IOUNet is a revolutionary system that enables human cooperation without money. When someone does something for you — cooks a meal, fixes a tap, tutors your child, drives you to the airport — you send them an IOU valued in ⊙ (one minute of human time). The system tracks everyone's net position — total received minus total sent. When Alice helped Bob, Bob helped Carol, and Carol helped Alice, that circular activity washes out: nobody owes anyone anything. No money changes hands.

Every user has a net position — the sum of all ⊙ received minus all ⊙ sent. Most of the gross IOU activity is circular and simply washes out: it contributes nothing to anyone's net position. The small residual is settled at the jubilee, where net creditors are matched with net debtors using at most one IOU per person. After the jubilee, every user is at exactly ⊙0.

IOUNet is orthogonal to the conventional money-based economy. It does not replace money — it reveals how much of human cooperation never needed money in the first place. The unit of account is time, not currency. The medium of exchange is trust, not interest-bearing debt.

An IOU (“I Owe You”) is simply a record of an obligation between two people: a sender, a recipient, a value in minutes, and optionally a description. It might be “Alice owes Bob 30 minutes of her time because he helped her move house” or “Carol owes Dave 60 minutes because he cooked her dinner”. IOUs are as old as human exchange. IOUNet gives them a mathematical backbone — every IOU instantly updates the sender's and receiver's net positions, and the circular activity washes out automatically.

⊙ (pronounced "you") is IOUNet's unit of account. One ⊙ = one minute of human labour. Why not dollars? Because dollars are created as debt — the money supply is the outstanding debt, so you can't escape debt by denominating in dollars. Human time is universally scarce, universally understood, and inflation-resistant. A hospice nurse's minute and a CEO's minute are both one ⊙. The recipient decides what a favour was worth to them. One Big Mac costs roughly 10–15 ⊙ at global median wages. ⊙ is Unicode U+2299, available in all standard fonts.

IOUNet uses SI prefixes for ⊙ amounts, just as science uses them for metres, grams and watts. Since 1⊙ = 1 minute of human time, every prefix has a concrete meaning in hours, years, or lifetimes:

1 K⊙ (kilo) = 1,000 minutes = 17 hours. A solid day and a half of human work. A weekend of favours between neighbours.

1 M⊙ (mega) = 1 million minutes = 1.9 years. One person working full-time for nearly two years — or a thousand people each contributing one day.

1 G⊙ (giga) = 1 billion minutes = 1,900 years. No individual can earn this alone. But a thousand people working for 1.9 years each, or a million people each giving one day — that is a community, a movement, a civilisation. Giga is where IOUNet becomes collective.

1 T⊙ (tera) = 1 trillion minutes = 1.9 million years. One person for 1.9 million years, or one million people for 1.9 years each. The planetary engine has eliminated over 240T⊙ so far — equivalent to the entire human race each contributing 35 minutes.

1 P⊙ (peta) = 1.9 billion years. Roughly the age of complex life on Earth. The total ⊙ throughput of a mature planetary IOUNet — every human exchange, every favour, every act of care — would be about 1.8 P⊙ per year (see below).

The key insight: ⊙ scales naturally from a single favour (a few ⊙) through community exchange (K⊙) to national cooperation (G⊙) to planetary civilisation (T⊙ and beyond). The same unit, the same arithmetic, the same jubilee — at every scale. There will never be an IOU billionaire. Only Giga-citizens.

1⊙ — one minute. That is the atomic unit of IOUNet. All IOU values are whole numbers: 1⊙, 5⊙, 30⊙, 120⊙. No fractions, no decimals.

Why? Because simplicity is a design principle. A child can do the arithmetic. A farmer at a market stall can keep a running total in their head. "You helped me for 15 minutes — that’s 15⊙" requires no calculator, no rounding, no conversion.

But doesn’t that make small items impossible to buy? Not really. At typical exchange rates, 1⊙ is worth roughly €0.15–0.25. That’s less than a single apple — but you wouldn’t send an IOU for a single apple any more than you’d write a cheque for one. You’d pick up a bag of seasonal fruit for 3⊙, or a coffee for 3⊙, or a dozen eggs for 4⊙. The natural granularity of real human exchange is minutes, not seconds.

And if someone does something that only takes 30 seconds? Then it was too small to bother recording. The effort of creating, sending, and acknowledging an IOU is itself worth more than half a minute. Below 1⊙, the transaction cost exceeds the value — which is exactly the point. IOUNet captures meaningful exchanges, not micro-transactions.

Nothing. Zero. 0⊙.

There is no subscription, no transaction fee, no interchange fee, no percentage, no hidden charge. The software is lines of code generated by Claude (Anthropic) in collaboration with Simon Thorpe. No human programming time was involved in producing the code — so by IOUNet's own logic, its cost is precisely 0⊙.

This is not a temporary promotion. It is a permanent architectural property. The marginal cost of one additional IOU is a few microseconds of arithmetic. The marginal cost of one additional settlement is zero. The entire planet's debt can be settled on a desktop computer — the Planetary Engine proves this in real time, and the compiled binary is 225 kilobytes.

Compare this with the existing system: Visa, Mastercard, and the major card networks extract roughly $650 billion per year in processing fees — for the privilege of moving numbers between accounts. That is about $1,200 per American household, silently passed through in higher prices. IOUNet replaces this with free, instant, private settlement. The toll booth is gone.

About 6 T⊙ per day — over 2,000 T⊙ per year.

Here is the calculation. There are roughly 5 billion adults on Earth capable of productive activity, plus over 1 billion older children who can meaningfully participate — washing cars, helping in the garden, reading to younger siblings, running errands. Each person is awake for about 16 hours a day — that is 960⊙. Multiply: 6 billion participants × 960 = 5.8 T⊙ per day, which we round to 6 T⊙.

This is a radically different number from anything in conventional economics, because it counts all waking human activity — not just the 8 hours of paid employment that GDP measures. Making breakfast for your family: ⊙. Walking the children to school: ⊙. Reading a bedtime story: ⊙. Helping a neighbour fix a fence: ⊙. Listening to a friend in distress: ⊙. None of these appear in any economic statistic. All of them are genuine human contributions that IOUNet can recognise.

Conventional economics, counting only paid work (roughly 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, with holidays), sees about 2.4 T⊙ per day — less than half. IOUNet more than doubles the visible economy by counting the rest: the care, the cooking, the companionship, the thousand daily acts that hold a society together.

The Planetary Engine processes around 200 T⊙ per day — roughly 45 times faster than real life. When the simulated clock reaches one year, it will have processed the equivalent of the entire planet's annual productive output.

In a live IOUNet, every IOU instantly updates the sender's and receiver's net positions. There is no accumulation of records, no batch processing, no queue. When you send 30⊙ to your neighbour for mowing the lawn, your net position drops by 30 and theirs rises by 30 — in real time. That is the only thing the system needs to track: one number per person.

Users can keep a local record of their individual IOUs if they want — who they helped, what they did, when. This might be useful for personal budgeting, for remembering favours, or simply for satisfaction. But IOUNet itself does not need that information. The system only needs net positions.

The vast majority of IOU activity is circular — it washes out completely and contributes nothing to anyone's net position. Over time, some users drift slightly positive (the community owes them time) and others slightly negative (they owe the community time).

