In my on-going quest for good metaphors and ways of thinking about the community/multi-currency world, an excellent metaphor came to me that is useful when talking about all this with programmers:

federal currency = global variables
community currency = local variables

Writing software with only global variables is not impossible, but their “liquidity” (i.e. the fact that they have “value” everywhere) is not an asset, but a liability. Of course an individual variable “loses power” by not being “valuable” everywhere, but its utitlity increases by being only have value in a given context.

The whole programming concept of “scoping” applies to currency!

[tags]currency, programming, scope, community currency, local variable, global variable, money, metaphor[/tags]