Portfolio
Aggora Coin
A currency that decays, the way everything alive decays — and whose decay is not burned but paid to the city its holder chooses. Built to put money back under the law that governs every other real thing.
The exception we built
Everything alive decays; money was made the one thing that does not
Leave grain in a barn for a year and there is less of it. Leave a herd untended and some of it dies. A forest does not hold still; it grows, falls, rots, and feeds the next forest. Decay and regeneration is the law every living thing is under.
Money is the one thing we designed to escape it, and interest is the mechanism of the escape — the single store of value that grows merely by being held, while everything real it claims to represent is quietly falling apart.
The consequence is not abstract and it is nobody's failure of character. If holding money reliably pays more than doing something with it, then waiting beats building and rent beats work. That is arithmetic; it compounds; and it is the engine under a great deal of what we call the state of the world.
A construct of madness?
Money is a social construct. All of us have accepted it and almost none of us chose it, which makes one question worth asking out loud: is what we accepted a construct of madness?
Everything in nature decays and regenerates. Money is the one thing we built that does neither — it only compounds. And a sum that compounds makes a claim on the future which grows by itself, against a world that does not.
That claim has to be met somewhere. It is met by manufacturing scarcity: shortage stops being a condition we happen to find ourselves in and becomes a requirement of the system. Everything below follows from that one necessity.
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It takes our time
The hours of a life are the first thing spent servicing the claim. Most people are not working toward anything they chose; they are working to keep pace with a number that grows whether or not anything real was made.
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It consumes the earth
A claim that grows geometrically is pressed against a planet that does not. Forest, soil and water are drawn down to meet a figure that was never derived from anything physical in the first place.
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It dissolves community
What neighbours once did for each other has to be bought, because everything must be converted into something that can service a debt. Relationships that were never transactions become transactions.
Those are the visible costs. The deeper one is that a system like this shapes perception itself: when every interaction is anchored in incessant growth, growth becomes the lens we see through — and we end up disconnected from nature, and disconnected from life.
Even our art shows it. It repeats itself, and no longer expresses the collective impetus that is actually felt in our time.
By adapting the principles of nature to the social construct of money, we seek to bring balance to the earth and its inhabitants.
The repercussions are worked through at length in Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics, which is on my reading list.
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0.5% a month, flat
The carrying cost on every coin held
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34,100 cities
The roster, with each city’s zone frozen at genesis
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120s block target
Merge-mined with Monero, at no extra cost to miners
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Zero premine
No founder reward. The first coins belong to the first miner
Demurrage, and where it goes
The part that is not Gesell's
Demurrage is the correction: a small, steady carrying cost on holding currency. Silvio Gesell proposed it in 1916, Keynes thought the future would learn more from Gesell than from Marx, and the Austrian town of Wörgl demonstrated it working in 1932 — until the central bank shut the experiment down.
Money under demurrage circulates, because holding it has a price and using it does not. It stops being something to accumulate and goes back to being something to exchange. Saving does not disappear; it moves to where it belongs — into land, tools, skills, buildings, relationships: things that have to be maintained to keep their value.
What is new here is the destination. In most demurrage designs the lost value is simply burned. In Aggora it is paid to a city — and to the city the holder chooses, not one assigned to them. The cost of holding money becomes the funding of the place you have decided to stand behind.
Cryptography is what finally makes this practical. Gesell's version needed stamps glued to paper notes. A protocol applies the carrying cost continuously, to everyone, without a clerk — and without a central bank in a position to switch it off.
Three mechanisms
Two of them create coins. The third only moves coins that already exist. Between them they decide where every unit of value ends up.
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One
The zone deposit
Each city is entitled to a fixed amount every year
Every city on the roster has an annual entitlement set by population zone and frozen at launch — from 4,000 AGC for the smallest to 60,000 for the largest. Coins are minted only at the moment a city actually pays someone, so an entitlement left unspent inflates nothing.
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Two
Demurrage
Every coin loses half a percent a month
The carrying cost is flat, and the value lost does not disappear — it goes to a city, chosen by the person holding the coin, and is settled the next time that coin moves. This creates no new money. It moves money from holders to the places people live.
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Three
The payout
A city pays a person for work, in stages
Payment is released against work done rather than promised, approved by the city’s judges, and a city can never pay out more than it holds. The coins go straight to the person who earned them and circulate from there; no treasury sits on a pile.
Read the paper
The mechanism, the parameters, and the strongest objections
The full argument — the emission curve, the demurrage settlement, the city roster and payout rules, the historical record, and the objections I think are strongest rather than weakest — is in the paper.
Note for Prem: the button points at
/downloads/aggora-coin-paper.pdf. Drop the real PDF into
public/downloads/, or change PAPER_URL at the top of
src/pages/portfolio/aggora-coin.astro. Figures on this page come
from your AGC economy document — update them here if the design moves.
Follow the project
Updates when the paper is revised and when the protocol reaches testnet. Infrequent, and technical.