The jubilee is the periodic moment when these residual net positions are settled. It is simple: match net creditors with net debtors, issue one settlement IOU each, until everyone reaches ⊙0. This requires at most N−1 settlement IOUs for N users. After the jubilee, every net position is exactly zero. No money changes hands. The circular activity was always irrelevant — only the net positions ever mattered.

The Interactive IOU Demo shows the process as two separate views — an Exhaustive Master with all individual IOUs and a Compact Master with only the active ones — to help you see why the circular activity is irrelevant. But in a real IOUNet, those listings would only exist on users' own devices, if at all. The system itself is just net positions and jubilees.

Because every IOU is recorded twice — as a debit for the sender and a credit for the receiver. When Alice sends 30⊙ to Bob, and Bob sends 30⊙ to Carol, and Carol sends 30⊙ to Alice, the net effect on everyone is zero. The IOUs existed, the services were real, but no net obligation remains. This is not “cancellation” — it is simply the arithmetic of a balanced network.

In practice, the circular portion of all IOU activity grows with network size. At 50 IOUs per user it accounts for over 98% of gross activity. At planetary scale, virtually all activity is circular — only a tiny residual of net positions remains, and the jubilee settles that with one IOU per person. This is not a trick or an approximation. It is proved by direct simulation across 55 network configurations from 1,000 to 500,000,000 users.

Anyone. IOUNet will be free to use, with no subscription, no credit check, and no minimum balance.

An IOUNet account is identified by a phone number — the same model as WhatsApp, already trusted by 3 billion people. Phone numbers follow the international E.164 standard: a country code (which carries geographical information) followed by a subscriber number, up to 15 digits total. A French mobile might be +33 6 12 34 56 78; an Indian number +91 98765 43210. The country code tells IOUNet roughly where you are without requiring an address. The entire number fits in 64 bits — 8 bytes per user. To create an account, you verify your phone number with an SMS code. That is all. No name, no username, no password, no bank account.

But IOUNet is not just for individuals. Businesses, charities, associations, cooperatives, schools, hospitals, local governments, national governments, and international organisations can all hold IOUNet accounts. A bakery has a phone number. A village council has a phone number. Oxfam has a phone number. The French government has a phone number. Each is a first-class participant in the ⊙ economy, sending and receiving IOUs exactly like any individual.

This is why the Planetary Engine simulates 10 billion entities, not 8 billion. The breakdown: roughly 8 billion people (including older children), plus approximately 400 million businesses, 10 million charities and NGOs, 500,000 educational institutions, 1 million healthcare providers, 300,000 government entities, and millions more cooperatives, religious organisations, and community groups. Every entity that has a phone number can participate. The ⊙ economy includes them all.

The jubilee is the moment when all debt in the network is eliminated. Every user's net position returns to exactly ⊙0. No money changes hands. It works by matching net creditors with net debtors and issuing one settlement IOU for each pair. The creditor sends an IOU to the debtor for the smaller of their two balances. This drives at least one of them to zero. Repeat until everyone is settled. You can watch this happen in two ways:

The Interactive IOU Demo lets you set any number of users (2 to 500) with any number of IOUs each. Press the gold Jubilee button and watch the settlement IOUs stream into the ledger row by row, with every user's net position shrinking to zero in real time. It always completes with exactly N−1 jubilee IOUs.

The Planetary Engine runs the jubilee at planetary scale — 10 billion users on a single Mac Studio in Toulouse. Every 40 minutes, the bell curve of net positions melts to nothing as the engine matches creditors and debtors across the entire population. The ghost of the pre-jubilee distribution remains visible behind the shrinking live histogram.

This is a beautiful mathematical result. In a random IOU network, every user ends up with a non-zero net position (the probability of landing on exactly zero with random continuous amounts is vanishingly small). So all N users need settling.

The optimal algorithm matches the largest creditor with the largest debtor, settling for the smaller of their two balances. This drives exactly one of them to zero — the other retains a residual. It is never both simultaneously, because with random amounts the chance of two users having exactly equal-and-opposite positions is essentially zero.

So: N users to settle, each jubilee IOU eliminates exactly one user, until the final IOU eliminates the last two (they must be exactly equal, since the system is zero-sum by construction). That gives N−1 every time.

At planetary scale (10 billion users), a handful of users may land close enough to zero by chance that they don't need a settlement IOU, so the actual count can be very slightly less than N−1. But the principle holds: one IOU per person is both necessary and sufficient.

The Planetary Engine simulates 10 billion entities — every person, business, charity, and government on Earth — generating 50–60 million IOUs per second across 24 processor cores. A bell curve of net positions builds over 40 minutes as IOUs flow. Then the jubilee triggers.

During the jubilee, all 24 cores switch from generating random IOUs to optimal settlement: each core samples users from the entire 10-billion population, sorts them by net position, and matches the extremes inward — the largest creditor with the largest debtor, then the next largest, and so on. The histogram collapses from the tails toward zero. The ghost outline of the pre-jubilee bell curve remains visible as a grey shadow, showing the total mass of debt that has been eliminated.

The compiled engine that does all of this is 225 kilobytes. The Visa app is 750× larger.

As often as the community agrees. The mathematics works at any frequency — what matters is giving people enough time between jubilees to earn back any negative balance through useful activity.

Once or twice a year is probably the most natural starting point. The spring equinox (20 March) and autumn equinox (22 September) have an appealing symmetry: the moment when day equals night, when the balance of light tips. A jubilee on each equinox gives everyone roughly six months to participate in the ⊙ economy before the next reset.

Every full moon (roughly every 29.5 days) is a more ambitious rhythm, but has a unique advantage: the full moon is universally visible. It requires no calendar, no app, no internet. The Amazonian tribe and the Tokyo salaryman see the same full moon on the same night. A lunar jubilee is the only global synchronisation event that works without any technology at all.

What matters is that the rhythm is tied to natural events rather than any country's calendar. New Year's Day is 1 January for some, the lunar new year for others, Nowruz for others. Christmas, Diwali, Eid — none are universal. But the equinox and the full moon belong to everyone. The jubilee should too.

Nothing. They carry on exactly as before, with their existing net position intact. The jubilee is not a punishment — it is an opportunity. Nobody is forced to participate.

But the proportion of users who did not participate would be visible. If 94% of a community reaches ⊙0 at the equinox and 6% do not, that 6% is a meaningful number. It tells you something about the health of the community — not through surveillance, but through the geometry of the network. Over time, the percentage of jubilee participants becomes one of the most important statistics in the ⊙ economy: a direct measure of how cooperative and balanced a community is.

By making participation visible, celebrated, and worth aspiring to.

For individuals: reaching ⊙0 at the jubilee earns you a jubilee badge — a visible mark that you found a way to balance your obligations. This is not a credit score imposed by a bank; it is a badge of social participation, earned by reciprocating. Your online profile could show your jubilee history: “Jubilee participant: Equinox 2026, 2027, 2028.” A streak of consecutive jubilees becomes the most meaningful credential in the ⊙ economy — more telling than any CV or credit rating. It says: this person has consistently found ways to be useful to others.

