The article refutes the headline — nothing New about this except the ledger? When I was very young my parents joined a New Parents group. Members traded favors (“can you watch my kid for a few hours”) for little pieces of paper denominated in half hours. The shopping neighborhood nearby had “NeighborhoodDollars” that you could buy at a discount to face value and use at any of the shops. Local currencies are great and help bring people together, I highly recommend talking to people who live near you!
This is pretty cool. It reminds me a little of a concept I have been working on which is part currency and part UBI experiment. (shameless plug) It is called The Good Loop (thegoodloop.org). It works by Charities creating tasks that reward some number of credits. Volunteers perform the tasks and earn credits. Merchants accept credits for goods and services. Merchants then donate the credits to the Charity of their choice. It is a closed looped system to encourage and reward volunteerism.
Can the merchants claim it as a donation on their taxes?
At least in Germany, you can't "pre-donate", i.e. work to a charity and claim it as a donation. You'll have to agree on a price and the charity has to be able to compensate you and after everything is done, you can choose to not take their money. I'm not sure whether the third party in the transaction changes anything.
We had a baby-sitting-club kind of thing with its own currency, nice middle/upper-middle-class neighborhood, and some people just couldn't seem to get around to 'earning' credits by babysitting other people's kids...
So there was forgery.
Of course, in such a small community, it was immediately obvious who had done it, so people stopped being available to babysit their kids.
Paul Krugman has written on them long ago. I think there were things like runs on the bank and people hoarding babysitter hours, stalling out the system, and all kinds of emergent problems.
