The nightmare for the U.S. financial industry is that a technology company—whether from China or a homegrown juggernaut such as Amazon.com Inc. or Facebook Inc.—replicates the success of Alipay and WeChat in America. The stakes are enormous, potentially carving away billions of dollars in annual revenue from major banks and other firms.

That threat may now be materializing. On June 18, Facebook unveiled a white paper outlining ambitious plans to create a new global cryptocurrency called Libra, to be launched in 2020. Facebook reportedly has high hopes that Libra will become the foundation for a new financial system free of control by Wall Street power brokers and central banks.

But apparently Libra will not be competing with Visa or Mastercard. In fact, the Libra Association lists those two giants among its 28 soon-to-be founding members. Others include Paypal, Stripe, Uber, Lyft and eBay. Facebook has reportedly courted dozens of financial institutions and other tech companies to join the Libra Association, an independent foundation that will contribute capital and help govern the digital currency. Entry barriers are high, with each founding member paying a minimum of $10 million to join. This gives them one vote  (or 1% of the total vote, whichever is larger)  in the Libra Association council. Members are also entitled to a share proportionate to their investment of the dividends earned from interest on the Libra reserve—the money that users will pay to acquire the Libra currency.

Needless to say, all of this has raised some eyebrows, among both financial analysts and crypto-activists. A Zero Hedge commentator calls Libra “Facebook’s Crypto Trojan Rabbit.” An article in The Financial Times’ Alphaville calls it “Blockchain, but Without the Blocks or Chain.” Economist Nouriel Roubini concurs, tweeting:

Another Zero Hedge writer calls Libra “The Dollar’s Killer App,” which threatens “not only the power of central banks but also the government’s money monopoly itself.”

From Frying Pan to Fire?

To the crypto-anarchist community, usurping the power of central banks and governments may sound like a good thing. But handing global power to the corporate-controlled Libra Association could be a greater nightmare. So argues Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who writes in The Financial Times:

This currency would insert a powerful new corporate layer of monetary control between central banks and individuals. Inevitably, these companies will put their private interests — profits and influence — ahead of public ones. …

The Libra Association’s goals specifically say that [they] will encourage “decentralised forms of governance.” In other words, Libra will disrupt and weaken nation states by enabling people to move out of unstable local currencies and into a currency denominated in dollars and euros and managed by corporations. …

What Libra backers are calling ‘decentralisation’ is in truth a shift of power from developing world central banks toward multinational corporations and the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank.

Power will shift to the Fed and ECB because the dollar and the euro will squeeze out weaker currencies in developing countries. As seen recently in Greece, the result will be to cause their governments to lose control of their currencies and their economies.

Pros and Cons

Caitlin Long, co-founder of the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition, recently agreed that Libra was a Trojan horse but predicted it would have some beneficial effects. For one, she thought it would impose discipline on the U.S. banking system by leading to populist calls to repeal its corporate subsidies. The Fed is now paying its member banks 2.35% in risk-free interest on their excess reserves, which this year is projected to total $36 billion of corporate welfare to U.S. banks—about half the sum spent on the U.S. food stamp program. If Facebook parks its entire U.S. dollar balance at the Federal Reserve through one of its bank partners, it could earn the same rate. But Long predicted that Facebook would have to pay interest to Libra users to avoid a chorus of critics, who would loudly publicize how much money Facebook and its partners were pocketing from the interest on the money users traded for their Libra currency.

But that was before the Libra white paper came out. It reveals the profits will indeed be divvied among Facebook’s Libra partners rather than shared with users. At one time, we earned interest on our deposits in government-insured banks. With Libra, we will get no interest on our money, which will be entrusted to uninsured crypto exchanges, which are coming under increasing regulatory pressure due to lack of transparency and operational irregularities.

United Kingdom economics professor Alistair Milne points to another problem with the Libra cryptocurrency: Unlike Bitcoin, it will be a “stablecoin,” whose value will be tied to a basket of fiat currencies and short-term government securities. That means it will need the backing of real money to maintain its fixed price. If reserves do not cover withdrawals, who will be responsible for compensating Libra holders? Ideally, Milne writes, reserves would be held with the central bank; but central banks will be reluctant to support a private currency.