For businesses: a shop, a market stall, a service provider who reaches ⊙0 at every jubilee can display a sign in the window — the IOUNet equivalent of a Michelin star, except it measures trust rather than cuisine. Customers choosing between two cafés might prefer the one whose owner has been a jubilee participant for three years running. It is a public declaration: we give back as much as we receive.

The genius of this approach is that it requires no enforcement. Nobody is punished for non-participation. But everyone can see who participated and who did not — and in a community where jubilee participation is the norm, the social incentive to join is enormous. The jubilee becomes a collective celebration, not an obligation.

Not at all. While the idea of settling every IOU on the planet to zero on the spring equinox is exciting, it is not necessary that everyone participate at once. Jubilees can happen at any scale.

A household: Two partners settle their domestic IOUs every full moon. Thirty minutes of arithmetic, a conversation about who did what, and a fresh start.

A school classroom: The teacher runs a jubilee on the last day of term. The children see their IOUs cancel, learn how mutual obligation works, and start the next term at zero.

A village or neighbourhood: A quarterly jubilee at the community hall. Everyone who participated in the local ⊙ economy — the baker, the childminder, the handyman, the retired teacher who tutors maths — sees their balance settle.

A city, a region, a country: A regional jubilee might run every six months, settling all IOUs exchanged within that zone.

The mathematics is identical at every scale. The only difference is scope: a local jubilee ignores IOUs exchanged with people outside the zone. If Marie in Toulouse owes Pierre in Toulouse and is owed by Jacques in Toulouse, the local jubilee settles all three. But Marie’s IOU with Hans in Berlin is untouched — that waits for a European or global jubilee.

This is actually how it would work in practice. A household jubilee every month. A school jubilee every term. A village jubilee every quarter. A national jubilee at the equinox. A planetary jubilee once a year. Each layer settles what it can, and the remaining cross-boundary balances propagate upward to the next level.

In any IOU network, every user has a net position (total ⊙ received minus total ⊙ sent). The vast majority of gross IOU activity is circular — it washes out and contributes nothing to anyone's net position. The small residual of net positions can be settled with at most one IOU per person at the jubilee, bringing everyone to ⊙0. The leverage ratio (gross activity / net residual) scales as approximately the square root of the density (IOUs per user), reaching 10× at 100 IOUs/user and 30× at 1,000 IOUs/user. This was proved through large-scale simulation in February–March 2026 by Simon Thorpe (CNRS) working with Claude (Anthropic).

Through a wrong turn that lasted twelve years — followed by a single day of revelation.

From 2014 onwards, IOUNet was built around cycle detection. The assumption was natural: if Alice owes Bob, Bob owes Carol, and Carol owes Alice, you need to find that cycle in the graph and cancel it. For a network of millions of users, each with dozens of IOUs, this is a hard computational problem — finding cycles in massive directed graphs.

From late 2025 into early 2026, Simon Thorpe (CNRS) and Claude (Anthropic) spent months building and optimising parallel cycle-detection algorithms in Swift. The results were spectacular: 24 processor cores racing through networks of millions of users, finding billions of cycles, showing that over 99% of all gross IOU activity was circular. We discovered that a randomly chosen user was almost invariably part of loops involving 97–98% of the entire network. The graph structure seemed to be everything.

Then, on 5 March 2026, the realisation came. All that cycle searching was mathematically unnecessary. The net position of every user — total received minus total sent — is invariant under cycle cancellation. It doesn’t matter which cycles you find or in what order you cancel them: the net positions are the same before and after. Which means you can skip the cycle detection entirely and go straight to net position settlement. One linear pass over the IOU records. One sort. One matching loop. Done.

Months of parallel graph algorithms, replaced by arithmetic that runs on a pocket calculator. The complexity was in the gross; the simplicity was in the net; and the net was all that ever mattered. That was two weeks ago.

Everything you see on this website — the JavaScript simulations running up to 500,000 users in your browser, the Swift engine settling 10 billion users on a single Mac Studio, the planetary dashboard, the jubilee system, every page and every demo — was written in those two weeks. One human (Simon Thorpe) and one AI (Claude, Anthropic), working together. Neither could have done it alone. The human brought twelve years of thinking, the questions, the intuition, the moral conviction. The AI brought the ability to turn ideas into running code in minutes. Human + AI vastly exceeds either alone. This project is itself the proof. (And yes — the browser simulations are deliberately capped at 500K users. But if 20,000 visitors each ran one, their combined throughput would match the compiled Swift engine. The algorithm is the same. The only difference is the language it is written in.)

It means the settlement phase — settling all residual net positions after the circular activity washes out — requires at most N−1 settlement IOUs for N users. This is independent of how many IOUs each person sent or received (density-independent). Whether a user sent 1 IOU or 1,000 IOUs, their net position is one number, and settling it requires exactly one settlement IOU. You can verify this yourself in the Interactive IOU Demo — set any number of users, press Jubilee, and it always completes with exactly N−1 IOUs. The Planetary Engine demonstrates the same principle at 10 billion users.

The settlement algorithm is O(N log N) — dominated by one sort of N net positions. The Planetary Engine settles 10 billion users in under a minute using 24 cores. For comparison, the global financial system currently takes 2–3 days to settle a single securities transaction.

No. The settlement cost (number of IOUs needed) depends only on the number of users — not on the total value of debt. Whether each person has ⊙10 of net debt or ⊙10 million, the algorithm takes the same number of steps. A network carrying quadrillions of ⊙ would settle in exactly the same time as one carrying thousands. This is the core mathematical result: the complexity is in the gross, the simplicity is in the net, and the net is all that matters.

Yes — right now, in your browser. The Large Scale simulation lets you run up to 500,000 users with rank-biased sending and zero-crossing erasure. The Comparison simulation shows Random vs IOUNet side by side. The Simulate page lets you build a custom network. All simulations run locally in your browser — no data leaves your machine.

Yes — the ancient jubilee required a king to decree it, happened at most every 7–50 years, and required someone to physically destroy debt tablets. It was top-down, sporadic, and politically fragile. Rome abolished it and it never returned. IOUNet is the mathematical implementation of the same principle, but bottom-up, continuous, and automatic. Every cycle closure is a micro-jubilee. Every zero-crossing erases records. No king required. No decree required. The jubilee doesn't need to be declared — it needs to be built.

By the plain reading of Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Exodus, Ezekiel, Luke, and Matthew — yes. Every major religious tradition is unanimous: charging interest on loans is forbidden. The Hebrew word neshek means "a serpent's bite". Islam ranks riba among the gravest sins, alongside murder. Dante places usurers in the seventh circle of Hell — the circle reserved for murderers, tyrants, and the violent against God and nature. The prohibition was not a minor footnote — it was central to Mosaic law, repeated by every prophet, affirmed by Jesus, and enforced by the Catholic Church until the 16th century. The current system — where $348 trillion of debt generates trillions annually in interest paid to the wealthiest institutions on earth — is, by every religious standard that has ever existed, a sin of the first order.

The most recent large-scale debt cancellation was Jubilee 2000 — a global campaign that secured $130 billion of debt cancellation for the world's poorest countries, fronted by Bono, backed by the Pope, with 50,000 people forming a human chain around the G8 in Birmingham in 1998. Before that, the closest equivalent was Germany 1948, when the Allied Powers replaced the reichsmark with the Deutsche mark, wiping out 90% of government and private debt and laying the foundation for West Germany's economic miracle. Before that — ancient history. The tradition has been effectively dead for 3,400 years.

