It’s such a neat concept that can make certain expensive services like lawyers or therapists more accessible. I could trade a few hours gardening, sewing, cleaning, or baking, for someone else to give me a hand building a larger project. It’s a beautiful way to connect a community through acts of service 🥰
Fundamental issue.
You aren’t paying a lawyer for an hour. You’re paying a lawyer for the time they spent on schooling and practice that it took to reach their current level of skill. They also need to make up for the opportunities (financial and social) that they chose to forgo in order to become a lawyer.
Risk also matters for jobs, logging for example is way more dangerous than programming.
This is why we use currency as a proxy for time, so it can account for all these factors.
This isn’t something to replace normal monetary currency, it’s just another way to organise volunteering for willing participants! It’s like an extension of doing odd jobs for friends to your wider community and a way to meet new people with different skillsets.
For example I do sewing and mending and my partner fells trees, cuts firewood, and helps with building projects for our friends and they help us with tree plantings and garden projects. We have a mate who helps with accounting stuff in exchange for hunting access. It would be what a lot of us already end up doing but on a slightly larger scale with a bit more organisation. It’s definitely not for everyone but I think it would be neat to try.