Long also predicts that Facebook’s cryptocurrency will be a huge honeypot of data for government officials, since every transaction will be traceable. But other reviewers see this as Libra’s most fatal flaw. Facebook has been called Big Brother, the ultimate government surveillance tool. Conspiracy theorists link it to the CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense. Facebook has already demonstrated that it is an untrustworthy manager of personal data. How then can we trust it with our money?

Why Use a Cryptocurrency at All?

Why has Facebook chosen to use a cryptocurrency rather than following WeChat and AliPay in doing a global payments network in the traditional way? Yan Meng, vice president of the Chinese Software Developer Network, says Facebook’s fragmented user base across the world leaves it with no better choice than to borrow ideas from blockchain and cryptocurrency.

“Facebook just can’t do a global payments network via traditional methods, which require applying for a license and preparing foreign exchange reserves with local banking, one market after another,” Meng said. “The advantage of WeChat and AliPay is they have already gained a significant number of users from just one giant economy that accounts for 20 percent of the world’s population.” They have no need to establish their own digital currencies, which they still regard as too risky.

Meng suspects that Facebook’s long-term ambition is to become a stateless central bank that uses Libra as a base currency. He writes, “With sufficient incentives, nodes of Facebook’s Libra network would represent Facebook to push for utility in various countries for its 2.7 billion users in business, investment, trade and financial services,” which “would help complete a full digital economy empire.”

The question is whether regulators will allow that sort of competition with the central banking system. Immediately after Facebook released its Libra cryptocurrency plan, financial regulators in Europe voiced concerns over the potential danger of Facebook running a “shadow bank.” Maxine Waters, who heads the Financial Services Committee for the U.S. House of Representatives, asked Facebook to halt its development of Libra until hearings could be held. She said:

This is like starting a bank without having to go through any steps to do it. …  We can’t allow Facebook to go to Switzerland and begin to compete with the dollar without having any regulatory regime that’s dealing with them.

A Stateless Private Central Bank or a Publicly Accountable One?

Facebook may be competing with more than the dollar. Jennifer Grygiel, assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University, writes:

[It] seems that the company is not seeking to compete with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Rather, Facebook is looking to replace the existing global financial system with an all-new setup, with Libra at its center.

At least at the moment, the Libra is being designed as a form of electronic money linked to many national currencies.That has raised fears that Libra might someday be recognized as a sovereign currency, with Facebook acting as a “shadow bank” that could compete with the central banks of countries around the world.

Long thinks Bitcoin, rather than Libra, will come out the winner in all this; but Bitcoin’s blockchain model is too slow, expensive and energy intensive to replace fiat currency as a medium of exchange on a national scale. As Josh Constine writes on TechCrunch:

[E]xisting cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum weren’t properly engineered to scale to be a medium of exchange. Their unanchored price was susceptible to huge and unpredictable swings, making it tough for merchants to accept as payment. And cryptocurrencies miss out on much of their potential beyond speculation unless there are enough places that will take them instead of dollars. … But with Facebook’s relationship with 7 million advertisers and 90 million small businesses plus its user experience prowess, it was well-poised to tackle this juggernaut of a problem.

For Libra to scale as a national medium of exchange, its governance had to be centralized rather than “distributed.” But Libra’s governing body is not the sort of global controller we want. Jennifer Grygiel writes:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg . . . is declaring that he wants Facebook to become a virtual nation, populated by users, powered by a self-contained economy, and headed by a CEO–Zuckerberg himself– who is not even accountable to his shareholders. . . .

In many ways the company that Mark Zuckerberg is building is beginning to look more like a Roman Empire, now with its own central bank and currency, than a corporation. The only problem is that this new nation-like platform is a controlled company and is run more like a dictatorship than a sovereign country with democratically elected leaders.