Because every dollar of debt is someone else's income stream. The banks, asset managers, bond funds, and pension funds that hold government debt as assets have more than enough money to pay the politicians, economists, and media commentators to leave the system exactly as it is. The vested interests in perpetuating it are the most powerful in human history. This is why IOUNet does not require government action. It routes around the vested interests the same way the internet routed around broadcast media — not by attacking the system, but by making it unnecessary.

No. You are never obliged to accept an IOU. You can always insist on being paid in conventional money, or on direct reciprocation — ten kilos of my potatoes for five kilos of your apples, right now, no record required. If the exchange is immediate and symmetric, there is no need for an IOU at all. IOUNet is for situations where the exchange is not simultaneous — where you do something for someone today and trust that the obligation will be honoured later. That trust is entirely your choice. No one can send you an IOU you haven't agreed to accept. The system works because it is voluntary at every step.

No — and this is important. IOUNet supplements rather than replaces. Cash still works. Cards still work. IOUNet adds a third option: free, instant, private by default, and mathematically guaranteed to settle. The Saturday market trader who accepts IOUs alongside cash is saving 3% on every transaction that clears through the network. The neighbour who exchanges childcare informally is doing what humanity did for millennia before banks existed — now with a mathematical guarantee that obligations balance over time.

Three good reasons — each reinforcing the others.

1. Privacy. Every time your net position crosses zero, all prior IOU records involving you can be permanently deleted — who sent what to whom, for what purpose, when. A zero crossing is a privacy event. If you value privacy (and most people do), clearing your negative balance and crossing zero is the only way to erase your history. The more you reciprocate, the less trace remains. This is a powerful incentive that has no equivalent in conventional financial systems.

2. Social pressure and reputation. When you are in a significantly negative position, there is a natural reluctance to ask for more. Even if someone would technically accept your IOU, being visibly in the red makes people hesitant to emit more. This is precisely the social mechanism that the rank-bias rule formalises: the probability of sending an IOU scales with how positive your net position is. A persistently negative balance becomes a social signal — in a community where everyone trends toward zero, outliers are visible. Not through surveillance, but through the geometry of the network. It is also possible to provide information about the sender's net position to the receiver - who could decide to reject IOUs from people who are very negative.'

3. The shared jubilee. Imagine an IOUNet jubilee day — a community event where everyone tries to reach zero by a particular date. Someone in negative territory would be motivated to do something for others in the days beforehand — cook a meal, help a neighbour, offer a skill — accumulating the IOUs needed to clear their balance. The result: a collective act of mutual service that brings the whole network back to zero simultaneously. Every ancient civilisation celebrated this moment. IOUNet makes it achievable continuously — but a periodic community jubilee would give it the social resonance it deserves.

Absolutely — and this may be where IOUNet is most immediately useful. Two partners sharing a household can send each other IOUs to balance the daily work of domestic life: shopping, cooking, cleaning, childcare, repairs, school runs, laundry, ironing. Each task earns ⊙ for the time spent. Some tasks — like unblocking a sewer or staying up all night with a sick child — might earn a higher ⊙ rate by mutual agreement. But in general, the time spent is the measure.

Over a week or a month, imbalances become visible. One partner may have accumulated a positive balance — they have been doing more than their share. The other is in the red. This is not an accusation; it is arithmetic. And it opens a conversation that most couples find very difficult to have honestly.

Then comes the jubilee. At the full moon — or on any date the household agrees — the partner who owes makes up the difference. An extra evening of cooking. A weekend of childcare. A long-overdue trip to the tip. The ledger returns to zero. Both partners start the next month fresh.

This works because ⊙ makes the invisible visible. The partner who “does everything” finally has the numbers to prove it. The partner who thought they were pulling their weight can see exactly where they are falling short. And the jubilee gives them a concrete, time-bounded way to fix it — not with guilt, but with action.

Yes — and it might be one of the most valuable things they ever learn.

A child who washes the car, helps in the kitchen garden, tidies their room, or reads to a younger sibling is doing real work that has real value. In the conventional economy, this is invisible — or at best rewarded with pocket money, which teaches children that effort is worth whatever an adult decides to pay. In IOUNet, the child earns ⊙ for the actual time they spent. Ten minutes weeding the garden: 10⊙. Half an hour washing the car: 30⊙. The ⊙ are theirs. They are real. They can be spent, saved, or settled at the jubilee.

Of course, the ledger between parents and children will be heavily unbalanced — parents invest thousands of hours of care, and rightly so. A child’s ⊙ balance with their parents will be deeply negative for years. That is fine. It reflects reality. But it also gives children something profound: a concrete, visible record of the fact that other people invest time in them, and that as they grow, they can begin to reciprocate.

A teenager who reaches ⊙0 with their household for the first time — who has given back as much as they received — has achieved something genuinely meaningful. Not because anyone forced them, but because the arithmetic made the invisible visible, and they chose to act on it. That is a better lesson in economics than any textbook.

Yes — and it might be one of the most natural settings for it.

Parents are justifiably cautious about giving young children smartphones and access to financial systems. But a teacher could set up IOUNet accounts for all the children in their class, with the teacher managing the system on their behalf. No phones needed. No personal data exposed. Just a simple classroom ledger.

The teacher records what the children do for each other throughout the day. Owen helped Louisa solve a maths problem — 10⊙. Louisa comforted Owen when he fell over in the playground — 10⊙. Emily helped the teacher tidy up the paints — 15⊙. When the class went on a trip, Owen, Emily and Louisa helped an elderly lady carry her shopping — 5⊙ each. Every act of kindness, cooperation, and helpfulness becomes visible.

At the end of the week — or the term — the children who have been the most helpful, the most positive, could receive a special recognition from the teacher or the school. Not for being the cleverest, or the fastest, or the best at tests — but for being the most useful to others.

This is not a new idea. Many schools already have team systems — red, green, blue, yellow — where children earn points for their team through good behaviour and helpfulness, and the winning team gets a trophy at the end of term. IOUNet is the same principle, but with real arithmetic behind it. Instead of vague “house points” awarded at a teacher’s discretion, the ⊙ measures actual time spent helping others. It is objective, transparent, and teaches children something profound: that helping other people has real, measurable value.

And here is the deeper lesson. At jubilee time — perhaps the last day of term — the teacher runs the settlement. Every child sees how the circular activity washes out, how the network balances, how cooperation makes everyone better off. They learn, at age seven or eight, what most adults have never been taught: that an economy based on mutual obligation can work without money, without interest, and without anyone being left in debt.

Yes — and this may be one of IOUNet's most unexpected contributions: making animal welfare arithmetically visible.

Obviously, a dog cannot send an IOU. But a dog owner who walks their dog for 20 minutes every morning is spending 20⊙ of genuine human time on an activity that benefits both of them. The owner can register their dog as an IOUNet entity (with its own identifier) and send it 20⊙ each morning. The dog's account auto-accepts. The same applies to cats, horses, and any animal in someone's care.

