Inherited
We inherit family ties, a language and a history before we can choose any of them.
CommunityCoins
ROOTY / Grassroots monetary freedom
Freedom needs somewhere to take root.
Auroracoin, Canada eCoin, e‑Gulden and the other currencies in this alliance were created for communities with histories and identities of their own. CommunityCoins helps their teams maintain the tools each currency needs without taking control away from them.
Eleven currencies, each rooted in a different community
01 / Living initiatives
These currencies already exist.
Auroracoin was created for Iceland. Canada eCoin began in Canada. e‑Gulden was built as a Dutch monetary alternative. CommunityCoins starts with initiatives like these and helps the people behind them keep their currencies working.
Each team keeps control of its own currency. Through CommunityCoins, teams can share the costly work behind wallets, nodes and mining.
The caseWhy we say this6 arguments
Why these currencies are evidence, not products
- A community is bounded and particular by definition. A currency created to serve one will therefore be smaller and different from Bitcoin; that is evidence of purpose, not product failure.
- The community existed before the currency: a place, language, history or shared economic fate came first.
- A name tied to that community keeps the original purpose legible, even when ownership changes over time.
- Broad initial distribution can place a monetary possibility directly among the people it is meant to serve.
- Surviving years of speculation, neglect and technical change is evidence of practical continuity—not nostalgia.
- Shared wallet, mining and backend work can strengthen every initiative without absorbing its identity.
The challengeWhy we cannot achieve this without you5 ways in
Turn rare beginnings into living proof
- Tell the history accurately: why an initiative began, whom it was meant to serve and what has survived.
- Represent an initiative inside the alliance so that CommunityCoins never has to speak over the people maintaining it.
- Test its current public tools and report the dead ends that make a living network look abandoned.
- Preserve releases, sources, chain knowledge and original motivations before they become irrecoverable.
- Introduce the people who can carry practical responsibility for the next chapter.
02 / Why it matters
Community starts with relationships.
Communities grow from relationships people already have and responsibilities they accept toward one another. A currency can serve those relationships only when the people using it know and accept why it was created.
Before anyone chooses a currency, other people have already shaped where that person belongs.
familyneighbourhoodtownlanguagecountrycause
Entered
We choose our friends and join associations, workplaces and causes through decisions we make ourselves.
Honoured
People turn belonging into community when they care for one another and accept responsibility for what they share.
We inherit some bonds and choose others. A community lasts only when its members recognise what they owe one another.
Community requires mutual recognition.
The caseWhy we say this6 arguments
Why community must come before currency
- A currency’s first distribution is a constitutional act: it must express the community’s own idea of fairness.
- Fairness is not only arithmetic. Education, familiarity, access and practical reasonableness are virtues that can only be judged in context.
- A living community is held together by reciprocal relationships, not merely by a common asset or opinion.
- Identity, reputation, trust, language and geographic concentration all reduce the distance between participants.
- Membership brings rights and responsibilities; loyalty is meaningful only where recognition and care are mutual.
- A currency can reinforce an existing bond. It cannot manufacture one from holders and followers.
The challengeWhy we cannot achieve this without you5 ways in
Name the bond money could serve
- Identify one real community to which you owe more than attention: a place, language, association, cause or shared history.
- Describe the rights, duties and mutual care that make it a community rather than an audience.
- Help decide what a fair first distribution would mean there—and who could otherwise be missed.
- Translate monetary freedom into the language and experience people in that community already share.
- Correct us whenever the word community slips back into marketing language.
03 / The missing layer
Most communities use money issued and governed somewhere else.
Families, towns, cultural groups and associations make economic choices every day. Almost all of them must measure those choices in money controlled beyond their reach.
Ask an ordinary question
Which of the communities I belong to uses a currency that its own members created and govern?
For most of us: none.
The gap remains
Crypto built markets around coins.
A shared asset gathers buyers and followers. It does not give them a common history or a duty to keep value circulating among one another.
