For as long as debt has existed, civilisations have recognised that it compounds faster than income — and that without periodic cancellation, free citizens become serfs. The jubilee, the prohibition on usury, the tally stick: all were attempts to solve the same problem IOUNet solves mathematically.
The concept of periodic debt cancellation is as old as debt itself. The earliest known debt cancellations were decreed by Sumerian and Babylonian kings — the ama-gi (Sumerian for “return to the mother”) and andurārum (Akkadian for “freedom”). These were not acts of charity. They were pragmatic social engineering: when debt became unsustainable, the king wiped the slate clean to prevent social collapse.
The tradition was codified in the Hebrew Bible. Deuteronomy 15:1–2: “At the end of every seven years you shall grant a release of debts.” Leviticus 25:10: “Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you.” The jubilee was not optional. It was law.
Rome abolished the tradition in 27 BC. The debt mountain has grown without a ceiling ever since. IOUNet is the first system since antiquity that makes the jubilee automatic, continuous, and mathematical — no king required.
If the jubilee is the oldest demand for debt cancellation, usury is the oldest named evil that makes it necessary. Every major religion in human history has condemned the charging of interest on loans — not merely excessive interest, but any interest at all. The Biblical Hebrew word for it is neshek, meaning literally "a serpent's bite". The Arabic is riba. The condemnations are not peripheral footnotes. They are central moral teachings, repeated across millennia, by Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Aristotle, Aquinas, Dante, Luther and Calvin.
The logic is simple and has never been refuted: interest is unearned income. Money itself does not labour, does not create, does not risk. The lender extracts a guaranteed return from the borrower's distress regardless of whether the venture succeeds. It transfers risk from those with capital to those without, structurally enriching the already rich and impoverishing the already poor. Every ancient civilisation understood this. The modern financial system is built on forgetting it.
The prohibition collapsed in the West not because anyone disproved the moral argument, but because the Catholic Church invented Purgatory — a place where usurers could purchase absolution — and because the Protestant Reformation fragmented the authority needed to enforce it. The sin was not abolished. It was rebranded as "finance".
| Judaism | Neshek ("serpent's bite") forbidden. Leviticus, Exodus, Ezekiel, Psalms, Deuteronomy — repeated across the entire Torah and prophetic tradition. |
| Christianity | Jesus forbids expecting repayment. Council of Nicaea (325 AD) bans clerical usury. Pope Clement V declares absolute prohibition in 1311. Dante puts usurers in Hell, circle 7. |
| Islam | Riba is one of the gravest sins in the Qur'an. Muhammad cursed every party to an interest transaction. Islamic banking — finance without interest — remains a multi-trillion dollar industry today. |
| Buddhism & Hinduism | Ancient Vedic texts (1400–2000 BC) prohibit usury among the highest castes. The Buddha condemned moneylending as incompatible with right livelihood. |
| Today | $340 trillion of global debt, generating trillions annually in interest. The billionaires who finance Christian Nationalist politics extract this income while every religious tradition they claim to represent names it a sin. Global debt: $348 trillion (IIF, end-2025). |
Around 1100 AD, King Henry I of England introduced the tally stick — a hazel wood rod scored with notches to record a debt. The stick was split lengthwise: the creditor kept the longer half (the “stock” — origin of the word “stockholder”) and the debtor kept the shorter half (the “foil”). On settlement, the two halves were matched and destroyed. Privacy by physical destruction — 800 years before IOUNet.
Tally sticks were peer-to-peer, required no bank, charged no interest, and could not be counterfeited (the wood grain had to match). They circulated as money for over 500 years. The system was so successful that it competed directly with the Bank of England after 1694 — which is precisely why it was eventually banned.
IOUNet is the digital tally stick. The same principle — record, match, destroy — now implemented in mathematics rather than hazel wood.
King William III of England, desperate for money to fight France, granted a Royal Charter to a group of private merchants on 27 July 1694. They would lend the Crown £1.2 million at 8% interest. In return, they received the exclusive right to issue banknotes — to create money. The Bank of England was born.
Within four years, the national debt had grown from £1.2 million to £16 million. It has never stopped growing since. The Bank replaced the interest-free tally stick system with interest-bearing paper debt — transferring the power of money creation from the sovereign to private bankers. Every central bank that followed used the same template.
By 1834, tally sticks had been out of official use for decades, but an enormous stockpile remained in the basement of the Houses of Parliament. Parliament ordered them burned. The workers, eager to be rid of them, stuffed them into the furnaces beneath the House of Lords.
The furnaces overheated. The flues caught fire. Both Houses of Parliament burned to the ground. J.M.W. Turner painted the inferno from across the Thames — “The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons” (1835). Charles Dickens, in a speech to the Administrative Reform Association in 1855, used the fire as a parable of government incompetence.
The debt-free money had to be destroyed to make way for the banking system. The fire that did it accidentally destroyed the seat of government itself. It remains the most expensive bonfire in British history — and the most symbolic.
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Three Gospels record the same words. The message is unambiguous.
The IOUNet version: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a billionaire to reach ⊙0 at the full moon.”
Why? Because 1⊙ = 1 minute of your time. A minimum wage worker: 60⊙ = €12. A billionaire earning 8% on €10 billion = €1,520 per minute: 60⊙ = €91,200. The ⊙ is the first currency where the rich pay more by construction, not by legislation. Oxfam would happily send 60⊙ for €91,200.
| Minimum wage worker | 60⊙ per hour = €12 |
| Average earner | 60⊙ per hour = €25 |
| Billionaire (8% on €10B) | 60⊙ per hour = €91,200 |
| Reaching ⊙0 at the full moon | Easy for most. Mathematically near-impossible for the ultra-wealthy. |