IOU Net

The idea for IOU Net was initially proposed 2014 by Simon Thorpe in a post on his blog called "Let's all create our own money ". It was followed up by a series of other posts, including "Eureka - how to create unlimited amounts of "money" without banks! The "Owem" system....
A few weeks later, Simon had implemented a version of Owem using Cyclos 4, which was acapable of sending and receivingIOUs. It was launched on the now-defunct www.owem.net  site and announced on the blog in a post called "OWEM is now online" in May 2014. 

However, that version did not have the backend code to cancel loops. Simon's postdoc, Jake Martin, had done some Matlab simulations that suggested that 60% of the debt could be cancelled by cancelling loops. But there was no way to link this to the Cyclos 4 code. 

Some attempts were made to get a software company based in Barcelona to take on the integration work, but this was eventually abandoned. 
But starting in the summer of 2015, Simon started working with Anthropic's AI assistant Claude on redeveloping the idea. Intiitily, we had a graphical display that illustrated IOU graphs with up to a few hundred users. But, in parallel, Simon had been using Claude to develop very large scale spiking neural networks, and had succeeded in simulating networks with hundreds of billions of neurons. It seemed that the technologies could be related.

But everything changed on the 9th March 2026 when Simon realised that it was not necessary to search for loops to eliminate debt - you only need to note the current net positions of everyone in the system. To prove that, you can do a 'Jubilee' in which the people with net negative positions do things for people with net positive positions. When the IOUs are sent to recognise the work done, everything cancels out. In this way, communities can do unlimited amounts of cooperative work, with no money, no permanent debt, and no interest.  For a presentation of