A currency intended for trade on a national—let alone international—scale needs to be not only centralized but democratized, responding to the will of the people and their elected leaders. Rather than bypassing the existing central banking structure as Facebook plans to do, several groups of economists are proposing a more egalitarian solution: nationalizing and democratizing the central bank by opening its deposit window to everyone. As explored in my latest book, “Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age,” these proposals could allow us all to get 2.35% on our deposits, while eliminating bank runs and banking crises, since the central bank cannot run out of funds. Profits from the public medium of exchange need to return to the public rather than enriching an unaccountable, corporate-controlled Facebook Trojan horse.

Reposted from Truthdig. Header image: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Mike Deeroski / Flickr)(CC BY 2.0)

The post Facebook May Pose a Greater Danger Than Wall Street appeared first on P2P Foundation.

When: Thursday, 27 June – Friday, 28 June
9:00 am – 8:00 pm

Where: University of London, Malet Street, London

In previous years, we’ve promoted platform co-ops in a traditional conference format. This year we’re doing things differently and will be exploring opportunities to increase decentralised collaboration in a completely open space format. We’re proud to be working on collaboration with Phoebe Tickell and Nati Lombardo from Enspiral, to convene and facilitate the event.

Who is OPEN 2019 for?

OPEN 2019 is an inter-network event for community builders, network organisers and key connecting members of organisations from a wide range of progressive communities. We welcome all cooperators, rebels, mavens, network builders, systems architects, open source developers, and anyone else who is interested in designing and building our collective future. The idea is to network the networks by creating deeper connections and relationships between some of the key connectors from a wide range of mutually aligned communities.

What will we be doing?

To kick off each day attendees will be introduced to a handful of new, distributed, cooperative, technical and social projects, through a selection of lightning talks. After that attendees will be guided to co-design the event by proposing, refining and voting on the content for the rest of the two days’ sessions. Experienced facilitators from the Enspiral network will help us create a ‘container’ for our time together. Working in small groups we will discuss, debate and feedback ideas to the wider group, to ensure everyone has a chance to have their say and that the collective wisdom of the group is captured and shared.

With an informal evening dinner and drinks and more networking opportunities, there will be plenty of time for building deeper understanding and relationships too.

What will you get out of it?

Recognising that effective collaboration, at any scale, can be hard to define and even harder to achieve OPEN 2019 does not aim to build immediate collaboration between attendees. Having studied the key ingredients of collaboration we know that the first step towards effective collaboration is building deeper connections and trusted relationships, and that is what OPEN 2019 aims to deliver.

By introducing more connectors to each other, getting to know one another, and working together over two days we aim to strengthen our relationships, deepen our understanding and to cross-pollinate and fertilise the pre-existing projects and evolving ideas within our networks.

We will explore opportunities to coordinate our existing organisations better, to keep each other better informed about what we are working on and to potentially cooperate if we can find opportunities to do so. Ultimately, as a result of the networking, we aim to pave the way for any collaborative opportunities which might arise as things evolve…

When and where is it?

The OPEN 2019 Community Gathering will take place on the 27th and 28th of June at the University of London in Holborn, London.

What should I do if I want to come?

Spaces are limited to 150 attendees in order to keep the group small enough to be effective so, if are interested in being involved, please order your tickets below asap. If this event becomes over-subscribed we will explore the possibility of running additional events. If you have a project you would like to present at a lightning talk we’d love to hear from you (please email a short description of your project) but please note – all attendees, including presenters, will be required to buy a ticket.

Please join us to discuss, explore, connect and decide how we can deliver systemic change, together.

For more information and tickets click here!

The post OPEN 2019 Community Gathering – Decentralised Collaboration appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A cooperative cloud would also provide a clear stepping stone towards the open source, collaborative working environment we have described as PLANET and could help form the basis of an entire open source suite of apps for the cooperative economy.

This Internet of Ownership ‘Clouds directory‘ explores and documents efforts to form free, open source alternatives to corporate cloud infrastructures, especially through cooperative business models and is a very useful resource for anyone thinking about building something similar.

As ever, at The Open Co-op we are keen to encourage as much cooperation and collaboration in this area as possible because it seems crazy for new initiatives to re-invent the wheel and greater gains, and network effects, will be easier to achieve if more effort is focused on one larger collaborative effort than many disparate initiatives.

