Troco project, an experimental peer-to-peer currency based in google wave

Troco is a set of wave extensions that aims to provide a decentralized complementary community currency system, that is, a peer-to-peer currency system. Also you can see it as an IOU or promissory note based system.

Troco is heavily inspired in the japanese WAT and i-WAT Systems.

By now, troco consist only in an experimental (unfinished and yet insecure) wave gadget with a toolbar installer.

Troco is developed with Java + GWT framework.

Some links:

• project homepage: http://ourproject.org/projects/troco/ and http://troco.ourproject.org
  
• source code
  
• development mailing list
• troco announce wave (needs sandbox account)
• the gadget
• the extension installer
• more links and papers

Roadmap

A brief of things to work on / study:

• Make the gadget more robust
  
• Improve the use of FireGPG (advanced users)
  
• Study the implementation of debt circulation
  
• Study the evolution of wave and how can this improve this project

Troco means barter in Interlingua and in Português. Also troc means barter in French and Català.

Finally, a quote from Complementary Currencies in Japan Today, 2004:

«Japan isn’t dealing with a “Japanese crisis” as is typically described in the Western media, but rather with a structural world crisis that chronologically happens to have first hit Japan.(...) We can expect the US to follow a similar path of denial particularly in an election year, repeating the mantra that the Japanese have heard for fourteen years: “next year, the economy will be back to normal.” It is under this light that what is going on in Japan in the domain of complementary currencies is relevant for the rest of the world. The second largest economy of the world has turned itself into a real-life laboratory for resolving a variety of economic and social problems from the bottom up, thanks to monetary innovations. Can the rest of the world afford not to learn from those experiments?»

And from the term Currency (typography) in Wikipedia: «The currency sign (¤) is a character used to denote a currency, when the symbol for a particular currency is unavailable.»

Troco is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.