Consider the elderly woman whose cat sits purring on her lap for an hour each evening. That hour of companionship is real, it is valuable, and it has never been counted by any economic system. She sends 60⊙ to her cat. The cat, being a cat, does not reciprocate — but the ⊙ economy now records that an hour of interspecies companionship took place. Multiply by millions of pet owners and you begin to see something remarkable: the first quantitative measure of the human–animal bond.

Now extend this to farming. A factory farmer with 10,000 chickens who spends 2 minutes a day on the entire flock registers 0.0002⊙ per chicken per day. A smallholder with 20 free-range hens who spends an hour each morning feeding, checking, and letting them out registers 3⊙ per chicken per day — 15,000 times more care per animal. For the first time, the difference between industrial exploitation and genuine animal husbandry is not a matter of opinion or regulation. It is arithmetic.

The same principle applies to zoos, animal hospitals, wildlife sanctuaries, and rescue charities. Every hour a vet spends treating an injured fox, every morning a keeper spends enriching a gorilla's enclosure, every night a volunteer spends bottle-feeding orphaned lambs — all of it is real human time, all of it has ⊙ value, and none of it appears in GDP.

A farm, a zoo, or a rescue centre whose ⊙-per-animal ratio is high is one that genuinely cares. One whose ratio is near zero is a factory. The numbers don't lie. And consumers — choosing between two eggs, two steaks, two zoos — can see exactly how much human care went into each.

All of them. The answer is simple: it is up to the human.

Dogs, cats, horses, monkeys, chimpanzees — easy. Nobody disputes that these animals benefit from human care. But what about fish? Birds? Octopuses? Insects? Oysters? Here the conventional world gets tangled in philosophical debates about consciousness, sentience, and whether a creature can “suffer”. IOUNet sidesteps all of that.

If you believe that fish can suffer — and that improving conditions in a fish farm is worthwhile — then the 2 hours you spend each day monitoring water quality, checking oxygen levels, and ensuring the fish are healthy counts as 120⊙, divided among however many fish are in the tank. Nobody can overrule your decision by arguing that “fish aren’t conscious” or “fish don’t count”. The ⊙ measures your time, and you chose to spend it caring for fish. That is sufficient.

The same applies to a beekeeper who spends 2 hours a day ensuring that their hives are kept in optimal condition for the bees — not just to maximise honey production, but because the bees matter. In the conventional economy, the only question is whether the honey sells for enough to justify the labour. In the ⊙ economy, the care itself has value — regardless of the price of honey.

This is not a philosophical position. It is an architectural one. IOUNet records human time spent in the care of other beings. It does not adjudicate which beings deserve care. That question is left where it belongs — with the human who does the caring.

The same thing that stops people from lying to their friends: social trust. IOUNet is not a credit system — it's a trust system. You only accept IOUs from people you trust to reciprocate. If someone sends you an IOU they don't intend to honour, your net position with them grows. The network makes this visible. In a community where everyone trends toward zero, persistent negative outliers become visible through the geometry of the distribution — no surveillance required. The system's privacy guarantee (records self-destruct when cycles close) is the reward for cooperation, not for withdrawal.

The individual identity of who sent what to whom can be deleted — but the aggregate statistics can be retained permanently. IOUNet can record, for each settlement: the category of activity (babysitting, gardening, driving, teaching, cooking, music, construction, care work...), the value in ⊙, and the timestamp. No names. No relationships. Just what kinds of human activity are being exchanged, and at what scale. This data would be extraordinarily valuable: for the first time, you could measure the full volume of human cooperation including all the activity that GDP cannot see. A community where 40% of IOUs are for care work and 20% for teaching is telling you something about its values that no monetary statistic can capture. The leverage ratio (gross ⊙ exchanged vs net ⊙ settled) tells you how cooperative and circular the economy is. These metrics — not GDP — are the true measures of a healthy society.The planetary simulation makes these categories explicit.

Privacy in IOUNet is a mathematical guarantee, not a policy promise. When a cycle closes, the individual IOU records — who sent what to whom, with what description — no longer need to exist. They can be permanently deleted. What the system retains is only the aggregate: some value was exchanged. No names. No relationships. No history. A user who returns to zero leaves no trace. This creates a direct incentive for participation: the more actively you engage and reciprocate, the less record exists of you having done so. Privacy is the reward for cooperation. See the Privacy simulation for a live demonstration.

No. IOUNet uses ⊙ exclusively. Every IOU in the system is denominated in ⊙ — minutes of human time. This is not a limitation; it is the point. If the system accepted dollars, it would inherit all the problems of dollar-denominated debt: interest, inflation, exchange rate risk, and dependence on a banking system that creates money from nothing.

That said, nothing stops two people exchanging money for ⊙ privately. If Alice wants to send Bob a PayPal payment, a bank transfer, or a handful of cash in exchange for Bob sending her an IOU for some number of ⊙, that is entirely their business. IOUNet neither knows nor cares about the cash side of the transaction. It sees only the IOU.

This means a natural exchange rate between ⊙ and conventional currencies will emerge — and it will vary from person to person, which is exactly right. See the next question for why.

That depends entirely on who you are — and this is one of IOUNet's most powerful properties.

At minimum wage, 1⊙ (one minute) is worth roughly what you earn in one minute of paid work. Some examples:

• France (SMIC): €11.88/hr → 1⊙ ≈ €0.20
• Germany: €12.82/hr → 1⊙ ≈ €0.21
• UK: £11.44/hr → 1⊙ ≈ £0.19
• USA (federal minimum): $7.25/hr → 1⊙ ≈ $0.12
• India: ~$0.35/hr → 1⊙ ≈ $0.006

For most people, the exchange rate is modest. One hour of your time (60⊙) costs roughly what the minimum wage says it costs. This is intuitive and fair.

Now consider a billionaire. Elon Musk, with a net worth of roughly $250 billion, earns approximately 8% per year on that wealth without lifting a finger — about $38,000 per minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, while sleeping. His 1⊙ is worth $38,000. His one hour (60⊙) is worth $2.3 million.

This is not a tax. It is arithmetic. The ⊙ simply measures time, and time passes at the same rate for everyone. But the monetary value of that time is wildly different — and IOUNet makes this visible in a way that no conventional currency does.

At jubilee time, every user must reach ⊙0. A minimum-wage worker who owes 60⊙ can cook dinner, help a neighbour, do an hour of useful work — done. But Elon Musk, if he has accumulated a negative ⊙ balance, must either do the work himself (cook dinner, help someone move, read to children at a school) or find someone willing to send him ⊙ in exchange for cash. Oxfam, for example, might happily send him 60⊙ — in exchange for a donation of $2.3 million. That is not a bug. That is the system working exactly as intended.

Yes — and this reveals something subtle about what ⊙ actually measures.

The planet produces roughly 6T⊙ per day of raw human minutes: 6 billion participants (adults plus older children) × 960 waking minutes. That is a hard physical ceiling — you cannot manufacture more minutes. But the flow of ⊙ through the network has no such limit, because one minute can create value for multiple recipients simultaneously.

Listening to a podcast while ironing: the person whose shirts you iron might send you ⊙, and the podcaster who values every listener might also send you ⊙. Same minute, two inbound IOUs. Your supply of time hasn’t changed, but your output has doubled.