The post below is the latest update from the CommonsCloud project from the Free Knowledge Institute which helpfully details a lot of their technical decisions and subsequent setup.

Members of the CommonsCloud project will be speaking at OPEN 2018 in London in July – come along and say “Hi” if you are interested in collaborating on a common solution.

Photo by neXtplanaut

The post The Making of the Cooperative Cloud appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Great Lakes Commons is inviting people to give a Currency of Care note as a thank-you to people who have done something to protect the Great Lakes in big or small ways.  Or you can give notes to people as a request that they do something to protect the lakes in the future.  Paul Baines, an organizer of the project, notes:

“Each note represents the act of giving gratitude or requesting action. Each note carries the most precious value: acts of thanks and care for the Great Lakes. Rather than based on dollars, the value of these notes is our collective agreement and intention to reward people for their water protection through past actions (saying ‘thanks’) or future actions (saying ‘please’).  Because our current money systems only acknowledge economic utility and gain, our Great Lakes Commons currency needs a wildly different theory of value — such as past/future actions for water care.”

More than 5,000 individually numbered bills have been distributed, all of them due to expire at end of year.  Why the expiration date?  Because “this currency is for sharing not saving,” the currency webpage explains.  “The value of this currency comes through its use — its current.  The rules of today’s dollar system rationalize hoarding and controlling money to make more money.  The needs of healthy people and living water are denied not because there isn’t enough money in the world, but because it makes ‘sense’ to accumulate/hoard more and to spend it otherwise.”

The issuers of the Currency of Care make the point that “money is not just a medium of exchange, but a disciplinary force on what we value, the story of a meaningful life, and our position within this story.”  The point of the currency project is to promote a new vision of money and value:

“We need a new story for money and a new currency can help us tell it.  Right now our money commodifies time, ideas, muscle, relationships, and all of creation in order to create more money.  But what if the value of money was based on caring for water?….

“There is no money to be made protecting water as the source of life.  Financing Great Lakes care today comes through either altruistic charity or legislated compensation.  Water restoration costs are a fractional expense for a pollution-based economic system.  Advocating for a friendlier version of the current system denies its core impulses and interests.  Let’s be honest — degrading the living earth makes obscene amounts of money and defines our current story about ‘progress.’”

Inaugurating an actual, tradeable currency that asserts its own type of value and creates new circuits of value is, of course, a very complicated enterprise.  Just ask the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, which has successfully developed the BerkShares currency in western Massachusetts.

The Currency of Care should not be mistaken for such a project.  It is more of a performance art project and public-education campaign that asks us to think about reconnecting money’s value with our values.  It asks us base the value of currency on things that really matter, such as the integrity of the Great Lakes as an ecosystem.

To promote new stories of value, the project invites people who receive or give the notes to share their stories on the Great Lakes Commons online map. People are asked to share:  “What was it like getting and sharing the notes? What kinds of conversations did it spark?  What types of past/future actions did people reward?  Where did their note go or where did it come from?”

One supporter of the Great Lakes Charter Declaration, Steve Edgier, gave his notes to activists who are protecting the Great Lakes from stormwater runoff and monitoring for sewage discharges.  Another person gave a Currency of Care to the Marquette Poets Circle for their work in “tending poetry and community along the wild shore of Lake Superior.”

Since its inception several years ago, Great Lakes Commons has done great work in helping people to express and imagine relationships of care to those much-abused bodies of water. Here’s hoping that the Currency of Care widens the circle of engagement.

The post Great Lakes Commons Issues “Currency of Care” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A year later, the Kumpula exchange rink, renamed the Helsinki Timebank, began to attract more citizens who wanted to participate in this satisfying alternative economy known as timebanking. The main principle of timebanking is that everyone’s time, work and needs are of equal worth. One hour of babysitting is equal to one hour of helping an elderly neighbor or providing accounting services. It is fair to say that this essential principle of timebanking stands in stark contrast to the premises of the current money system and capitalist markets, which value everyone’s time and effort in highly unequal ways. Timebanking provides an alternative by helping people meet important personal and household needs in more socially satisfying, equal ways.

