Community Based Banking (2) Multiple Recorders

In some communities, several people will operate this transaction recording service. The next step in the development of community banking would be the cancelling out of countervailing debts and credits between different recorders. If a person had a credit with one record-keeper, that person could get them to another pass the credit to another record-keeper to assign to another person that has supplied the first person with for goods or services.

The record-keeper would be happy to pass a positive balance to another recorder, because it does not belong to them, but to the person they recorded it for. They would not mind if the person who was previously positive went negative in the records, because it is not a debt owed to the record-keeper, but to the rest of the community. The debt would only fall to the record-keeper, if the person owing it cheated by keeping on taking, but refusing to give anything to anyone else. This would be a risky course to take, because once the record-keeper alerted the rest of the community to what is going on, that cheat would either be ostracised or intimidated into settling their debt.

A wise record-keeper would stop recording their own debts and credits and get another trusted recorder to do it. That would reduce the temptation to cheat and add extra transparency to their operation.

Once several people have entered the record-keeping business, the negative and positive balances recorded by particular record keepers would no longer balance. One might have negative exceeding positives. Another might have positives exceeding negatives. However, the negatives and balances would balance out across the entire community. For everyone in the community who is owed something, there would be another person in the community who owned the same amount. If all the records were put together, the balances should net to zero.