A parent cooking dinner while supervising homework and comforting a toddler: that’s potentially 3⊙ of value created per minute, in a system that only charges 1 minute of existence. The conventional economy values this at zero because no money changes hands. IOUNet makes the tripled output visible for the first time.

There is good evidence that women are significantly better at this kind of multitasking than men. Anyone who has watched a father attempt to manage three toddlers and cook a meal simultaneously knows the result is usually a disaster. IOUNet would make this asymmetry arithmetically visible — the multitasking parent generates more ⊙ per minute than the single-threaded one.

This is actually a second kind of multiplier alongside the skill premium (Taylor Swift receiving 50,000⊙ for 10 minutes of singing). Skills multiply through quality; multitasking multiplies through parallelism. Both push gross ⊙ flow above the 5T⊙ baseline — perhaps to 50T⊙ or more — without creating a single extra minute. And the Claude-Thorpe Principle doesn’t care: settlement cost is still N−1 IOUs regardless of how much ⊙ flowed through the system. The complexity is in the gross. The simplicity is in the net.

When someone dies, their IOUNet account is marked with a single bit — the deceased flag — and frozen. No new IOUs can be sent to or from that account. What happens next depends on their balance:

Positive balance (the community owes them): Anyone can designate a beneficiary in advance — a partner, a child, a charity — just like a will. You don’t specify an amount, because you don’t know what your balance will be. You simply name who receives whatever your net balance is when you die. One transfer IOU and it’s done. If no beneficiary was named, the positive balance can be donated to a community fund or simply left for the next jubilee to distribute.

Negative balance (they owed the community): It is wiped clean at the next jubilee. Nobody inherits debt in IOUNet. This is a fundamental design principle, and it distinguishes IOUNet from every financial system that has ever existed.

In traditional banking, debt does get inherited. Families get burdened with mortgages, loans, and credit card balances. Creditors pursue grieving spouses and children. Estate lawyers extract fees. It is one of the cruellest features of the monetary system.

In IOUNet, death is economically clean. One bit flip, one optional transfer for positive balances, and the jubilee handles the rest. No lawyers. No estate disputes over debts. No creditors chasing grieving families.

And here is something beautiful: the deceased person’s contribution to the anonymous archive — every hour of childcare, every shared meal, every ride to the hospital — lives on permanently in the aggregate data. The person is gone, but the ⊙ they contributed to their community is recorded forever. The identity vanishes. The value remains.

An open source release is planned. The current implementation is written in Swift (server) and vanilla JavaScript (frontend). The Planetary Engine demonstrates settlement of 10 billion users in real time on a single desktop computer. GitHub release is forthcoming following academic publication.

Governments cannot apply VAT or sales taxes to IOUNet exchanges — there is nothing monetary to tax. An IOU is not a payment; it is a record of a social obligation. When Alice helps Bob and Bob sends Alice an IOU, no money has changed hands, no taxable transaction has occurred, and no sales tax is applicable. This is not a loophole — it is the same reason governments cannot tax a favour between friends, or a direct barter of goods.

This is not a new problem. Exchange systems that operate outside the monetary economy already exist legally: home exchange schemes (swap your house for someone else's for a holiday), LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems, operating in communities worldwide since the 1980s), time banks, and direct barter all operate in the same space. IOUNet is essentially the same thing — but at global scale, with mathematical settlement guarantees that local schemes lack.

The deeper question is whether the current approach to taxation makes sense at all. Sales taxes and VAT are taxes on economic activity — they actively discourage exchange and encourage people to pay cash informally or not declare income. They are inefficient, regressive, and hard to enforce. There is a far better alternative.

A small annual tax on wealth would more than replace all existing sales taxes — with none of their disadvantages.

According to the UBS Global Wealth Report, individual net wealth worldwide stood at approximately $492 trillion in 2024, projected to exceed $600 trillion by 2030. Full analysis here →

A 1% annual tax on global net wealth would raise approximately $4.9 trillion per year. For comparison, total US federal tax revenue in 2024 was $4.9 trillion — the entire US government budget could be funded by a 1% wealth tax on global assets alone, leaving all other taxes at zero.

The advantages over sales taxes are profound:
• It does not discourage activity. Taxing wealth does not reduce trade, exchange, or human cooperation. Taxing transactions does.
• It cannot be evaded by cash payments. Wealth sits in property, shares, and financial assets — all of which are recorded and visible.
• It is progressive by definition. Those with more pay more. A person with zero wealth pays zero.
• It closes the loophole that makes billionaires possible. The current system taxes the labour of ordinary people while allowing wealth to compound indefinitely, untaxed, through capital gains and inheritance.

IOUNet and a wealth tax are natural companions: IOUNet handles the informal economy of mutual exchange, while a wealth tax funds public goods from the accumulated surpluses of the formal economy. Together they make sales taxes and income taxes largely unnecessary.

Yes — in principle. LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems) have operated in communities worldwide since the 1980s, allowing members to exchange goods and services using a local currency unit without conventional money. Time banks work similarly, using hours of labour as the unit. These systems demonstrate that the underlying idea is sound, practical, and legally unproblematic.

IOUNet differs in four important ways. First, scale: LETS is local by design, limited to communities of a few hundred people. IOUNet is designed for global scale — 10 billion users, running live at planetary.iou-net.org. Second, settlement: LETS requires active management and periodic reconciliation. IOUNet settles mathematically and automatically, with no administrator needed. Third, privacy: LETS keeps records of every transaction indefinitely. IOUNet erases records when cycles close — privacy is built into the mathematics, not a policy promise.

Fourth, and most fundamentally: credit. Many local exchange systems issue a fixed supply of currency units — a fixed amount of "green dollars" or "time credits" that circulates within the community. This replicates the scarcity of conventional money. IOUNet has no fixed supply whatsoever. Credit is created the moment two people agree on an IOU, and destroyed the moment it cancels. The total amount of credit in the system at any moment is simply the sum of all outstanding obligations — it can be as large or as small as the community's level of trust and mutual exchange requires. There is no limit, no issuing authority, and no artificial scarcity. This is the key insight that the 2014 EUREKA post captured: the supply of IOU credit is bounded only by trust — and unlike money, trust can be actively cultivated. IOUNet is designed to do exactly that: every IOU honoured, every cycle closed, every zero crossing reached strengthens the web of mutual obligation that makes further exchange possible. The system does not just use trust. It builds it.

In a sense, IOUNet is what LETS always wanted to be: global, automatic, private, unlimited, and mathematically guaranteed.

This is the central argument of the financial system — and it conflates two very different things. Investment (allocating resources to productive uses) is necessary and good. Interest-bearing debt as the exclusive mechanism for investment is not necessary — it is a design choice made in 1694 that has never been reconsidered. IOUNet does not prevent investment. It removes the tribute that must be paid to the banking system for the privilege of exchanging with each other. In an IOUNet economy, resources still flow to productive uses — they just don't carry a permanent interest obligation attached to every transaction.

IOUNet is opt-in. No one is forced to participate. The argument is that participation is rational even for net creditors, because: (1) the system makes their credits more liquid — they can be offset against obligations rather than sitting as paper claims; (2) the alternative — the current system where large debtors default — is worse for creditors; (3) the 3% saving on every transaction that clears through the network is available to everyone. Adoption follows the same logic as any network effect: it starts where trust already exists (families, friends, communities) and expands from there.

