SALSA

How the community owns and utilizes its assets

These blockchain-based currency communities own real-world assets.

Members take ownership of community assets using a partial shared ownership system (SALSA license).

Members run the entire community democratically (e.g., using RxC Voice or other thoughtful democratic systems).

Specifically, I want you to think of a community with five members who own three different assets (a car, an office building, and stock in a publicly traded company). Here is what it would look like:

https://gyazo.com/c115752877a3f7c8e4b9e794e6b7a8b9

New Models of Community Ownership

Various members of the community use community currency to purchase the right to use things in the community. For example, Annie purchases a SALSA license for a condo in Miami for one year. During that time Annie can do whatever she wants with the exception of selling or destroying it. For example, she can renovate it, live in it, or rent it out in exchange for dollars to someone who is not a community member. At the end of the period she holds the SALSA license, the new bidder pays her the winning bid in community currency (not to the community) and she surrenders the SALSA license.

Here's an example:

https://gyazo.com/354852e1637a15c4eae9dd68b69ca0e2

Partially shared with SALSA

SALSA License Details

SALSA licenses are a fairer and more efficient form of ownership than traditional private property; SALSA licenses are inspired by a roughly Georgist perspective. For more on its philosophy and economic logic, see here, here, and here. For now, let's just explain how it works.

Different types of assets should have different license periods and fees. In a democratic process, the community would need to set these parameters (as well as several others, such as when SALSA licenses can be combined or subdivided).

As noted above, funds from SALSA license fees may be used by the community to purchase assets or distributed individually as dividends to community members.

SALSA holders are free to use their assets as they wish. They have an incentive to keep and invest in their assets because when the assets are auctioned off, the new SALSA price goes into their pockets. For example, they can lend in dollars. However, SALSA holders are not permanent owners and cannot unilaterally sell their assets. Any permanent disposition or purchase must be approved by the community as a whole.

How Community Currency Works

Each community issues its own community currency (CC). Furthermore, decisions regarding the supply of currency, such as whether or not to issue CCs, are made democratically.

However, CCs cannot be used for everything; they are primarily used to purchase SALSA licenses.

The CC is the only currency that can be used for SALSA auctions and SALSA fees; all SALSA license auctions and SALSA fee payments are done on-chain and can be hard-coded for special CC status.

The difficult question is what else should be done to minimize the amount of wealth flowing out of the community through CC. This is because, on the one hand, CC facilitates business transactions among community members, and on the other hand, we do not want CC to be used to buy removable assets such as dollars or stocks from other community members. This would make it too cheap and easy for capital to leave.

In short, we want CC transactions other than SALSA license transactions to be strongly biased toward (a) transactions between community members and (b) services that cannot be taken directly out of the community, not goods that can be taken out. Let's go through (a) and (b) in turn.

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