A dividend for being, a tax for hoarding

"Money," the economist Bernard Lietaer wrote, "can be defined as an agreement, within a community, to use something as a medium of exchange." Not a law of nature like air or water, but a choice, like a marriage or a lease. If money is an agreement, a community can write a different one. Röbel Münzen are what one small town's different agreement looks like, and the most interesting thing about them is not that they exist onchain. It is the shape of the agreement itself.

Two forces

Röbel Münzen inherit their economics from Circles, and Circles runs on two forces pulling in opposite directions.

The first is a mint. Every verified person issues their own money continuously, about 24 units a day, forever, simply for being a participating human. No work test, no application. A basic income the system prints rather than redistributes.

The second is demurrage: every balance shrinks by about 7% a year, automatically. Money you hold quietly evaporates at the edges. It sounds like a bug. It is the most important feature in the design.

Put them together and something elegant happens.

The balance finds a level

A lifetime of minting against 7% demurrage. The balance climbs fast when it is small, then flattens as demurrage catches up with the mint, and falls away once a person stops minting.

When your balance is small, the daily mint dwarfs the demurrage, so you grow quickly. As you accumulate, the 7% is taken on a bigger and bigger number, until the amount demurrage removes each year exactly equals the amount the mint adds. At that point you stop growing. For Circles' parameters that equilibrium sits around 120,000 units. The arithmetic, roughly 8,760 minted a year divided by 7%, lands nearer 125,000; the curve flattens either way.

The consequence is radical and easy to miss: everyone drifts toward the same balance. Not by decree, not by confiscation, but by arithmetic. A person who hoards does not climb forever; they asymptote to the same ceiling as everyone else, and the moment they stop participating, demurrage walks the balance back down. Wealth here is a flow you keep refreshing, not a stock you can sit on.

The same 7%, read as a tax

Now look at the identical mechanism from the holder's point of view, as a yearly rate on what they hold.

The same 7% demurrage, read as a tax. For a citizen who mints, it is negative below the equilibrium (money flows toward you) and gently positive above it. For anyone who cannot mint, it is a flat 7% holding fee.

Net the constant mint against the proportional demurrage and you get an effective rate that depends entirely on how much you hold. Below the equilibrium it is negative: more money arrives than leaves, so the rate is a dividend, not a tax. This is a basic income with no funding line, no means test, and no office deciding who qualifies. At the equilibrium it is zero. Above it the rate turns gently positive and climbs toward 7%, which is to say it becomes a wealth tax that nobody legislates and nobody can avoid, applied automatically to exactly the people holding the most.

One curve, and it is at once the most generous welfare policy and the most frictionless wealth tax you could describe. That is Köppelmann's insight, and it is worth sitting with: the politics usually fought over for decades are, here, a property of the money itself.

Where Röbel changes the picture

This is where Röbel Münzen stop being ordinary Circles and become something a town can actually run on.

Raw Circles has a hole: the mint is open to any registered human, and nothing stops one person from registering a thousand fake humans and collecting a thousand incomes. The dividend only stays fair if every recipient is a real, distinct person. Röbel already guarantees exactly that, through a soulbound citizen credential that two existing citizens must vouch for.

So Röbel Münzen are built as a Circles group currency: a single fungible town unit, minted by depositing personal Circles as collateral, where the town only accepts collateral from the wallets it trusts. That trust now tracks the citizen credential automatically: becoming a verified citizen triggers an invitation into the currency on its own, with no hand-maintained list. The rule is simple: only verified citizens can create Röbel Münzen. Everyone else, a shop, a visitor, a club, can hold and spend them freely, but never mint them.

Read that back onto the tax curve and the gate becomes the whole story. The citizen credential is what decides which side of the curve you live on:

A verified citizen mints, so they sit on the dividend side: below the equilibrium, money flows toward them.
A business, a company, an AI agent, anyone who cannot mint sits on the flat 7% line. They can hold the currency and use it, but holding it costs them, the same gentle pressure to keep value moving rather than parked.

A basic income for people, a holding fee for capital, and the line between them is literally "are you a verified human in this town." No other community currency we know of draws that line cleanly, because no other one has both halves: the money and the proof of personhood.

Honest lines about the numbers

Precision is the brand, so: the 120,000 and the 7% are Circles' current parameters, not laws, and the curves above are the clean model, not a promise about any one wallet's path. At a town's scale this is small-denomination civic money, not macroeconomics, and "tax" and "dividend" are lenses on a demurrage mechanism, not literal fiscal instruments. Demurrage is genuinely unfamiliar to anyone raised on money that only ever grows, so the burden is on us to make "money that flows" feel like a feature and not a leak. And Röbel Münzen are deliberately not redeemable one-for-one for euros, which is what keeps all of this an experimental community currency rather than a regulated financial product.

Why a town would choose this

Lietaer's point was that our money is a choice we forgot we were making. The euro is optimised, among other things, to be a good store of value: holding it is safe, so capital pools. Röbel Münzen are optimised for the opposite, to be a good medium of exchange: holding them gently costs you, so value circulates, and being a person quietly pays. Neither is right in the abstract. They are different agreements for different purposes.

A town does not need its money to make a few people rich. It needs its money to move, to reach everyone, and to keep reaching the next person. The arithmetic above is what that preference looks like when you write it into the money instead of into a budget. Röbel made the other choice on purpose.