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Ğ1 (June) Libre Currency

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Ğ1 (pronounced “June” in French, where G sounds like juin) is a libre currency launched on 8 March 2017. It is the first cryptocurrency to put the Relative Theory of Money (TRM) into practice: rather than being mined by the few or issued as debt by a central authority, the money is co-created in equal relative shares by every member through a daily Universal Dividend. Ğ1 runs on the Duniter free software and identifies its human members through a decentralised web of trust. Starting from 59 founding members who minted the genesis block, the network has grown to several thousand members (Duniter reports over 6,000 participants), mostly across France and other French-speaking regions.

The Universal Dividend

The defining feature of Ğ1 is that money is created as a Universal Dividend (Dividende Universel, DU), a share of the existing money mass paid to every member at a regular interval. This is the direct implementation of the TRM’s principle of spatial and temporal symmetry: no member, early or late, alive now or born later, is privileged in money creation.

  • Each certified member co-creates the same proportion of the total money supply per period.
  • The DU is revalued every six months so that the money supply grows by roughly 10% per year.
  • That rate is not arbitrary: it is calibrated so that over half an average human life (taken as 40 years for Ğ1, the ev/2 of the theory) each member creates the same share of money as everyone before them.
  • Only individual human members co-create the DU. Companies and associations can hold and exchange Ğ1 but cannot create it, preserving the one-human-one-share symmetry.

The Web of Trust

A Universal Dividend only stays fair if each human receives exactly one share, which requires a way to verify that every member is a unique, real person without a central registrar. Ğ1 solves this with a web of trust (WoT), inspired by the OpenPGP model but used here for monetary identity.

  • To join, an applicant must obtain five certifications from existing members and sit within a bounded certification distance of the rest of the network.
  • Certifications are cryptographic attestations signed with Ed25519 key pairs, the same keys used for transactions.
  • A certification expires after two years, a member can issue at most 100 of them, and must wait several days between issuing two, which slows and bounds growth.
  • These rules make Sybil attacks (one person farming many fake identities to multiply dividends) expensive and detectable.

By drawing the boundary of who co-creates money, the web of trust effectively defines the community itself.

Duniter: Software and Blockchain

Duniter is the free software that runs the Ğ1 blockchain. Unlike Bitcoin, it has no block reward for miners: the only money creation is the Universal Dividend. It uses a proof-of-work consensus with personalised difficulty, which raises the difficulty for members who have recently produced a block so that block creation rotates among many participants rather than concentrating in large mining farms. As a result Duniter is lightweight enough to run on hardware as modest as a Raspberry Pi, avoiding the energy cost associated with conventional blockchains.

A major rewrite, Duniter v2, migrates the network to a new blockchain engine while keeping the economic rules identical: one DUĞ1 per day, revalued every six months, and the same five-certification web-of-trust membership. V2 introduces a dedicated sub-group of “blacksmiths” (forgerons), members of the co-creators’ web of trust who run always-on forging nodes under a security licence to produce blocks, while everyone else can run read-only mirror nodes.

Ecosystem and Community

Users interact with Ğ1 through a range of free-software clients: Cesium and the command-line Silkaj on V1, and Ğecko, Tikka (accounting-oriented), Ğ1nkgo, Duniter-Connect, and Ğcli in the V2 era. Local Ğ1 groups organise markets and exchanges, and some local currency collectives, such as Le Sou in Mayenne, connect their own systems to Ğ1. The project explicitly aims to reach the millions of users needed for a libre money to carry meaningful value.

A Monetary Commons

Studies of Ğ1 frame it as a case of commoning: what is held in common is not the currency units themselves but the monetary protocol. The web of trust draws the community boundary, the Universal Dividend distributes the right to create money equally, and the open-source rules are governed and modified collectively. In this reading Ğ1 is a working experiment in governing a monetary commons without a central bank or a state.

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