Market around a coinLiving community
A shared priceA shared life
Holders and followersMembers and neighbours
Attention and exitContinuity and responsibility
Fiat as scoreboardCirculation as purpose
The crypto industry calls institutional buying “adoption”, yet often dismisses currencies created for real communities as fragmentation.
The caseWhy we say this6 arguments
Why the monetary absence matters
- Money is infrastructure: it influences what can be financed, exchanged, preserved and remembered—and therefore shapes difficult local choices.
- Almost every community conducts its economic life in units issued, governed and measured somewhere else.
- Crypto gave global assets an audience, but a shared price is not a shared life or reciprocal dependence; adoption rates and needs remain radically different.
- Bitcoin maximalism directly confronts monetary self-determination when it treats one global currency as the only legitimate outcome.
- Institutions with a local responsibility—associations, cooperatives, businesses and public bodies—can broaden adoption in ways global finance cannot.
- Community-scale initiatives are dismissed as fragmentation, even though monetary monoculture is itself a form of centralisation.
The challengeWhy we cannot achieve this without you5 ways in
Make the monetary absence discussable
- Ask who issues, governs and measures the money in which your community makes its hardest choices.
- Bring the question to associations, cooperatives, local businesses and institutions that already carry responsibility there.
- Document where dependence on an outside unit weakens a local decision, exchange or long-term commitment.
- Refuse fiat price as the only scoreboard; make circulation, participation and retained local value visible.
- Defend monetary plurality when community-scale initiatives are dismissed as mere fragmentation.
04 / The unfinished promise
Bitcoin made money without a central issuer possible. Communities must still decide how best to use the money available to them.
Anyone can run the software and verify the ledger without asking a bank or state for permission.
No global protocol can decide how people in a town, language group or nation should distribute a currency and put it into daily use. The people concerned must do that work themselves.
- People can transfer money without a central issuer.
- Anyone can inspect and reuse the underlying software.
- The network can verify scarcity without trusting a bank.
- Decide who should receive the currency first.
- Teach people how to hold and use it.
- Build places where it changes hands repeatedly.
“Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years.
— Satoshi Nakamoto, 2008
The caseWhy we say this8 arguments
Why Bitcoin’s breakthrough remains unfinished
- Bitcoin demonstrated that scarce money can exist without one central issuer or gatekeeper.
- It also made monetary creation permissionless: communities no longer need to wait for an institution to begin.
- Decentralisation must also exist between autonomous networks, not only among participants inside one dominant network.
- Success can reintroduce concentration through mining pools, specialised hardware, heavy nodes and custodial access.
- A global protocol cannot arrange fair local distribution, connect local enterprises or create mutual responsibility.
- Community-scaled networks expand aggregate capacity without abolishing scarcity: each currency remains bounded by its own acceptance and purpose.
- A few global reference currencies can coexist with many local and cultural currencies.
- Treating one breakthrough as the only legitimate currency risks replacing a monetary monopoly with a monetary monoculture.
The challengeWhy we cannot achieve this without you5 ways in
Keep Bitcoin’s open territory open
- Explain decentralisation as room for autonomous networks, not only as distribution inside one favoured network.
- Operate or support at least one independent node, miner, service or public source of chain knowledge.
- Compare systems by their weakest links and repair paths, not only by market value or total hash power.
- Build interoperability that lets networks cooperate without erasing their boundaries.
- Challenge monetary monoculture in your own words while preserving what Bitcoin genuinely made possible.
05 / The wider alliance
Eleven currencies are operational today. Each can be explored as a working network.
The map shows eleven currencies created for a place, nation or cultural community. Each one runs on its own network. Together they show that communities can create monetary systems of their own.
Each marker is an existing
currency network
The map is sparse because few communities have created monetary networks of their own. That leaves work to do.
EFLThe Netherlands
CESCPortugal
CDNCanada
RUBTCRussia
SLGUnited Kingdom
FJCJapan
AURIceland
NESSBermuda
PAKPakistan
DEMGermany
BOLIVenezuela
The caseWhy we say this7 arguments
Why distance can make a community bias stronger
- Distance is the governing factor: geographic, cultural, social and economic proximity make recognition, trust and reciprocity easier.