By 2014 some 3,000 members had registered with the Helsinki Timebank, and more than one-third had participated in at least one exchange. To date, some 19,000 total hours have been exchanged through the Helsinki Timebank, which includes internal work to maintain and develop the timebank. Worldwide there are thousands of timebanks that enable individuals and diverse types of organizations to exchange services, and sometimes goods, according to timebanking’s principles. The Timebank is a part of the Community Exchange System (www.ces.org.za), which lets people exchange goods and services without money or markets. (The network hosts timebanks and local currencies, facilitating “intertrading” among them.)

Timebanks are often seen as irrelevant to the “real economy” because they are not dealing with “economic issues” or markets. They tend to be described as self-help tools, as solvers of certain social problems, as charities, and as a new form of volunteering. They are seen as platforms for people to develop skills and exchange nonprofessional services while strengthening their sense of community connection. Yet in meeting real needs without money while building what economists call “social capital,” timebanks deserve to be taken every bit as seriously as markets.

Developing Currency into a Commons

Since its founding, Helsinki Timebank has striven to be a platform of deliberation. It is managed by a core group, open to all members, which discusses how to develop the timebank and meet ongoing challenges. All larger and substantial decisions are made in consultation with all Timebank members, or by voting. For instance, the decision to convert the local exchange rink into Helsinki Timebank in 2010 and to name its local currency “Tovi” (Finnish for “a moment”) was made through a membership vote.

When a large cosmetic firm with its own exchange rink wanted to join Helsinki Timebank, it provoked spirited discussion about what kinds of services and relations should be supported and how to define the Timebank’s boundaries. Inspired by the example of the Solidarity Economy movement, members in May 2013 drafted the Helsinki Timebank’s ABC, a statement of its values and working principles. The ABC defines the Timebank as a platform for “reciprocity, We-spirit, ecological sustainability, economic justice, and local and participatory culture,” among other principles that guide participants in deciding what types of organizations may join Helsinki Timebank.

When a local food cooperative wanted to join Helsinki Timebank, it was a perfect fit – and an ingenious way to blend the local market with the credit currency. The cooperative makes locally produced food available to people with time-credits – and in return it gains access to the community and resources for which time-credits can be exchanged.

Another example of commoning can be found in the “Time Heals Network,” which grew out of Helsinki Timebank.¹  This peer-to-peer network offers emotional support to people when their lives take a turn for the worse; the services are credited to the providers in time-credits. Peer supporters themselves may have acquired their expertise through formal education, employment or life experiences. The system is based on reciprocity – sometimes one helps someone else, sometimes one receives help. The network also uses the timebank to help people meet concrete needs like housekeeping and childcare.

The time currency in itself, the Tovi, is not a commodity, but a token in a “credit commons” that allows people to exchange services, earning and spending credits. The process of defining the principles and rules of the credit currency is itself a process of commoning, a term used by historian Peter Linebaugh in discussing medieval English commons. In this sense, Helsinki Timebank’s time credits function as a pedagogical tool that helps people learn about cooperation and organization. Strangers are able to meet each other and develop new ways of relating to each other. Thanks to a timebank, the valuable human skills that people have – even among people outside of the labor market, such as the elderly and disabled – can be made visible and put to good use. Timebanks help people reproduce ordinary life without the mediation of markets. A timebank as such is a platform for commoning.²

One major act of commoning at Helsinki Timebank was the development of an internal taxation mechanism. When the provider of a service receives time-credits, a percentage of the time-credits earned are automatically transferred to the account of an ethical economic actor of choice in the Helsinki Timebank; this could be a food cooperative, another local CSA, or the Time Heals Network, for example. The time-tax function lets Timebank members strengthen actors and organizations that exemplify the values listed in the ABC. It also supports work that is important to timebank members, and strengthens and develops the community. In a larger context the time-tax and time-credit can be seen as ways that Helsinki Timebank supports solidarity economy-building and the commons in Finland.