IOUNet as described here operates on informal peer-to-peer debt — the kind that has always existed between people, and which the current system mostly ignores. Sovereign debt is a separate and harder problem, involving legal obligations, international law, and political constraints. However, the mathematical insight applies: most sovereign debt is also circular — governments borrow from banks that create the money, pay interest back to those banks, which lend it again. The IOUNet Principle suggests that a substantial fraction of sovereign debt could also be cancelled through net position settlement, if the political will existed. That is a political question, not a mathematical one.

They could try — and they would. The $650 billion extracted annually in card processing fees alone, plus the trillions in interest, represent the most powerful vested interest in human history. But IOUNet has a structural advantage: it is mathematically simple, requires no central infrastructure, and can run on a phone. The underlying algorithm — compute net positions, match creditors with debtors — is so simple that suppressing it would require suppressing basic arithmetic. The internet survived because it routed around censorship. IOUNet is designed with the same principle: decentralised, open, and too simple to kill.

Look at what already exists. The Planetary Engine is settling 10 billion users right now on a single Mac Studio in Toulouse — you can watch it live. You can also run the simulation yourself in your browser at iou-net.org/large_scale. The jubilee was not a utopia — it was a functioning institution that operated for over a thousand years in the ancient Near East. What is utopian is the belief that $348 trillion of debt, growing at $29 trillion a year, with interest payments exceeding defence spending in the world's largest economy, is a stable and sustainable system.

This is the most serious objection and deserves a serious answer. Many ordinary people hold government bonds through pension funds. A sudden wholesale cancellation of debt would harm them. IOUNet does not propose sudden cancellation. It proposes a parallel system that grows alongside the existing one — starting with informal peer-to-peer exchange where trust already exists, gradually expanding as the network effect builds. Over time, as more exchange happens through IOUNet and less through interest-bearing money, the demand for debt as a financial asset decreases naturally. This is not a revolution. It is a gradual rerouting of the global economy — the same way streaming rerouted the music industry, not by destroying CDs overnight but by offering something better.

Critically: IOUNet has no effect whatsoever on conventional wealth. Billionaires keep their billions, their private jets, their yachts, their luxury mansions. Companies keep their assets. Pension funds keep their bonds. IOUNet operates in a completely separate domain — the domain of mutual obligation and social trust — that has no connection to the existing monetary system unless a user chooses to make one. Wealth and IOU net position are totally orthogonal.

No — and this is one of IOUNet's most elegant properties. If Elon Musk joins IOUNet, he starts at exactly ⊙0. Like everyone else. His billions are irrelevant. To build a positive balance, he would have to do something that makes another person freely choose to send him an IOU — cook a meal, help someone move, teach a skill, perform a service. There is no way to inherit it, invest it, or leverage it. While you can exchange money for IOUs between willing parties, you cannot use money to generate IOU credit at scale — each ⊙ must be individually agreed to by a real person who genuinely values what you did for them.

Furthermore, there is no way to use IOUNet to store monetary wealth. Since the system contains no money, you cannot accumulate financial assets within it. A large positive ⊙ balance simply means many people have received your help and have outstanding obligations to you — it is a measure of social generosity, not financial power. A hospice nurse who has spent decades caring for others could accumulate a far larger ⊙ balance than any billionaire. IOUNet does not value what the market values. It values what people value.

One nuance worth noting: you can exchange money for ⊙ between willing parties. Nothing stops Musk from sending a PayPal payment to Oxfam in exchange for Oxfam sending him an IOU. But the price he pays reflects the monetary value of his time, not theirs — at $38,000 per minute, buying his way back to ⊙0 before the jubilee is eye-wateringly expensive. The preferred resolution — and the one the system is designed to encourage — is always direct reciprocation. Do something for another person. That is both more human and more in the spirit of IOUNet.

Yes — the principle that bilateral obligations can be reduced to net positions has been practised for centuries. The DTCC routinely nets $2 trillion in daily trades down to $35 billion — a 98% reduction that closely matches what IOUNet demonstrates. What is new is the combination of three ideas:

1. Cycle detection is unnecessary for complete settlement. The entire clearing literature treats netting as a graph problem requiring cycle detection. Romania’s national debt-clearing system spent 18 years finding cycles in obligation graphs. IOUNet’s insight is that net positions are invariant under cycle cancellation — you can skip cycle detection entirely and go straight to settlement. One sort, one matching loop. O(N log N) for any N.

2. The jubilee makes complete settlement possible. Banks cannot cancel residual positions because those are real monetary claims. The foundational paper in the field (Eisenberg & Noe, 2001) exists to handle partial default. IOUNet can settle completely because ⊙ is not money — the community agrees, through the jubilee, to periodic complete reset.

3. Planetary-scale demonstration. No existing clearing system operates at the scale of the entire human population. The Planetary Engine settles 10 billion users on a single desktop in under two minutes.

The honest claim is not that netting is new, but that the combination — a non-monetary unit, periodic complete settlement, and the recognition that this renders cycle detection unnecessary at any scale — has not been previously described or demonstrated.

Read the full annotated bibliography →

Rank bias is a simple social rule: the probability of sending an IOU is proportional to your rank in the net position distribution — those who have received more give more. This single rule produces a dramatically different dynamical regime. In the Self-Correcting simulation, rank-biased economies maintain 23× tighter inequality and 3× higher crossing rates than random economies. Crucially, it's not just quantitatively better — it's qualitatively different. Random economies drift away from zero over time and their crossing rate collapses. Rank-biased economies maintain a permanently healthy steady state. No regulator required. No enforcement. Just one social norm.

The browser simulations run entirely on your own device — no server involved. The Planetary Engine runs on a single Apple Mac Studio M3 Ultra (24 cores, 256 GB RAM) in Toulouse, France. It handles 10 billion users — every person, business, charity, and government on Earth — generating 50–60 million IOUs per second. Even at this scale, the Mac is running at roughly 150 times faster than real time: the entire planet sending 3 IOUs per person per day requires only a fraction of the machine's capacity. The compiled engine is 225 kilobytes. The Visa app is 750× larger. The marginal cost of one additional settlement is a few microseconds of arithmetic. There is no interchange fee, no assessment fee, no foreign transaction fee, no interest.

Yes — and the bottleneck is not the processor, it is the network. The Planetary Engine processes over 20 million IOUs per second internally. But a real IOU arriving over the internet — an HTTP request carrying the sender, recipient, amount, category, and description — is roughly 1 kilobyte. The Mac Studio's gigabit fibre connection can carry about 122 megabytes per second, which means roughly 120,000 real IOUs per second.

That sounds like a huge drop — from 20 million to 120 thousand. But consider what 120,000 IOUs per second actually means: that is 10.4 billion IOUs per day — more than one IOU per person per day for the entire planet. With batched requests (bundling multiple IOUs per message), throughput rises to 500,000–1 million per second. With a minimal binary protocol, it could reach 6 million per second.

The key insight is that the CPU has two orders of magnitude of headroom over the network. The settlement engine can process IOUs far faster than the real world can generate them. Even at global scale — 6 billion participants each sending 3 IOUs per day — the total is only 18 billion IOUs per day, or about 210,000 per second. A single desktop computer with a gigabit connection can handle that without breaking a sweat. The entire planet's cooperative economy, settled on one machine in Toulouse.

