UK taxpayers paid £1.21 trillion in interest between 2000 and 2025. EU taxpayers paid €335 billion in 2024 alone — to the same dozen banks that create the money from nothing at zero cost. Full analysis →
For 4,000 years, every great civilisation — Babylon, Israel, Rome, Islam — recognised that debt compounds faster than income, and that without periodic cancellation, free citizens become serfs. They built in a circuit breaker: the jubilee. Debts were cancelled, land was returned, slaves freed. Every seven years, or every fifty. It was not charity. It was social engineering that kept society stable.
Rome abolished the jubilee in 27 BC. The debt mountain has grown without a ceiling ever since. IOUNet does not propose to cancel $348 trillion — those who hold that debt profit from it and will defend it. Instead, it offers something more radical: a parallel system where debt simply does not accumulate in the first place. When you exchange IOUs rather than money, 100% of obligations cancel automatically. No interest accrues. No bank profits. The $348 trillion carries on — it becomes irrelevant to everyone who has chosen to live outside it.
IOUNet is a peer-to-peer system for recording and cancelling informal debts. Any user sends an IOU to any other user: a value, a description, a timestamp. No bank. No interest. No registration. The unit of account is ⊙ (pronounced “you”) — one minute of human labour. One Big Mac costs roughly 10–15⊙. A hospice nurse’s minute and a CEO’s minute are both one ⊙.
The mathematics does the rest. 100% of all obligations cancel automatically — without anyone paying anything. The mathematics is exact, not approximate. For 4 billion people carrying 35.6 trillion ⊙ of net debt, the settlement required exactly 3,999,999,975 IOUs — one per person. This is the IOUNet Principle: the complexity is in the gross, the simplicity is in the net, and the net is all that matters.
IOUNet does not replace money. It offers a third option alongside cash and cards: free, instant, private by default, and mathematically guaranteed to settle. The Saturday market trader who accepts IOUs alongside cash saves 3% on every transaction. The neighbour who exchanges childcare does what humanity did for millennia — now with a mathematical guarantee that obligations balance over time.
The $348 trillion debt mountain must be serviced with interest. That interest must be paid in money. Money is earned through labour. AI and robots are eliminating labour at scale — not gradually, but exponentially. The arithmetic is brutal: a debt that can only be repaid through human labour cannot survive the elimination of human labour. The system is not merely unjust. It is mathematically doomed.
IOUNet does not need this to be solved. It routes around the problem entirely. In an economy measured in ⊙ — human minutes — no robot can earn, no AI can accumulate credit, no algorithm can hold a balance. A piece of music generated by AI in one second has zero ⊙ value. A neighbour who sits with your dying parent for an hour has sixty. The things that matter most to human beings are precisely the things that machines cannot do — and those are exactly what ⊙ measures.
This project is itself the proof. IOUNet has been developing since 2014 — years of human thinking, questioning, refining. Today, AI amplifies that human work enormously: translations produced in minutes, simulations running at planetary scale, arguments sharpened in real time. But the value is in the human ⊙ invested. Without the years of thought behind it, the AI produces nothing of worth. Human + AI vastly outperforms either alone. AI alone produces zero ⊙.
As AI floods the world with zero-⊙ content — instant music, instant images, instant text — genuine human presence, care, wisdom and creativity become rarer and more precious. The ⊙ economy does not merely survive the AI transition. It is the only economy that makes sense after it. When the robots have taken the jobs, IOUNet is the exit.
| AI-generated symphony | Zero ⊙ — no human minute invested |
| Human composer + AI tools | Full ⊙ value — human judgment, taste, intention |
| Robot-assembled car | Zero ⊙ — no human time |
| Neighbour fixing your roof | Full ⊙ value — irreplaceable human presence |
| AI translation of IOUNet | Zero ⊙ — but multiplies human ⊙ enormously |
| 10 years thinking about IOUNet | Thousands of ⊙ — the source of all its value |
Every jubilee tradition assumed that debt was a temporary misfortune — a farmer borrowing grain until harvest, a family pledging land in hard times. The jubilee would come, the slate would be wiped clean, and the cycle would begin again. That world ended on 27 July 1694, when King William III of England, desperate for money to fight France, granted a Royal Charter to a group of private merchants. 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.
The key insight was captured by William Paterson, the Bank's founder, in words widely attributed to him and cited by historian Carroll Quigley in Tragedy & Hope (1966) — the same book by Bill Clinton's professor at Georgetown, which Clinton named as one of the most important influences on his political thinking: "The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing." Whether or not the exact words appeared in the original 1694 prospectus, the description is accurate in every particular. Within four years, the national debt had grown from £1.2 million to £16 million. It has never stopped growing since.
Today, virtually all money in modern economies is created the same way: as interest-bearing debt, issued by commercial banks when they make loans. When a bank grants you a mortgage, it does not lend you existing money. It creates new money — a number in a database — and charges you interest on it for 25 years. The Bank of England itself confirmed this in a landmark 2014 paper. Every pound, dollar and euro in existence was created as a loan and carries an interest obligation attached to it. The jubilee tradition knew this was unstable. They were right. Global debt hit a record $348 trillion at the end of 2025 — up $30 trillion in a single year, the fastest increase since the pandemic — and it has never been cancelled.
| US interest payments, FY2025 | $970 billion — more than defence + Medicaid. $7,300 per household. 19 cents of every tax dollar collected. |
| EU interest payments, 2024 | €335 billion — paid to the same dozen banks (Goldman, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank) that create the money from nothing at zero capital cost. |
| UK interest, 2000–2025 | £1.21 trillion — the government refuses to say who received it. An estimated £380–400bn left the country entirely to fund foreign pension funds. |
| Global debt total | $348 trillion (IIF, end-2025) — up $30 trillion in a single year. Every unit created as an interest-bearing loan, by a private bank, from nothing. |
| IOUNet cost to settle 4B people | $0. One IOU per person. No interest. No banks. No money. |