Facing the Challenge of State Policy

At the end of 2013, Finland tax authorities came out with new taxation guidelines that required taxing skilled work services received through timebanks according to their market value (in euros). Helsinki Timebank contested this decision, arguing that it destroys the essential principle of equality at the heart of timebanking. It called for an exemption from euro taxation so that the actual potential of timebanking in Finland – including also the benefits of the (internal) time-tax – could be assessed. The dialogue was opened between Helsinki Timebank and the City of Helsinki in 2014 and is still continuing.

The struggle that Helsinki Timebank now faces is to maintain its autonomy as a deliberative commons guided by strong ethical values while securing formal legal recognition and respect in Finnish society. One initiative seeks to find ways for the City of Helsinki to recognize the Timebank’s internal time-tax and incorporate it into the local economy. If successful, the time-tax could be used to support many different forms of coproduction (between timebankers and the city). It could also be used to start up all kinds of autonomous creative projects as commons, creating services or goods that are deemed important by both the city and timebank members. Importantly, this could open up new forms of power transfer and sharing within the city – a commonification of the public sector!³

An interesting future question is whether timebanking could be used as a tool for ethical entrepreneurs to share common resources and gain relative autonomy from markets. This would help the new economy strengthen commons and reduce dependence on highly capitalized markets and competition. Unfortunately, in Finland, this road is now blocked by rigid taxation guidelines that prevent the exchange of professional services via timebanks. It would appear that the guidelines are intended to prevent timebanking from growing and challenging the dominance of both market and state, and the capitalistic order itself.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

About the authors

Jukka Peltokoski (Finland) is a political researcher and pedagogue, an activist in the precarity movement, a commoner in Commons.

Niklas Toivakainen (Finland) is an active member of Helsinki Timebank, and a member of Commons.fi and the Finnish Solidarity economy collective.

Tero Toivanen (Finland) is a doctoral student in World Politics at the University of Helsinki.

Ruby van der Wekken (Finland) is an active member of Helsinki Timebank, and a member of Commons.fi and the Finnish Solidarity Economy collective.

Photo by pni

The post Patterns of Commoning: Helsinki Timebank: Currency as a Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Because of the recent U.S. election, progressives globally vow to work locally for change. Yet without an independent currency, they are all but forced to participate in the extractive economy that supports the new U.S. administration.

For billions of people, Bitcoin is not a viable option. However, Faircoop is launching Fairpay, aimed precisely at those who lack a smartphone. Those of us who do use iPhones can support the effort to build an independent, fair currency available to all.

Extracted from: https://fair.coop/order-the-fairpay-card-now-and-start-2017-by-committing-yourself-to-another-economy

Order the Fairpay card now and start 2017 by committing yourself to another economy for the whole year.

Extracted from: https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=P2P%20fairpay

Fairpay is:

– a NFC plastic card with payments charged with faircoin…

– A POS app for merchants

– A tool for payments without fees.

– A banking software for making charge the card or exchange faircoin and official currencies, so easy as using a bank account.

– A cashout system for merchants with SEPA transfer in 24 hours.

This technology will make faircoin the most advanced tool for easy physical payments in the cryptocurrency world. Making so easy the user experience as a is to use visa or mastercard. Still neither bitcoin have all of it together. Fairpay will be possible thanks to the collaboration between Faircoop and Chip chap.

Extracted from https://www.facebook.com/enricdurangiralt/posts/10211265838952073

In the last statement read: ” two milestones for the 2017. #Retornoenlibertad and build a new banking system for the people. So today same ad the next steps in each of those addresses. Let’s not leave for tomorrow what you can do today.

1. We just launch an online discussion group for the campaign #retornoenlibertad It’s a group of telegram (where we also have up to now the discussion of faircoop) Anyone who wants to collaborate is welcome, write to me privately and give me your user of telegram (possible create it in a minute in telegram. Org)

2. Ad that fairpay is going to be a reality already within a few weeks.

Fairpay will be a payment card for use in physical stores. An alternative to visa, Mastercard, no commissions. Using the latest technologies “Contactless” that the most innovative companies are implementing, because the cooperative is not at odds with innovation. A tool to extend the networks of social and solidarity economy to all, all over the world. The experience of use is going to be as easy as using a conventional system. Will be loaded with faircoin, but neither the user, or trade will notice is how easy it will be.

