Checking in on how to do community payments in the year of 2020. (I can’t believe this is still not yet a big successful thing, but whatever.)
LETS, Time Banks
LETS (local exchange trading system), particularly the open source ones (openLETS, SimpleLETS, WebLETS, LETS Connector), seem to have basically withered and died. (SimpleLETS is under active dev, but it’s alpha.)
Time banks may be a little less obsolete.
Also see: LETS Software, Circular Multilateral Barter, Complementary Currency Software, Timebanking Software Platforms.
RipplePay
RipplePay, now RumplePay, has always been interesting, and Ryan Fugger is still running the RumplePay server, although in his announcement of the name change on 2020-08-26, he writes, “So I’ve changed the name to Rumplepay. I hope that feels familiar enough, and also communicates the benign neglect that the site has seen since, oh, about 2008…”
He also notes that Villages IO is running a Rumple-ish site (although its for a locality).
Separately, this: “idea: Rumple”, which is sort of a mashup of RumplePay and Lightning, looks really interesting, but it’s currently just an idea.
Crypto
Maybe a community altcoin?
After just a short bit of reflection, I think the way to do this is not with an altcoin, but to issue a community-based ERC-20 token. A few initial funders could back the token by buying most or all of the initial minting with fiat.
There are token creation services now:
Or DYI, How to Create an ERC20 Token the Simple Way.
And now there is Uniswap, a decentralized protocol for automated liquidity provision on Ethereum, in case you want to exchange your tokens for something more liquid.
An ERC-20 token might work well, but would still have the huge disadvantage that users would have to use and maintain a compatible wallet.
Also see: ERC20 token generator comparison, State of the DApps — Tokenization.
Conclusion
Pickings are still pretty slim. An ERC-20 token would be a lot of fun, but a hassle for anybody who doesn’t want to wrangle a wallet and all the short- and long-term issues associated with it.