To be honest I am still having a bit of trouble understanding what a firm and a pure market is but either way I think the problem that occurs when you scale these interactions to larger communities are informational problems. You start to run into problems relating to Dunbar’s number and how many meaningful relationships you can maintain. That is where elinor ostrom’s method would need to be improved.

However I don’t believe currency would actually help resolve it because it is too detached and doesn’t provide enough information to actually build meaningful relationships between communities and people therefore would still have to deal with the tendency for people to dehumanize/exploit processes that can be turned into numbers.

An alternative that I think was shown (but I’m not sure because I haven’t read the second book) was something from the Monk and Robot series which is a nice solarpunk book that I recently got into. There were instances when a traveling tea monk (therapist with tea) went to a few different communities and “bought” a lot of herbs for their teas and “sold” their services as a tea monk by tapping their phones (which they called something like a box computer or whatever) together.

The thing is that it was never explicitly stated that it that they were exchanging money so I interpreted it as it just being an activity log between the people that are doing the exchange so that if you were doing business with them again you would have a pseudo-memory of your relationship so you can make the decision of whether or not it is worth interacting with them or not.

I liked that solution because it actually is tackling the root of the problem (not being able to build trust with limited memory) and doesn’t have the exploitative nature of regular currency being roped in at all.

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