The idea behind GPL is free software. The idea that good software should be available for everyone. The blessing of the digital age that you could copy things without a price. That everyone shoud benefit from it. I won't go further into what free means here. But just giving software away doesn't achieve this. Other people/comps will just use it and protect it with whatever means they have. The old principle of the competition of the strongest (marketeer).
To counter the existing legal means of exploiting 'unprotected' software the GPL does two things that are entwined: It uses an existing valid legal construct - the licensing model - to ensure that the software may not be exploited and stays free. And the second point - GPLs viral nature - causes it to grow and spread.
Actually there are more embedding means applied by the FSF. Companies may sign over software to the FSF (or other cheritable trust) for a nominal price that is the donation and the company can therefore tax-deduct it. A win-win situation for both but an additional means to add free software to the pool making it grow more.
One question I have seldom seen answered by social utopia models is how to get to the utopia from here and now. And the solution I see for this is a growing embedding of the utopia in the current society.
I have seldom seen this applied (except as above) but I immediately recognized it in your post.
Assuming your utopia - or rather the fragment of utopia related to a better currency - is an efficient digital currency feeding back efficient common wellfare. Then you have essentially shown how to embed this in a growing way:
Use a legal construct - a cheritable trust - to ensure a legally bound entity is handing out the 'currency'
Use another legal construct - an alternate currency - to ensure legal convertability.
Use social expectations and customs - donation and the trustee community - to propagate the construct.
You didn't name precise rules for the statutes of the trust, but I'm sure these could be drafted by a dedicated lawyer easily.
I think there is much to be learned from this with respect to hacking society - esp. with advanced technology.
We see tentative tries with direct democracy and free-nets to bring in the boon of technology for all. But many fail in doing it in an embedding way thus causing friction and counterforce instead of synergy.
EDIT. Fixed typos,
Thanks for your explanation of GPL and for your very illuminative post. The embedding idea is very good. It contrasts against the ordinary model which is overthrow of the existing model by political means.
The question of the statutes of the trust is also interesting - I didn't think of that. I suppose that could be a means of ensuring users they won't get ripped off.
The whole feel of the program would be quite different from Bitcoin. It should not be a shady underground currency but rather work very much in line with the current political system, collabora...
In the last few years we have seen two interesting revolutionary ideas on how to change the monetary system. The first is Bitcoin: the most well-known peer-to-peer currency. It has been wildly debated recently and I won't go into the detail of allegations of use in criminal activities etc (for one thing, I don't know much about it). My interest is rather in the money creation part. The people who run the Bitcoin software are rewarded for their work with new Bitcoins - a process called mining. Now the pace at which new Bitcoins are mined is limited, which means that Bitcoin creation is a zero-sum game: the more one miner contributes to the Bitcoin software, the less Bitcoins other miners get. Unsurprisingly, this has led to an arms race: miners spend nearly as much on running the software as they get back in form of new Bitcoins.
The second idea is the Chicago Plan, which was debated already in the 30's, after the great crash of 1929, but which recently was resurrected by Michael Kumhof (senior economist at IMF, of all places). The central idea of the Chicago Plan is to abolish fractional reserve banking - the system by which private banks in effect create money out of thin air. Instead of lending out most of the depositors' money, banks would effectively have to let them stay in the bank.
Instead money would be created by the central bank/government, a process that would generate a massive seignorage for the government. According to Kumhof, it would also have other beneficial effects, such as killing off the "boom-and-bust"-cycles which he thinks fractional reserve banking are mostly responsible for, and diminishing the wasteful parts of the financial sector.
Kumhof ideas' have not been well received. Overall, it is remarkable how little reform there has been of the financial and monetary system given that the world had a major financial meltdown 2008 (and was close to an even greater one, in my understanding). Governments won't challenge the financial system radically in the near future, that's for sure.
Instead radical reforms can only come from private hands. Let us now compare the two ideas. In the Bitcoin system money is created by private hands, but in wasteful ways, which effectively means that there is very little seignorage. Under the Chicago plan, money is created by the government in much more efficient ways, which leads to a large seignorage. Now my idea is to take the best part of both of these ideas: let a private player - more exactly, an altruistic organization such as CEA - produce the money centrally, Chicago plan-like, and let the seignorage be used for altruistic purposes. (Of course, there would be some costs of running the system, but if the system was sufficiently large, these would be negligible in relation to the seignorage.)
If the altruistic organization that did this had a sufficiently good reputation, chances are greater that people would trust the system. Of course, it would try to stop the currency from being used to launder money, drug trade etc.
Generally, people would be suspicious of private currencies where the central authority collected a seignorage, but if this seignorage was used for charitable and other altruistic purposes (and people really trusted that that would be the case), this would, I hope, be less of a problem.
What do you think? I'd be happy to get comments from people who know more about the Bitcoin system, since I don't really know it (though I find it interesting). Perhaps there is some info concerning Bitcoins that tells against this proposal; if so, I'd be interested in that.