What is colourcash?

In short – an alternative money system which aims at balance. It is most comparable to the LETS trading systems, but developers claim LETS is in fact closer to capitalism than colourcash is to LETS. The idea of colourcash is to help users raising their consciousness level and start cooperating as a group using the forces of nature to their advantage.

The colourcash paradigm itself was developed in the Netherlands by Barry Voeten between 1995 and 2006. In 2006 he wrote the Dutch book “Balanced Economics” and published it on the Internet. In 2007 an internet application followed, called Rgbtrade. Its code is also used by the Dutch website rgboog.nl. Rgbtrade is a combination of an advertising and a banking website for colourcash. So, you can place ads, see the ads of other participants and pay them in RGB. It is also completely transparent and it runs without an ‘admin’. This last thing was built in to make sure every user has his own responsibility and does not point to, or is pointed by, a ‘boss’ .

That is only how the system works on the outside. To understand the way it works, you need to look into its inner contents. Here comes the relationship with money: the foundation of colourcash is the RGB-unit, which consists of three colors (Red, Green and Blue). The colours have different meanings. As a basis for the value of 1, the energy and weight of Sunflower Oil is used. There are lists of reference values of several sorts of food and fuel, based on the energy they contain.