ScripNYC: Sustainable Financing for Humanitarian Emergencies

Abstract

Reclaiming value from some forms of waste through scrip issuance can reduce New York City’s budget demands by billions of dollars. User adoption and system efficiency are significantly enhanced by leveraging the existing OMNY or Metrocard systems. Limiting range of function distinguishes scrip from national money, while a pre-programmed rate of decay disincentivizes hoarding and non-productive use. Incentivizing dual-currency transactions, in which buyers and sellers use both scrip and legal tender within a single transaction, would likely result in limited deflation — lower dollar-denominated prices for goods and services — in the scrip-use region, without corresponding decreases in consumption. Fees collected from decaying scrip can sustain the ongoing maintenance of the system and, with broad usage, may even finance a commensurate expansion of humanitarian spending.

Keywords: scrip, humanitarian, dual-currency, blockchain, New York, deflation, migrant