Preface

This manual explains how CBER works: a money system in which the coin is tied to something you can measure, namely stored electricity.

The front page has the idea in short. Here it is worked out, with the assumptions stated and the gaps left in. Anyone who wants to know whether it holds up is in the right place.

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Why we started this

Money is how a society divides up work and raw materials. Since 1971, when the link with gold was cut, that instrument has hung on nothing at all. Euros and dollars come into being when a bank issues a loan: money out of nothing, backed by the promise to pay it back.

That works surprisingly well, until it does not. Two things bother us.

The real world has limits, money does not. A forest grows only so fast, a battery holds only so much, a day has 24 hours. The money supply knows no such ceiling and can grow exponentially. It pushes prices up and it strips the planet.

Almost nothing is really there. Banks keep only a fraction of their deposits as reserve. As long as people do not all ask for their money at once, nobody notices. When they do ask at once, it turns out not to be there. That is a bank run, and it is not an accident but a built-in property.

CBER tries to deal with those two things by tying money to something that does have limits and that really is there.

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Why now

Three developments make this a more reasonable idea than it was twenty years ago.

The bill for infinite growth is arriving. An economy that can only exist by growing collides sooner or later with a planet that does not grow. A coin tied to energy counts that limit in by itself instead of ignoring it.

The current system needs rescuing more and more often. Debt crises and bailouts with public money have stopped being incidents.

The infrastructure is already lying there. Solar panels on roofs, home batteries, electric cars plugged in overnight. Twenty years ago a reserve of stored electricity would have meant a handful of large power stations. Now anyone can take part, and that changes who owns the system.

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What we do and do not claim

This may well be the most important part of the whole manual. An idea that claims everything is worth nothing.

What we do claim

• That a coin backed by measurable, stored electricity can be a stable anchor, and stands up to inflation better than a coin tied to nothing.
• That the accounting bank run becomes pointless when everyone redeems at the same meter rate: redeeming does not change the backing ratio, so running gains nothing. Two real gaps remain, and the spec closes them: settlement happens against the next audited meter reading (never a stale one), and because kWh is not kW a second live number appears next to the backing, the power coverage, with a public queue rule in which the Basic Pulse goes first.
• That a fixed energy floor for everyone, plus a levy that presses harder the more you pile up, makes the whole thing more social and more mobile than it is now.
• That an economy can run without debt, and that this is not a moral choice but a monetary one. Money as we know it is a promise, so admitting promises means admitting money creation. That is why this system has duties and no promises: you buy a thing, you rent it, or you build up ownership in it piece by piece. That removes a great deal of misery and it costs something too; what exactly is in critique.
• That every number which increases the money supply comes from a sealed meter that has already taken its reading. Where there is no meter, the electricity does not count, and a loss that has not happened yet is not booked. Modelling does happen, in four places: the wear between two capacity tests, the temperature curve, the depreciation in between those tests, and the mint coefficient, which is based on twelve monthly values instead of on this interval. Each of those falls out conservatively, so towards a lower reserve, and in public it is called a model and not a measurement. That is less pretty than "nothing is estimated" and it does hold up. And the books are not allowed to drift away from the battery: at least once a month they are recalibrated against a physical measurement, and whatever deviation shows up is published. The whole design stands or falls with that, and it is at the same time the easiest thing to check.

What we explicitly do not claim

This is not a law of nature. There is no equation with CBER sitting inside it. It is a design, a way of arranging something. The arithmetic helps to simulate and to check, but the arithmetic is not the theory.

Not everyone can recompute the books themselves, not yet. This was one of our biggest promises and it has been adjusted. At this scale it does not hold, because the series you would need in order to recompute anything are exactly the series that point at individual people at that scale. In a village of two hundred households a public figure per metering station is already almost a name. So verification there leans on three other things: an independent auditor, witnesses co-signing every interval, and a private proof showing you that your own entries were counted correctly in the sum. When full public recomputability returns 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. We put this here among the promises we do not make, rather than in a footnote: it is the price we paid for letting privacy outweigh verifiability, and a price you hide is not a price but a trick.

Not all value comes from energy. A good conversation, a song, someone who knows how it is done: there is value in that which you cannot write in kilowatt-hours. Energy is not the source of all value. It is the floor all value rests on, because without electricity the rest stands still.

This does not solve everything. CBER takes on a few specific problems: money that appears out of nothing, bank runs, and the missing physical anchor. It is no replacement for laws, for politics, or for people who have to agree with each other. Anyone who claims that one design repairs a society is selling something.

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What does not add up yet, or is not finished yet, is in critique and in research: what we have shown, what is an assumption, and what we simply do not know yet.