What we know, suspect and do not know

Here is what we can support, what we suspect, and what we simply do not know. Mixing those three is the easiest way to make a good idea unbelievable, so they are kept apart.

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What is already proven

A few parts are not an assumption but existing practice. We do not have to defend those, only use them.

Measuring and allocating electricity precisely is already possible. Grid operators measure what goes in and what goes out every fifteen minutes. And the existing system of green power certificates shows you can allocate claims on electricity that physically mixed together long ago. That is exactly what we do, with storage added.

Steering thousands of home batteries as one is already possible too. It happens commercially today, to keep the grid in balance. The technique for operating batteries in garden sheds as a single whole does not need inventing any more.

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What we suspect but do not know

Does the economy not seize up? If the money supply is tied to the reserve while the economy grows, prices fall. A mild fall ought to make people handle their things more carefully. But it could just as well be that people postpone purchases because tomorrow is cheaper, and then everything grinds to a halt. We do not know.

Do people run from the leak? The idea is that a shrinking balance keeps money moving. But people can simply step over to the euro and use their CBER only when they have to. Then it is not the money that leaks away but the support.

Does watching each other work, or does it get suffocating? The model counts on openness curbing waste without anyone having to enforce it. But social control has a flip side: where it tips over into meddling or exclusion is an open question, and not one we can answer from behind a desk.

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How you could try this out

You do not have to rebuild a country to test this. It goes in three steps, each bigger than the last.

1. Simulation studies (agent-based modelling): build computer models in which thousands of autonomous agents (households, companies and the bank) interact under the CBER rules. That lets you run the monetary and energy flows through a range of economic scenarios.
2. Local cooperative pilot (provincial scale): a small experiment inside a neighbourhood or a municipality, funded by a local cooperative. Participants get an administrative energy budget (the Basic Pulse). Measurement runs on the existing smart meters, but payout does not: the floor arrives as an energy cost guarantee on the participant's own bill, or, where they have no contract of their own, as a payout they alone control. This tests the housing waterfall and the transaction tax on paper, in miniature.
3. Home battery integration: a technical pilot linking a group of 100 households with home batteries and solar panels to a local network. Here the reverse auction for capacity leasing runs live.

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Figures you can work with

Anyone who wants to build such a simulation does not have to start at zero. This data is already lying around:

• Grid operator data (ENTSO-E and others): real-time and historical data on electricity production, grid load, transmission losses and electricity prices in Europe.
• Household energy consumption: anonymised smart meter data from various grid operators, to calibrate the consumption profile per household and per season. Measurement runs per household (the meter hangs on the home), but the Basic Pulse itself is per person: converted via household size.
• Battery degradation data: scientific datasets on the wear of lithium-ion and flow batteries under varying charge cycles, needed to calculate the wear compensation and the leakage parameters.
• Historical monetary experiments: data from earlier demurrage experiments (such as the Wörgl currency experiment in the 1930s), to model how people behave under a shrinking money supply.

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The ten-year path

The recent additions to the model (the housing waterfall, the progressive tax, the dependency ceiling, the concentration meter) change nothing about feasibility: they are ledger software and policy, the cheapest kind of component. The expensive parts remain storage and political will. A realistic decade:

• Year 0 to 1: Phase 0. One battery park under contract, one public backing meter, the open ledger live. This requires no permission that does not already exist.
• Year 1 to 3: the municipal pilot. A person-bound basic budget for thousands of households via the existing smart meters, with the tax and the housing waterfall running administratively at small scale.
• Year 3 to 7: province scale. Citizen battery rental via the reverse auction; aggregators already orchestrate thousands of home batteries today, so this is integration work, not research.
• Year 7 to 10: the infrastructure stands. All mechanics run, the guarantee is on for the pilot scale, and the national meter climbs publicly at the pace of construction.

The 10-Year Growth Roadmap

Phase 0 → Phase 3

Fase 0: Meter + Solar Park (Phase 0) (Year 0-1)

Commences with 1 local solar park and battery reserve. Backing ratio steadily climbs from 0% towards 1:1. The full vision in miniature.

What does not exist after those ten years: an entire national money supply at 1:1. That remains decades away, and it does not need to be there: Phase 0 next to the euro is the end state in miniature.

What has to be finished before the first participant

The path above is about money and storage. There is a second list beside it, shorter but harder: without these points nobody may be enrolled. They come from the data protection impact assessment and from the rule set itself, and not one of them is done.

• An accredited body is under contract, at least one per region actually reachable for a participant, and two where the route calls for two. It sets the safety flag and it attests for anyone who cannot safely ask the neighbourhood. This is the heaviest paper measure in the file: the route carries the subsistence floor of people who cannot use the community route, and no body has been asked yet.
• The payout without a connection is arranged and run end to end at least once, not described. Whoever flees usually has no energy contract of their own, and the energy component of the floor expires on a daily cycle, so without this form the floor is zero from day zero.
• The conversations with people who have lived through it have happened, been processed and been reported back: a women's shelter or the domestic violence helpline, a benefits claimants' council, a street lawyer. Collecting is not enough; per point it has to be recorded what was done with it, and for every point not adopted, why not. This is the only safeguard in the whole file whose source is not the project itself.
• The four cryptographic constructions are built and measured. So far they have been written down as properties and not chosen as constructions, and that is the largest gap between this design and something implementable. They are: a proof that you are not yet in the list without making anyone else in that list visible; a cross-check between communities that returns one bit, to one side only, in which every question demonstrably concerns somebody standing at the counter at that moment; a way to refresh the federation-wide value without the person being present; and a way to verify an attestation without seeing which body issued it. This needs an implementing cryptographer, not a reviewing one.
• The impact assessment is validated, by somebody other than its author, and where the residual risk stays high the prior consultation of the data protection authority is completed, with its date and outcome published. In practice that consultation takes months, so it belongs at the front of the critical path and not at the back.

The tolerance ratchet: measurement tolerance is a growth path too. The fleet starts honestly at roughly 1% measurement uncertainty and publicly ratchets downward as meters improve. There is deliberately no fixed end figure in the rules any more: the end point is the measurement uncertainty of the meters themselves, because a target below your own measurement error is not a target but a lie. Measuring more loosely is allowed, but it immediately lowers the published reserve, so sloppiness costs you backing. The ledger simply states how accurate it is today.