For the past few hundred years, ever since the establishment of the first central bank, the creation of money has come with a price attached: an interest fee, which must be paid to the issuer. In the end, such money is nothing but debt, and it's ending now in the only way it could: everything, all the real wealth in the world, is being sucked to the top of a pyramid billions of people broad and hundreds of years old. This end was inherent in the way our monetary system works, but it is not inherent in money per se. Our modern monetary system is, when you get right down to it, nothing but a game that we play. On this page, you'll find the rules of a new game. One that just might be more fun to play than the one we're all sitting at the table for now.

Free money is money issued without interest. There is no central issuer; while banks still have a role, it is a very different one, a medium of transaction, rather than an enforcer of obligation. New currency is created with every transaction by participating parties. In place of interest, there is demurrage, a process whereby a periodic fee is levied on the currency, such that any given batch of it will eventually decay to nothing. This might seem strange - why trade money that grows more of itself just by sitting in a bank account? Especially for money that rots in your wallet? - strange indeed, until you consider that this is just what happens to real resources, in the real economy. Just like wheat and bubble-wrap and last year's computer, demurrage makes money decay until, eventually, it becomes worthless. But with every new transaction, more of it is created, and thus the cycle continues.

Free money is born, lives, and dies. Just like you and me and every other creature on this planet down to the humblest e. coli inyour stomach helping digest tonight's pizza. Debt money is immortal, and like most immortals is in its own way vampiric. Free money encourages spending and charity, for it does no one any good to hoard it; debt money, with its strange power of multiplying itself with no other input save time, encourages hoarding and selfish behaviour. Debt money is an inevitable triangle of greed; free money is an endless circle of giving, which grows richer for all when it grows richer for one.