--- title: money that acts like nature canonical_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/money-that-acts-like-nature markdown_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/money-that-acts-like-nature.md subtitle: "it circulates, it pools, it decays, it stays put — and nothing it is based on can be called" category: philosophy --- # money that acts like nature *it circulates, it pools, it decays, it stays put — and nothing it is based on can be called* A river does four things with water that no bank does with money. It moves it, all the time, without being asked. It stores it in snowpack, floodplains and aquifers, and lets it go slowly in a dry year. It loses some of it to evaporation and to the roots along the bank, and that loss is how the valley stays green. And the valley it runs through is nobody's collateral: the water moves, the riverbed and the land that hold it stay. The word **liquidity** comes from water. Finance borrowed it and then forgot where it came from. This post takes the borrowing seriously. If you are looking for a **nature currency**, as an allocator, a treasury, a group that already keeps a place, or someone who has been offered a token with a forest on it, here is what money that acts like nature would have to do, where the ideas come from, and where ensurance stands. :::johnson **money that acts like nature circulates, pools, decays, and stays put.** And nothing it is based on can be called. The first four are how it moves. The last one is what keeps the river off the table. [see the pools →](https://ensurance.app/pools?from=guide) ::: ## what a nature currency is ### what is a nature currency? A **nature currency** is money that behaves the way a living system behaves: it circulates among the people who keep a place, it pools in good years and releases in bad ones, it carries some cost for sitting idle, and it is grounded in that place without giving anyone a claim on it. It is not a credit, which is bought once and retired once. It is not a unit of nature; no coin is a hectare. And it is not a coin that can be redeemed for the forest, which is a secured loan whatever the name on it. The question of what a unit can call is answered in [a carbon currency is not a forest](/guide/a-carbon-currency-is-not-a-forest). This post is about the behavior. ## it circulates Water moves. The monetary cousin is velocity: money that changes hands often does more work per unit than money that sits. The oldest working example is not a crypto protocol. The **WIR Bank** in Switzerland has run since 1934 as a cooperative currency for small businesses. WIR francs enter circulation as interest-free loans from the cooperative bank to member firms, and then circulate among firms that both earn and spend them against real trade. Use rises in recessions, when franc liquidity dries up. The lesson from ninety years is circularity: every participant has both income and expenses in the unit. Local currencies that let consumers spend but left shopkeepers holding notes they could not use faded, however well they were loved. For a nature currency, circulation means the people and accounts that keep a place both receive and spend the unit. A steward is paid in it and pays in it. A watershed's account receives a share of every trade and spends it on the watershed. One-way flow, money that arrives at the place and stops, is a donation. Donations matter, and they are not currency. ## it pools Water also stops, on purpose. Snowpack holds a winter's precipitation and releases it through July. A floodplain takes a flood and gives it back as baseflow in September. John Muir, writing of the sequoia groves, said it is a mistake to suppose the water is the cause of the groves being there; the groves are the cause of the water, because their roots form a sponge that hoards the bounty of the clouds and sends it out as clear perennial streams. The monetary cousin is permanence: reserves. A currency needs both circulation and a base, and the two are not in tension. Pure velocity with no reserve is fragile. Pure reserve with no velocity is dead money. Money that acts like nature accumulates in wet years and releases in drought, so that a steward's income does not swing with the market's mood. A pool, in the plain sense of a standing place where the unit can be bought and sold, is the first version of that sponge. Deeper versions, reserves that fill during activity and release during quiet, are a design goal, not something you can see on a screen today. ## it decays Water is lost on the way. Some evaporates; some goes into the roots along the bank. The loss is how the valley stays green, and it is part of why the river keeps moving. Money does not rot. Silvio Gesell pointed this out in 1916: goods decay and labor ages, but money sits in a drawer and loses nothing but inflation, which gives whoever holds it structural power over whoever makes things. His answer was **demurrage**, a small carrying cost on holding money, so that it circulates rather than hoards. The town of Wörgl in Austria tried it in 1932 with stamp scrip during the Depression, and the central bank shut the experiment down in 1933. The Chiemgauer, a regional currency in Bavaria running since 2003, pairs demurrage with contributions to local nonprofits funded through conversion, so the currency gives as it moves. John X of Astral Protocol proposed running the decay in space rather than time: a unit that loses value with distance from the place it belongs to, so the incentive reads "spend closer to here" rather than "spend sooner." For a currency whose purpose is a named watershed, that is the natively place-aligned version. Honesty on our stage: decay is a concept we have written up, not a live mechanism. No ensurance coin loses value in a drawer today. We think some version of it belongs in money for places, and we have not committed to one. ## it stays put The water moves. The valley does not. The riverbed, the floodplain and the land that hold the water are not what the river spends, and they are nobody's collateral. This is the behavior that decides everything else. Money that acts like nature is **based on** the living asset, on the condition and function of a real place, and it is **not a claim on it**. Not debt: nothing is owed by the place. Not a security: nobody holds equity in the river, a dividend from it, or a right to liquidate it. Not collateral: nothing can be seized, foreclosed, or called. A coin can be sold into its pool. Nothing redeems against the place or its income. One honest stage note: a titled policy can hold the deed as the cost-side investor's security during the ensured period, until the place reaches entrust