Visa Was Just the Beginning

Dee Hock Built a Trust Network among Banks - And So Can We Among Each Other

In 1970, a little-known banker named Dee Hock helped launch what would become Visa … not just as a credit card, but as a radical experiment in decentralized coordination.

Most people think of Visa as just another corporate payments system. But in fact, Visa is one of the largest commitment pooling systems ever built … and it has a lot to teach us about building community-led economies today.

🏛️ What Is Visa, Really?

The most common form of Visa today is a debt-based credit card.

• You hold a bank account with deposits.

• Based on those deposits, and your repayment history, your bank gives you a credit limit.

• You can then use that line of credit anywhere in the Visa network: thousands of vendors, ATMs, and services across the world.

What’s happening behind the scenes?

Your bank’s promise to settle your debts is being trusted and honored by all the other banks and vendors in the network. This is commitment pooling: your local bank’s obligations become portable credit in a global web of trust.

That’s the power of Visa: a federated system of pooled commitments between banks, governed by shared protocols and coordinated clearing.

Visa as Commitment Pooling

Here’s how Visa worked and still works today:

• Member-owned network: Banks don’t just participate … they govern Visa.

• Shared standards: Everyone agrees on how credit, settlement, and fraud prevention work.

• Decentralized execution: Each bank processes and settles its own transactions, within a shared framework.

• Interoperable trust: One bank’s credit is honored by all others because the system tracks, settles, and balances commitments later.

What banks are doing here is not fundamentally different from what communities have always done—they’ve just digitized and standardized it for one particular resource that we call money.

Visa is a massive commitment pool of banks, coordinated by protocol … not central command.

What If Communities Could Do the Same?

That’s exactly what Commitment Pools are about.

Instead of only pooling USD deposits, communities can pool commitments for…. :

• Food

• Labor

• Tools

• Care

• Skills

• Childcare

• Housing

• Time

Each member issues a voucher … a promise to contribute something of value.
These go into a shared registry (the pool), where they and others can draw from the pool now, and contributors fulfill their commitments later.

It’s the same logic as Visa … but applied to real human needs, not just $ purchases.

Dee Hock’s Vision!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dee Hock didn’t want Visa to become just another company. He envisioned it as a chaordic system .. a blend of chaos and order, inspired by gosh darn living ecosystems!
You have to listen to him talk!

His principles:

• Autonomy at the edges (banks make their own decisions)

• Shared rules at the center (protocols for settling obligations)

• Federated governance (everyone has a voice, no central ownership)

In a sense, Hock was building a trust-based internet of banks.
Now, we can take that idea further … an internet of communities (commons), pooling all kinds of value.

Our Ancestors Did This .. With Many Kinds of Value

Before banks, before money, people used rotating labor associations, care cooperatives, harvest collectives, and mutual aid circles.

They pooled multiple forms of value .. food, time, effort …. not just dollars!
They kept track of who had given, who had received, and what was owed in return.

Visa does this for money.
Commitment Pools do this for everything else.

📊 Side-by-Side: Visa and Commitment Pools

Think of Visa as a global network where banks trust each other’s promises—your credit card works anywhere because the banks have agreed to honor each other's obligations and sort out the debts later. Now flip that model from banks to people. In a Commitment Pool, it’s not money being promised—it's real things: meals, carpentry, childcare, labor, care. Just like Visa pools bank credit, Commitment Pools collect and track these human promises in a shared registry.

Instead of centralized clearing, swaps and redemptions happen directly … someone offers, someone fulfills. Visa is governed by member banks through formal rules; Commitment Pools are governed by communities through shared protocols and relational trust.

Visa enforces with contracts; pools rely on accountability, reputation, and transparency. Both are powerful. One moves dollars. The other moves life itself.

What If We All Built a Network Like Visa?

Imagine:

• You commit 5 hours of tutoring, 2 meals, and 1 day of farming labor.

• These go into a local pool.

• Someone else contributes cooking a meal and uses your tutoring hours.

• You draw tools, or childcare, or emergency help when you need it.

• You settle your promises later .. not only in dollars, but in value you can give.

Now imagine these pools linking .. village to village, group to group, city to city … just like Visa’s banks do.

Each pool stays autonomous, but interoperable.
Each person stays independent, but accountable.

It is the language Dee Hock was trying to teach us all. One that our ancestors knew well.

🌍 From Corporate Credit to Commons Credit

Visa showed us that:

• Credit is not just money.

• Trust can be standardized and shared.

• Decentralized governance works … at scale.

Now it’s time to take that further.

Let’s build networks of trust that reflect the real diversity of value in our lives … not just what’s priced in dollars!!!!!

Let’s pool care, time, labor, and skills with the same rigor and clarity that Visa applies to money.

Let’s honor the wisdom of Dee Hock (and our ancestors!) by building a future of radical trust, mutual credit, and decentralized value.

We can all do it.
Commitment pooling is for everyone.

Let’s go!