Amazing stuff which perfectly coincides with so much of what we have been talking about here. Apply this to shared value communities:

Ripple is an open-source software project for developing and implementing a protocol for an open decentralized payment network. In its extreme form, the Ripple network could be a peer-to-peer distributed social network service with a monetary honor system based on trust that already exists between people in real-world social networks; this form is financial capital backed completely by social capital. On the other hand, it could be an extension of the existing hierarchical banking system, providing alternate payment routes that do not pass through a central bank.

And:

The core idea of Ripple is that it should be possible to route payments through an open, arbitrary trust network, similar to how the internet routes packets of data through an open, arbitrary computer network. The advantages of such a system would be that it wouldn’t be reliant on a small decision-making body at the center to set monetary policy for the entire nation; instead, it would be set in a more democratic fashion by all participants, and in theory be more responsive to regional and community needs. There would be no need to for a tightly-regulated institutional trust hierarchy to control the behaviour of those participants near the center: like the internet, but unlike the existing global monetary system, the Ripple network would be designed to weather the collapse of a large number of its nodes.

Note that the Ripple protocol itself wouldn’t preclude a hierarchical payment structure evolving, it just allows for the possibility of other structures.