CBEROne coin, one kilowatt-hour.

What is this? ​

Your solar panel sends electricity back for a few cents. In the evening you buy that same electricity back at a much higher price. You lose twice, and there is a toll gate in between.

We think that can be done differently.

The idea is simple: one coin should be one kilowatt-hour. Not as a promise and not as an exchange rate, but as charge sitting in a battery somewhere, charge you can measure.

Money used to have gold in a vault. Since 1971 it has had nothing. The euro in your account exists because we all agree that it exists. That works, until it does not.

We propose tying money to something again. Not to gold, because gold does nothing for you. To electricity, because everything hangs on it.

And alongside that you get something you do not have today: one account that belongs to all of us and that anyone can look at. Next to your own balance you see what is sitting in your neighbourhood battery, in your province's, and in the country's. This is what that looks like:

How does it work at my house? ​

Here is how it goes on a cloudy Tuesday afternoon in your own street.

1. Your panel generates. The solar panel on your roof makes a kilowatt-hour your house does not need.
2. The electricity goes into storage. Into the neighbourhood battery on the corner, or into your own battery if you rent that out to the bank. The battery does not belong to the bank. It rents it, measures what goes in and what comes back out, and owns nothing else. A bank without a vault is harder to rob.
3. There is a meter at every step. Something is lost on the way to the battery, and again while charging. Nobody estimates how much: a loss is the difference between two meters, and you simply read it off. And once a month the books are recalibrated against a physical measurement of the battery itself, because a running tally always drifts a little. Whatever deviation shows up is published.
4. Money appears in two places at once. What the battery actually gained becomes money. You are paid at the price that comes out of the auction, and because the bank buys in below one when there is a surplus, room is left over. Everyone's Basic Pulse is paid out of that room. So your kilowatt-hour fills your own account and your neighbours' floor.
5. You pay with it, and one day it disappears. At the supermarket you settle up and the shopkeeper receives ordinary money. When somebody finally draws that kilowatt-hour back out, the coin is destroyed at that same moment. What goes out, goes out.

And as long as that electricity stands still, it leaks. You see that happen on your own balance, because a battery sitting there waiting slowly drains, and the money does not lie about the charge. If the electricity is used quickly, there is little left to leak and everybody keeps more.

What you earn here is Luxury Capacity: tradeable money. Your Basic Pulse is separate from it. Everyone receives that, every day, whether you have a roof full of panels or no roof at all. If you had to earn it by generating, it would not be a floor but a reward, and it would disappear for exactly the people who need it most.

Why would you trust this? ​

Gold is a stone with a colour. You cannot do anything with it. We trusted it because it is scarce and shiny, not because it does something.

Electricity does do something. The traffic light on the corner, the payment terminal, the hospital, your phone, the internet you are reading this on: all electricity. Almost everything our trust rests on today stops without it.

A reserve of electricity is therefore not an arbitrary choice. It is a reserve of exactly the thing everything else leans on.

And it has a check that gold never had: you can measure it. A kilowatt-hour is a kilowatt-hour, everywhere, always. The moment somebody issues more coins than there is electricity, the backing ratio drops, and that ratio is public. Printing extra is possible; printing extra unnoticed is not.

What is public is public at system level. The reserve, the backing ratio and how much power is callable at once right now: anyone can see those. Individual balances, payments and calls: never, in any form and not even under a number. Of your own entries you get a private proof that they were counted correctly in the sum. The ledger shows levels, not lives.

So how do I save? ​

If money standing still slowly drains away, the next question follows: how do you put something aside for later?

Not by holding on to money, but by owning a piece of generation. You convert your balance into a share in something that makes electricity: a solar park, a wind turbine, a hydro plant, whatever it happens to be. That does not pay interest; it pays new kilowatt-hours for as long as the thing keeps running.

That is where it differs from interest as we know it. Interest is money making money, and nothing is added to the world; it merely moves from one person to another. A share in generation does add something: electricity that was not there before. Your return is not an agreement but physics.

Saving here means building something rather than holding something. And what you build fills exactly the reserve the coin rests on: saving for yourself makes everyone's money stronger.

That pattern runs through everything. Wherever an ordinary money system says borrow, this one says own a piece: no interest but a share in generation, no bank loan but your own capital, no instalment plan but a subscription, and no mortgage but a growing share of your own house. You never owe anyone anything, and nobody holds a claim on your future.

That is not a matter of principle but of arithmetic. Money as we know it is a promise: the euro in your account is a bank's promise, created the moment somebody else promised to pay it back. So admitting promises means admitting money creation. That is why this system has duties and no promises. How that works.

What is not right yet? ​

This is the honest part, and we think it is the most important section on this page.

The backing is at 0%. Nothing is stored yet. The meter starts at zero and climbs with every kilowatt-hour that actually goes in. We would rather that number be true than impressive.

Storing electricity for a long time is not solved. Batteries leak, that is physics, and no good idea fixes it. We have no solution for that ourselves and we will not pretend otherwise. People are working on it, with gravity storage and other approaches, but it is not there yet. This is where our plan stops and an engineer's begins.

Not everyone can recompute it yet. In a first field test of a few hundred households, the numbers you would need to do the sums yourself are exactly the numbers that let you point at individual people. There an independent auditor and co-signing witnesses do that work, and you see a private proof of your own entries. When everyone can do it themselves again does not depend on a participant count but on how spread out the holdings are: only once the largest anonymous holding stays below a fixed threshold for twelve months. That is a real retreat on one of our biggest promises, which is why it stands here and not somewhere at the back.

We are not economists. We came up with this because we found it strange that it did not exist, not because we studied for it. Criticism is therefore welcome and useful. There is a whole chapter on what can be held against it.

One thing we are sure of: that leaking is not a problem but the engine. A coin that slowly drains away when you hoard it is a coin you spend. Money then goes to work and trade instead of standing still. How that works exactly.

Who are we? ​

Bart Overkamp, Elon de Boer and Robin Genis.

It started with an email from two of us, which opened like this: "We are 2 young men with a simple idea. We have no idea where to start, so we are just sending it here."

That is roughly where we still stand. This is not a company and not a product. It is an idea we consider good enough to write out in full, and public enough to be torn down if it does not hold.

Want to know exactly? ​

The idea is above. Anyone who wants to know whether it holds up should be in the manual. There it is worked out, with the assumptions stated and the criticism included.

• For the ordinary reader: what you notice in an ordinary month, from your salary to your rent
• The manual, front to back
• Short summary, if you are in a hurry
• What can be held against it, in our view the most honest chapter
• Where the research stands: what is proven, what is an assumption, and what we do not know