So you don’t have an excuse to take the plunge. Be easy even for trade change to euros if necessary. As easy as using a bank account and a lot cheaper than the corporations. You can also propose to the city of your people to use it, in order to strengthen the local economy, as some of you are interested. It is a key step to extend the new banking system of the people in the 2017. Keep your ears open for the launch, we’ll need you on board!

Extracted from: https://fair.coop/groups/faircoop-community/forum/topic/nfc-card-system-based-in-a-new-app-integrated-with-a-tpv-app-coming-very-soon/#post-12214

Keymaster

One important tool awaited for a long time by the Faircoop community is right now in strong process of development and will be ready in NFC card system which was discussed as a priority already one year ago in this thread: https://fair.coop/groups/faircoop-community/forum/topic/priorities-201515-development-of-local-payment-systems/

The system that is in the works is still better than we could envision, because it will be directly connected to a POS app, which will connect the shops accepting the card with a system of automatized exchange between faircoin and official currencies (euros or the currency available in each country). We will have access since the beginning to one day wire transfer in all the SEPA zone, connected to that system. And 2-4 days for external transfers. Other regions could add more fast options in the future.

The NFC app will be open source and owned by faircoop. The app development and the backend service, is provided by chip chap – in the future we could reproduce it, but this have a big cost- and the brand used for this service at short term will be fairtoearth which website will be updated in the same time.

This development has been advanced with money I got from selling faircoin to investors interested in this project. (In future could be recovered if appears other funders who supports it, without faircoin exchange)

The NFC card printing would be selfmanaged as part of this collaboration, making it very cheap, and in the next future would be important to invest in the machine who produce the nfc tags for the cards.

My proposal is, at same time, to make a deep update to use.fair-coin.org and use it, for promoting and facilitating the services related the NFC cards.

So, since this moment progressively the role of the local nodes, with their exchange offices capacities will evolve, and will not be so much to make directly the manual exchange, but to invite local shops to join and coordinate the relation with the local shops who can provide the service.

• NFC (Near Field communication) is a technology similar than bluetooth, that makes possible to stablish connection between two devices when they are near. In this case the two devices are one smartphone and one card.

NFC tags:  Are just piece of information inserted in the card to be shared with the smartphone.

APP  (application). Is just any of the programs that you can install and run in your smartphone

POS (Point of Sale – TPV, terminal punto de venta in spanish).  Is the place where a retail transaction is completed. Actually is refered also as the point of service because it is not just a point of sale but also a point of return or customer order. Additionally, current POS terminal software may include additional features to cater for different functionality, such as inventory management, CRM, financials, warehousing, etc.

SEPA:  (Single Euro Payments Area). is a payment-integration initiative of the European Union for simplification of bank transfers denominated in euro.  SEPA consists of the 28 member states of the European Union, the four member states of the European Free Trade Association (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland), Monaco and San Marino.

• Hey all,For this project, we will use the banking software of Chip chap for the faircoin cards and POS system. This payment system will be called fairpay.Any person with a card or merchant or a local node, who participate in fairpay project, will have one account in this banking software.Local nodes and registered merchants/shops will be able to create accounts for normal users.For a payment, the shop needs to have a smarphone or a card payments device, with NFC technology. Most of the recent devices have it.Card would have a cost of less than 0.1 eur. Could be given by free when someone wants to use it, if is charged after exchanging some amount of official currency.
• Neither Faircoop, neither Chip chap, will receive any fee for creating a new account or for single payments, because the general vision is to provide an alternative without fees to visa and mastercard, etc… Anyway, the local nodes are free to decide any fee as local strategy for developing their work.
• Shops could only accept cards or could also distribute cards and sell faircoins with their App. Some level of trust could be appreciated in order to let a shop distribute cards and sell faircoins.
• Local nodes or the global faircoop where there is no local node, will be able to create accounts for merchants/shops

How faircoin cards will work

We could choose to include a QR from the faircoin address on the card, so then people with a card can charge the card or receive payments just with the QR.

