20 and the red element in the buyer's money is decremented by 1 so that its balance will be (0, 1, 1). The question is whether the buyer can pay by increasing its complementary color so that its balance will be

(1, 2, 2), instead of decreasing its paid color, according to the rule of complementary color. If this holds, the scarcity of money that is essential for conventional money is abandoned because the summation of seller's and buyer's accounts is calculated as (1, 2, 2) + (2, 1, 1) = (3, 3, 3) and (1, 1, 1) is created in the payment, even though the buyer cannot arbitrarily create any color money as much as possible.

Therefore, the light money is a "vector money" that microscopically represents various colors, but when aggregating all accounts macroscopically, it will always become a "scalar money" as a scalar multiple of the vector of the white light (1, 1, 1) in light money or black darkness (0, 0, 0) in color money. Therefore, macroscopically viewed, light money exists but color money does not exist, though both microscopically exist in complementary sets as "light and color", and "color and complementary color". Color money is more similar to LETS where there microscopically exist as the blacks and reds in accounts of participants but no money as the summation macroscopically, according to the zero-sum principle. The sum of the surpluses or deficits in LETS increases in proportion to the square root of the transaction volume if the transactions are randomly carried out (Kichiji, Nishibe 2012)

Figure 6 Munsell Color System

6. Conclusion

The media design of light-color money as CC is an attempt to reduce the money side as "uniform media" or "one-dimensional media" and add the language side as "diverse media" or "multi-dimensional media" so as to escape from the disaster caused by global capitalism and enrich CCs as integrative communication media.

The introduction of light-color money would 1) prevent money capital and fictitious capital to only seek profit and self-augmentation in terms of quantity as global, speculative, and financial capital (Nishibe 2019) , 2) urges corporates and governments to make more complete disclosure on usage of energy, resources, and labor so that consumers and investors can know more about the detailed ingredients of products and investment, 3) enables to conduct more abundant and diverse communication among people and companies based on qualitative information so that they mutual understanding and respect can develop based on exact knowledge on each other, and 4) build more sustainable and diverse society in the noncapitalistic, cooperative market economy.

We expect that it is not difficult to implement and use light-color money in the network of smartphones and computer servers under the current ICT environments and that the representation of light-color money as color symbol similar to QR codes, which are two-dimensional machine-readable barcodes now widely used in cryptocurrencies and digital CCs in Japan and the world, facilitate it to be diffused once it can attract the interests of people. It is worthwhile to conduct a social experiment with the younger generation, who are relatively free from traditional fixed ideas of money and easy to accept an innovative concept of communication media, to test its feasibility and applicability in the real world.