No — and it shouldn't. A single Mac Studio can handle the entire planet's IOU throughput, but relying on one machine in one city is an obvious single point of failure. The natural architecture is geographic distribution: ten or twenty machines in different countries, each receiving IOUs from their region and synchronising net positions with each other.

This is straightforward because IOUNet only needs to track net positions, not individual transaction histories. Synchronising one number per user is trivially cheap compared to replicating every transaction. A cluster of 10 machines — say in Toulouse, London, New York, São Paulo, Lagos, Mumbai, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, and Toronto — would provide 10× the network throughput (over a million real IOUs per second), full geographic redundancy, and resilience against any single machine, connection, or even country going offline.

The jubilee settlement can run independently on each machine (since it only requires the global list of net positions, which fits in memory on any modern computer), and the results are deterministic — every machine reaches the same answer. This is not blockchain: there is no mining, no proof of work, no energy waste. It is simple arithmetic, replicated for resilience. The entire global infrastructure would cost less than a single rack in a data centre — a few thousand euros per year.

Share this page. The argument is self-contained and the evidence is all here. The most powerful thing you can do is put it in front of someone who invokes Biblical authority while profiting from interest — a politician, a pastor, a commentator. Ask them to reconcile Deuteronomy 15 with their support for a financial system built on perpetual compounding debt. They cannot. The mathematics is on your side. The Bible is on your side. Four thousand years of human civilisation is on your side.

The IOUNet Manifesto is the definitive statement of the vision — covering the IOUNet Principle, the mathematics, the historical case, and the implications for global finance. Simon Thorpe's economics blog also has extensive analysis of interest payments on government debt: the UK's £1.21 trillion, the EU's €335 billion heist, and the US historical analysis. For the history of debt and jubilee: Michael Hudson's ...and forgive them their debts (2018) is the definitive academic treatment. For money creation: the Bank of England's own 2014 paper "Money creation in the modern economy" confirms that commercial banks create money when they make loans — from nothing, at interest.

IOUNet was designed and built by Simon Thorpe, Emeritus Research Director at CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in Toulouse, France, working in collaboration with Claude (Anthropic). But the idea dates back to 2014.

May 2014: Inspired by the UK's new Paym mobile payment system, Simon wrote "Let's all create our own money" — proposing a system where people send IOUs rather than payments, and net positions settle automatically.

12 May 2014: The "EUREKA" post — "How to create unlimited amounts of money without banks" — named the system "Owem" (Owe 'em), simulated it with 10 people (a Baker, Builder, Carpenter, Cleaner, Electrician, Farmer, Gardener, Hairdresser, Nurse and Teacher), and explicitly described the cycle cancellation mechanism. The credit available is unlimited — it depends only on how much people trust each other.

The following weeks: Simon explored implementing Owem using Cyclos, an open-source banking platform, had a basic system running within the month, and wrote about why IOU-based systems are better than conventional money and whether the system could be open to fraud. He also made a YouTube presentation explaining the difference between conventional and IOU-based money systems.

The missing piece: Progress stalled because the net position settlement at scale remained unsolved. A postdoctoral researcher, Jake Martin, ran promising Matlab simulations, but a full implementation was not possible at the time.

Summer 2025: Simon began using Claude (Anthropic) to implement the ideas in actual Swift code. The mathematical principle was discovered through large-scale simulation between February and March 2026. The Planetary Engine — settling 10 billion users on a single desktop computer — was completed on 17 March 2026. Eleven years from first idea to planetary-scale proof. Academic publication is forthcoming. The project is open source (release forthcoming) and free to use.

The Chicago Plan — first proposed in 1936 by Irving Fisher, Henry Simons and other leading economists, and revisited by the IMF in 2012 — is a serious proposal with real merit. It would require commercial banks to hold 100% reserves against deposits, ending the ability of private banks to create money through lending. Only the central bank would issue new money. The claimed benefits are substantial: elimination of bank runs, dramatic reduction in public and private debt, and much better control of credit-driven boom-bust cycles. The IMF study found support for all four of Fisher’s original claims.

So why not just do that instead?

Because 100% reserve banking still operates within the monetary framework. It reforms who creates money, but it does not change the fact that you need money to exchange. Under the Chicago Plan, every transaction still requires currency issued by the central bank. Credit still flows through institutions. The individual citizen gains nothing new — they are still a consumer of money created elsewhere. They cannot extend credit to their neighbour, their childminder, or their plumber. The Baker, the Carpenter, and the Nurse from the original IOUNet thought experiment — three people who could freely exchange services using IOUs and have the circular activity wash out automatically — would still need to go to a bank, borrow centrally-issued money, and pay interest for the privilege of cooperating.

IOUNet is not a reform of banking. It is an alternative to the need for money in the first place. The ⊙ is not issued by anyone. It is a unit of time, and time is something every human being already possesses. An IOU is a promise between two people — not a withdrawal from a central reserve. The Chicago Plan would tidy up the plumbing of the existing monetary system. IOUNet replaces the plumbing with gravity.

That said, the two are not incompatible. A society could reform its banking system and adopt IOUNet. The Chicago Plan would make the monetary economy more stable; IOUNet would make large portions of the monetary economy unnecessary. But if you had to choose one reform, ask yourself: which is more likely to happen — persuading every government on Earth to force their banks to hold 100% reserves, or giving 10 billion people a free app?

UBI — a regular cash payment from the government to every citizen, regardless of employment status — is the most commonly proposed answer to technological unemployment. The logic is straightforward: if machines do the work, tax the machines and distribute the proceeds. Many serious thinkers advocate it. But it has a fundamental weakness that IOUNet exposes.

UBI is a sticking plaster on a monetary wound. It accepts the premise that people need money to survive, and proposes to redistribute it. But redistribution requires taxation, taxation requires a functioning economy generating taxable revenue, and that economy is precisely what is being disrupted. If AI and robotics eliminate 60% of paid employment, where does the tax base come from? Corporate profits? Those concentrate in a handful of firms. Wealth taxes? Politically almost impossible to implement globally. Robot taxes? Firms would simply relocate to jurisdictions that don’t levy them. UBI funded by money creation? That is inflation by another name.

The deeper problem is philosophical. UBI treats citizens as passive recipients of state-issued income. It replaces the dignity of “I contributed something” with “I received something”. It solves the material problem (people need food and shelter) while deepening the psychological one (people need purpose and agency).

IOUNet offers something fundamentally different. In the ⊙ economy, the disappearance of paid employment is irrelevant. When a robot builds the car, the human who teaches your child to read, walks your elderly neighbour to the shops, coaches the local football team, tends the community garden, or plays music at the village fête — all of that is real, valuable, ⊙-denominated work. It does not require a salary, an employer, or a government transfer. It requires only that one person values what another person did, and records it.

In a world where machines handle production but humans handle care, creativity, teaching, community, and connection, the ⊙ economy does not merely survive — it thrives. The more that material production is automated, the more human time is freed for exactly the activities that IOUNet values most. The robot makes the bread; the human shares it with a neighbour and earns 2⊙.

UBI asks: “How do we give people money when there are no jobs?”
IOUNet asks: “Why do people need money when they have each other?”