POS System.

With the POS system, the merchants would be able to exchange the faircoins received to euros, from the panel on their account and receive a transfer to their banking account in 24 hours. This service would have a 1% fee by chip chap.

Faircoop should provide the liquidity in euros and faircoins, for covering the exchanges, if faircoop fails to do it, there is the option that chip chap get the liquidity from bittrex or that we stop the service until there is liquidity.

General panel use

The panel can be used as an online bank account + online wallet. We can decide each category of users which services can access.

For example people could:

– Charge the card online

– Empty the card online

– Send faircoins to an andress outside of the wallet.

– Change from euro to faircoin or faircoin to euro (this service would have 1% fee)

Organization elements.

A team for coordinating the project should be created. This team could be related to the european coop bank that also is being developed.

Faircoop could inform about this project in use.fair-coin.org. At same time fairtoearth.com could be used.

The local nodes should be able to ask for some amounts of cards for using at their local nodes. Then they could explain and provide the local merchants.

The shops which are not related to any local node could ask for it by their own; then the global faircoop team should use some criteria to confirm if they could be accepted for the way of participation they choose:

1- Accepting card payments

2 – Accepting card payments, distributing cards

3. – Accepting card payments, distributing cards and selling faircoins.

(We could choose simplify and only organize to options, just accepting cards or distributing and selling together)

In the case of shops selling faircoins, they could receive euros that belongs to faircoop, then would be a task of local nodes to follow up that cash in order to recover it for managing for example. cashout needs. The panel will have info of the stats of the shops they manage for making easier following this data.

The post Project Of The Day: Fairpay appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Originally published here.

Photo by zcopley

The post The Invisible Politics of Bitcoin: Governance Crisis of a Decentralized Infrastructure appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In Extraenvironmentalist #92 we first speak with Paul Vigna about his new book The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and the Blockchain Are Challenging the Global Economic Order to discuss how the Bitcoin currency and the blockchain distributed ledger system are laying the groundwork for alternatives to today’s monetary system. Then, we talk about the potential influence of exponential technologies on education, learning and other areas of the economy with Jim Jubelirer.

// Books

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and the Blockchain Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey

//Clips (in order of appearance)

Full Story: on Bitcoin
Bitcoin vs. Banks
This Money’s so Safe, You’ll Never Touch It

// Music (in order of appearance)

Postiljonen – Supreme (Niva Remix) via Soundcloud
Future Elevators – Modern World via The Planet of Sound
Rodriguez – Hate Street Dialogue (GingerAle Remix) via IndieShuffle

// Production Credits and Notes

Our editor Kevin via Sustainable Guidance Youtube Channel

Episode #92 was supported by donations from the following generous listeners:

Kathryn in Washington
Erin in Vermont
Robert in Kansas
Lee in Arizona

Cross-posted from the Extraenviromentalist.com

The post Decrypting Cryptocurrency appeared first on P2P Foundation.

” just as standards of weights and measures are determined independently of those that use them as a common good.”

An interesting argument by Shann Turnbull:

(via email)

“I cannot see how money can become democratic unless its value is determined independently of the financial system just as standards of weights and measures are determined independently of those that use them as a common good.

A local standard of value established in each bio-region would allow anyone in that region to enter intro contract to exchange goods and services with reference to the accepted standard. There would be no need for either a centralised or distributed ledger even if one was kept.

Establishing the standard of value on a democratic basis becomes a governance problem not a financial one. Millions of producer and/or suppliers of benign renewable energy being shared through a cooperative creates a democratic governance arrangement that unlike LIBOR or foreign exchanges could have its value cross checked by millions of its stake holding suppliers/consumers.

I would caution the call of requiring money to be created without debt unless you also specify “Bank” debt. If we are going to use money as a medium of exchange it will be creating private peer to peer debt!

If you want democratic money then we cannot have money that creates money by earning interest. The ability of money to earn interest also misallocated resources to creating money rather than investing in real things that can increase prosperity on a sustainable basis without growth and even with de-growth.”

The post Money as a Commons requires a Local Standard of Value appeared first on P2P Foundation.