- Initial distribution shortens the distance between ownership and the people the currency was created to serve.
- Its name, history and original purpose shorten cultural distance by continually pointing attention back towards the community.
- The chance of acceptance rises when the currency and the person offering it are already known nearby.
- Finite network capacity makes distance practical: not every recurring exchange needs to compete for space on one global ledger.
- If holding the coin becomes analogous to investing in the community, the feedback between commitment and local value can reinforce itself.
- Local marketplaces turn identity and sympathy into recurring relationships at a distance people can actually sustain.
The challengeWhy we cannot achieve this without you5 ways in
Shorten the distance
- Introduce the currency through people who are already known and accountable inside the community.
- Translate the name, story and practical use into local language and recognizable situations.
- Help put an initial or renewed distribution into hands that can turn possession into participation.
- Connect one shop, association, event or marketplace where repeated exchange can begin.
- Record what earns trust locally so that another community can learn without copying blindly.
06 / A common wallet
In active development
One wallet can give people access to every currency while each one keeps its own network.
CC-WALLET is a joint project of the teams in the CommunityCoins alliance. We are building it together so people can hold, send and receive currencies that already exist. Each currency keeps its own network and rules.
Together, we build and maintain the wallet. People in each community earn users’ trust and create real places where the currency can change hands.
Your community currenciesReady to exchange
AuroracoinIceland1,240.00
Canada eCoinCanada384.60
Electronic GuldenThe Netherlands92.75
The caseWhy we say this7 arguments
Why a common wallet is decisive
- Without a usable way to hold, send and receive it, a community currency remains an argument rather than an instrument.
- Trust is decisive, and part of trust is recognition: one familiar doorway makes an unfamiliar currency less alien.
- One recognisable interface removes duplicated wallet work from small volunteer teams.
- A shared interface can host many currencies without merging their networks, rules or identities.
- Lightweight access lets ordinary users participate without operating the full machinery underneath.
- A trustworthy wallet makes its weakest links visible: keys, backups, errors and user responsibility must never disappear behind convenience.
- The wallet carries a currency into daily life; only the community can give it trust, use and meaning.
The challengeWhy we cannot achieve this without you5 ways in
Make one recognisable doorway trustworthy
- Test CC‑WALLET with someone who has never used cryptocurrency and stay present for every moment of doubt.
- Contribute accessibility, language, interaction or visual recognition that makes the doorway belong to more people.
- Help connect and test one currency through the shared wallet, ROT and CC‑PROXY path.
- Review how keys, backups, errors and recovery limits are explained; convenience must not create false safety.
- Turn a working prototype into a dependable release through testing, documentation and sustained maintenance.
07 / Put it into circulation
Shared software only matters when people can spend the currency nearby.
People return to a currency when shops, associations and neighbours accept it. Only people inside the community can decide where that exchange should begin and keep it going.
-
01
Start with people who already take part
Give the first coins to members who know one another.
-
02
Ask one place to accept it
Begin with a shop, association, market or local event.
-
03
Bring people back
Arrange the next exchange before the first one is forgotten.
The caseWhy we say this6 arguments
Why circulation must be built locally
- One shared denomination simplifies daily life; without it, every exchange falls back to outside prices and repeated exchange-rate calculations.
- Acceptance becomes easier when people can see that others nearby already recognise the currency.
- Repeated exchange creates reputation, trust and habits that a one-time marketing campaign cannot.
- Local circulation keeps more value, attention and responsibility connected to the community.
- Shops, associations, markets and events connect the currency to shared life instead of only to a price chart.
- The people inside a community know where value already flows—and where a new instrument could make that flow stronger.
The challengeWhy we cannot achieve this without you5 ways in
Create one real place to use it
- Price one real product, service or contribution directly in the community currency.
- Invite one shop, association, market or event that already has a relationship with the community.
