One of the first practical questions for any IOUNet community is: what counts as a valid exchange? Unlike conventional money, which is indifferent to what it buys, IOUNet records the type of service exchanged. This creates an extraordinary opportunity: for the first time, we can measure the full volume of human cooperation — including everything that GDP cannot see.
The categories below are a starting point. A community of IOUNet users would collectively decide which categories to recognise, what constitutes a valid IOU within each, and how to handle edge cases. The marketplace is not defined by IOUNet — it is defined by the people who use it.
Every IOU in the system carries a category. This means IOUNet automatically generates what no economic statistic currently captures: the full volume of human cooperation by type. How much care work happens in a community? How much teaching? How much creative work? For the first time, these questions have answers. Not because anyone is surveilling anyone — but because the mathematics of settlement requires the data, and privacy is guaranteed when cycles close.
In the conventional money economy, a minute of labour in Bangladesh is worth a fraction of a minute in Switzerland. Exchange rates, wage differentials, and global arbitrage allow corporations to exploit this gap — paying workers in poor countries ridiculously small amounts in conventional money for the same human effort. In IOUNet, one minute of human time is one ⊙ everywhere on earth. The Bangladeshi seamstress and the Swiss lawyer both give sixty ⊙ per hour. What they choose to do with those ⊙, and what they accept in return, is entirely up to them and their community. IOUNet does not eliminate differences in skill, reputation, or demand — but it does eliminate the structural exploitation that comes from denominating human time in currencies controlled by others.