and is free of claims. That is the policy's path, not the coin's or the certificate's; neither adds a claim of its own at any stage. History has tested the other design, the French assignats issued against seized land and the Terra stablecoin backed by its own token, and both lessons are told in [a carbon currency is not a forest](/guide/a-carbon-currency-is-not-a-forest). The longer argument, that reserve currencies have been anchored to things you have to dig up, burn or foreclose on, is in [living money](/guide/living-money). ### can a currency be based on a living system without being backed by it? Yes, and the river shows how. The water circulates, pools and is lost; the valley stays. A currency can move, be held and be spent while the place it is based on is never pledged, never sold to satisfy a holder, and never the thing that pays anyone out. Serious teams work the other lane, with coins that hold a redeemable claim on land or on its output. The question to put to any of them is where the claim points under stress. If it points at the place, the place is on the table. ## three kinds of money, one test Money for living systems could be fiat, social or crypto. All three are real, and the test is the same for each. | kind of money | what it is | can it circulate, pool, decay, stay put? | |---|---|---| | **fiat** (a dollar, a stablecoin) | A claim on an issuer, settled through banks or a public ledger | Circulates and pools well. Decays only through inflation, and not toward any place. Stays put only if the contract that moves it adds no claim on the place | | **social** (mutual credit, a community currency, a gift ledger) | Credit members issue or borrow against real work | Circulates by construction (WIR). Can decay (Chiemgauer). Pools weakly. Stays put if its credit is not secured on the place | | **crypto** (a coin with a pool) | An open contract anyone can hold, trade and build on | Circulates and pools in public. Can be programmed to decay. Stays put if, and only if, the design refuses to make the place collateral | None of the three wins by its category. A dollar routed to a watershed's account with no claim on the watershed acts more like nature than a token that can be redeemed for timber rights. ### how would money that acts like nature behave? It would reach the people who keep a place and be spent by them, not just arrive and stop. It would hold reserves in good years and release them in bad ones, so that care is paid for in a drought. It would carry some cost for sitting idle, so that it keeps moving toward the work. And it would be grounded in a living place without giving anyone a claim on that place. Four behaviors. The last one is non-negotiable; the first three are what the design is reaching for. ## where ensurance stands today Plainly, from the public catalog. On 21 October 2026 [general ensurance](https://ensurance.app/general?from=guide) listed 191 **coins** plus **$ENSURE**, the [protocol currency](https://ensurance.app/ensure?from=guide). One hundred of them had a pool where the coin can be bought and sold, and sixteen had traded in the previous twenty-four hours, a few dollars in all. **Certificates** on [specific ensurance](https://ensurance.app/specific?from=guide) are 1:1 with a named agent, each a record of a hold on one living system, not a share in it. Each pooled coin routes part of its trading fees to a payout account; today that is mostly the protocol's own addresses, and for some coins a named agent's account. So: circulation exists, in small pools. The sponge exists as a design and as the beginnings of protocol-held liquidity ([what protocol owned liquidity can and cannot buy](/guide/what-protocol-owned-liquidity-can-and-cannot-buy)). Decay is on paper. Stays put is built in from the first contract: no coin or certificate carries a claim on any parcel. The protocol is its own first user. Muir's groves made the water; the first liquidity in these pools came from the people building them. That is the honest description of a seed, and we would rather you read it as a seed than as a market. ## what to ask of any money for a place If someone offers you a nature currency, four questions sort the field. How does it move, and do the people who keep the place both earn and spend it? Where does it pool, and what happens in a bad year? Does it rest, or does it reward sitting still? And what can it call? If the answer to the last one is the forest, you have been offered a loan. The three instruments and their different levels of fungibility are laid out in [the nature of fungibility](/guide/the-nature-of-fungibility). What every credit is trying to become is the first post in this series; how each one scores as money is the second. If you allocate capital and want to see how money shaped this way reaches a place, [tell us which place](/contact?from=guide&topic=money-that-acts-like-nature), or start by [looking at the pools](https://ensurance.app/pools?from=guide). The river does not know it is a model for anything. It moves, it stores, it loses a little, and the valley stays. Money that remembered the same four things would be enough. ## sources [WIR Bank](https://www.wir.ch/) — Swiss cooperative currency operating since 1934 [Stodder and Lietaer, The macro-stability of Swiss WIR-Bank credits (2016)](https://bernard-lietaer.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/2016-The-Macro-Stability-of-Swiss-WIR-Bank-Credits-Balance-Velocity-and-Leverage-Stodder-Lietaer-annotated.pdf) — WIR use rises in recessions [Chiemgauer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgauer) — regional currency in Bavaria with demurrage and nonprofit contributions funded through conversion, since 2003 [Silvio Gesell, The Natural Economic Order (1916)](https://www.silvio-gesell.de/the-natural-economic-order.html) — the origin of demurrage, or money that decays like goods [John Muir, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 9](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/60929/60929-h/60929-h.htm) — "the groves are the cause of the water being there" [ensurance general coins](https://ensurance.app/api/general) — the live catalog this post's counts were read from, 21 October 2026 ## the series [every credit is trying to become money](/guide/every-credit-is-trying-to-become-money) — the names, and the one job [a credit judged as money](/guide/a-credit-judged-as-money) — the scorecard [a registry is not a market](/guide/a-registry-is-not-a-market) [money that acts like nature](/guide/money-that-acts-like-nature) — this post [composable, modular, open](/guide/composable-modular-and-open) [pay the land, pay the people](/guide/pay-the-land-pay-the-people) — the flag