- Make the exchange recur; a habit is more valuable than a launch-day transaction.
- Listen to the first users and remove the practical reason they hesitate to return.
- Document the local pattern so others can adapt it without pretending every community is the same.
08 / What the alliance adds
Teams can share infrastructure without giving up control of their currency.
Users see a wallet and expect it to work. Behind that screen, contributors keep nodes online, maintain mining software, publish builds and run wallet services.
01Open source
Shared infrastructure
Teams package and document core software so another maintainer can rebuild a node and bring it online.
02Mining commons
CC-MINE
Miners use shared software to produce blocks for smaller networks without depending on a single pool operator.
03Wallet access
CC-PROXY
CC-PROXY gives wallets a simple HTTPS route to chain data supplied by independent nodes.
The caseWhy we say this6 arguments
Why invisible infrastructure belongs to the promise
- Decentralisation is not a slogan. It exists only where people continue to operate it.
- Security is determined by the weakest maintained link, not by the most impressive headline number.
- A community cannot delegate away every node, miner, build and service and still call the result autonomous.
- Resilient systems are diverse systems; preserving several working networks preserves practical alternatives.
- Open weaknesses can be repaired; reproducible software and shared services let small teams inspect rather than merely trust.
- Cooperation can remove duplicated technical work without creating a central issuer or a single governing coin.
The challengeWhy we cannot achieve this without you5 ways in
Maintain what users should never have to see
- Run a node, miner, mirror or service that makes one of the networks independently reachable.
- Review builds and packaging so that reproducible software is a fact rather than a promise.
- Test ROT, CC‑PROXY and the shared service path under realistic failure and load conditions.
- Write the operating knowledge that lets someone else repair what currently depends on one person.
- Take responsibility for a small recurring piece of infrastructure and report honestly when it fails.
09 / A common ground
A currency can only serve a community that already exists.
People create community through shared life and responsibility for one another. A currency can support exchange between them. Decentralised software lets different communities make different monetary choices.
Read the principles-
01
Community comes before currency.
-
02
A community may create money to serve its own economic life.
-
03
A community currency succeeds when people keep using it with one another.
-
04
Several independent currencies leave people more than one system to rely on.
-
05
Teams may share tools while each community keeps authority over its currency.
-
06
Communities can work together and still make different choices.
The caseWhy we say this6 arguments
What cooperation must never erase
- There is no CommunityCoins master currency into which the others are expected to disappear.
- Each initiative keeps its own history, network, community and responsibility.
- Common infrastructure is a coordination layer, not a claim to central authority.
- Economic diversity is valuable precisely because communities do not all make the same choices.
- Participation means showing up, maintaining what others depend on and acknowledging failures openly.
- The alliance succeeds when autonomous currencies become more usable—not when the alliance becomes their new centre.
The challengeWhy we cannot achieve this without you5 ways in
Keep cooperation plural
- Bring the voice of an initiative, community or discipline that is currently missing from the alliance.
- Correct any alliance claim that smooths over a real difference between currencies or communities.
- Test the principles against an actual decision about distribution, infrastructure or local use.
- Share what can be shared without surrendering the identity and responsibility that must remain local.
- Make commitments, decisions and failures visible enough for cooperation to earn trust.
10 / Ideas worth preserving
The CommunityCoins journal
Origins
The Return to Bitcoin’s Original Promise
What remains when cryptocurrency is reclaimed as monetary infrastructure rather than a speculative product?
Read essay
Community
Community, Cause and Currency
A community currency can carry purpose, memory and economic commitment in the same way language carries identity.
Read essay
Infrastructure
Why We Choose Legacy
Preserving proven networks is not nostalgia. It can be a deliberate strategy for autonomy and continuity.
Read essay11 / It begins where you stand
Carry the possibility home.
Recognise the communities that already hold you. Discover whether one of these rare beginnings belongs there. Then help give it people, places and recurring reasons to circulate.
ROOTY
Decentralisation is not something
a system grants us.