Thanks for this excellent post about faircoin.

I’ve recently discovered this fair cryptocurrency and I’m very excited about the revolution it could be.

I would be pleased to translate it in french so that I can share it in my circles. Who can I send my translation to so that it can be linked on this original english post ?

many thanks

The comments and discussion opened by Sepp Hasslberger, and some answers can be get here: https://fair.coop/groups/faircoop-community/ask-us-anything/forum/topic/equitable-distribution-of-fair-coins-what-is-the-plan-to-achieve-this/
(also some relation with part of the previos Graham Barnes comments)

The multisignature members will become transparent when the ecosystemic council gets created.

and related the Matthew previso comment, our goal is to have a big part of the market walking in a cooperative way. This is a goal and also one challenge 🙂

So from what I see this seems to be an alt coin which is a variation on the Bitcoin code, where issue of remaining future coins to be created, is done as a reward for either mining or minting. The reward is said to be mainly based on minting, which is the concept that your saved faircoins have value as they make the process of finding a block easier.

I haven’t seen anything on how the distribution of the first 50 million coins went, if there are any left or if they were all given away.

I haven’t seen anything either on whether there is a ceiling of coins to be created, and how the amount of coins to be created is regulated…

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I see that faircoin is a crypto currency intended as a “store of value” while faircredit is to be the exchange currency (internal) for cooperatives.

I do’t believe faircredits have been launched yet.

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I am still trying to understand the relationship between faircoins (the crypto currency said to be a savings vehicle) and faircredit (the exchange type currency).

Apparently faircredit isn’t credit at all as we understand it, but frozen fair coins… which have to be either mined or bought from who holds large amounts.

According to fair.coop: “Some of the activists pushing this project bought large quantities of faircoin at a very reduced price with the intention of redistributing it to projects that fall under the fairfunds (link) and revalue it by generating real value, in a cooperative way through fair.coop.”

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The distribution pattern of existing faircoins, 50 million of them, which have been mined all in one go and were then either “given away” or “sold”, depending where you read, is not very clear.

From fair.coop: “FairCoin is a currency created with the purpose of promoting equality and economic justice. 50,000,000 Faircoins were created in March 2014 and on March 6 – 8 they were distributed through a massive give-away called airdrop at a rate of 1000FAC/hour to anyone who asked for it.”

Probably most of the coins went to those who were, at the time of the issue, “in the know”. Since buying faircoin involves having a bitcoin wallet with bitcoin in it, the majority of those give-away coins must have ended up in the possession of people in the bitcoin space, not so much people in the co-op space.

This is acknowledged on the fair.coop site:

“So FairCoin became the first currency which needed no initial mining but was distributed equitably to promote equality over financial possibilities. Still, obviously an airdrop on an Internet forum has a very limited scope and therefore the initial distribution isn’t quite efficient in its equity purpose.”

A bit of an understatement, I would say.

It would be interesting to see some statistics of who owns how many of those fair coins.

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The distribution pattern of 50.000.000 existing fair coins is somewhat murky, probably largely limited to those who happened to be on the Bitcoin forum when the Faircoin airdrop was announced.

But not enough, the rest of the coins that are to be created at an initial rate of 6% per year destined to decrease to 1 and a half per cent per year, are surely going to majorly go to the same people. Since the reward mechanism for mining (called minting in this case) privileges those who have “saved” faircoin, practically all of the issue of fair coins is going to go to a few Bitcoin insiders, either through the initial distribution or through minting.

I think equitable distribution of the financial instrument, although professed loudly on the site and in announcements, is not borne out by the facts of how things work…

I also tried to understand the difference between and faircoin and faircredit; this latter one is intended to become the “internal means of exchange” of the participating co-operatives, while the former (faircoin) is described as a means of finance, capital accumulation and exchange with other currencies out there.

It seems to me that most of the initial issue of faircoins (minus 20% which was given to Fair.coop as a capital endowment) is in the hands of a few Bitcoin aficionados, those who were frequenting the Bitcoin forum when Faircoin was announced. So 80% of the capital, which is destined to grow in value thanks to the work of participating co-operatives, is essentially in the hands of the promoters of the currency.

Not only that, most of the current and future issue of faircoins is going to end up in those same hands, because of the fact that coins are minted, meaning that who has saved coins is going to win the mining race hands down.

So I would like to know how exactly this currency can be said to be “equitably distributed”.

I’m not sure which ‘system’ Faircoin is outside control of. It seems that, as with Bitcoin et al., the markets will decide the price.

Thanks for the comments Graham, I think you would be doing fair.coop a service if you could briefly reiterate them in the ‘ask us anything’ group on there:
https://fair.coop/groups/faircoop-community/ask-us-anything/forum/

i) the addresses of the four funds are presumably multi-sig controlled. Who are the signatories and is that information transparent.
ii) the remaining (as yet unallocated) 80% coins – again multi-sign and signatories?
iii) what process envisaged for evaluating ‘calls’ on fund usage, and transparency of process?
iv) what facilitating measures/ encouragements for acceptance of currency outside the core ‘enthusiasts
/ activists’ group?

Its an interesting architectural approach to currency design, but important decisions will be made by trusted members. A positive trusting view would see the project as a carefully designed channel for accumulating and organising activist resource; a negative view would see it as an attempt to leverage up the fiat exchange price of a new currency via the invested goodwill of committed but naive activists prior to pre-crash insider cash-in.

It increasingly seems to me that the governance *is* the currency, so these issues are central I think.

Graham Barnes
http://www.feasta.org/author/graham-barnes/

PS Cautious with market caps. They are a number based on the assumption that if everyone sells they all get today’s value – i.e. a fictional construct for corporate egoists.