Faircoin 2 Crowdinvestment Campaign
Faircoin, much more than money.
FairCoop has launched the Faircoin 2 crowdinvestment campaign.
https://coopfunding.net/en/campaigns/faircoin-2-crowdinvestment/
This crowdinvestment campaign has two goals:
1. Fund the pending Faircoin 2 development.
FairCoin 2 will be an important blockchain-based innovation to allow the Faircoin blockchain to function, secured with ‘proof of cooperation’, and bring to the world a really functional alternative to the current unfair systems that are based on competition between nodes: ‘proof of work’ and ‘proof of stake’.
2. Faircoin Stability.
Stability of the currency is vital in order to make Faircoin use resilent in any situation. In particular FairCoop needs to sustain reserves in order to give more confidence and flexibility to merchants, producers, consumers who are becoming Faircoin users.
Currently to facilitate that resilence it is necessary that more people who are in accord with the FairCoop values join and invest, thus making a better distribution of the Faircoins in circulation.
Why Faircoin 2?
Faircoin 2 will keep the same Faircoin balances as Faircoin 1, meanwhile adding the technology needed to apply the Faircoop values of fairness and social cooperation.
In order to do that, a network of certified nodes will be created which will guarantee the securing of the Faircoin network and some important innovations:
- No more unfair money creation. Faircoin 2, will stop creating new coins. Certified nodes will not need to create new coins in order to give security to transactions. Instead, Faircoin 2 will help to create the conditions for existing coins to be redistributed to amazing social projects worldwide, thanks to funds like Global South Fund, Commons Fund, Technological Infrastructure Fund and Refugees Fund.
- Instant confirmations. Technically Faircoin 2 will bring us important innovations for making Faircoin an important tool for online and physical payments; one of these will be instant confirmations, which will bring security to real time exchange relations in multiple situations.
- Micropayments. The high efficiency level of the Faircoin 2 network, trusted node relations, low energy cost and consequently low fees, will make Faircoin the best currency for micropayments which are very important for many needs like the gift economy and use in poor countries.
Faircoin 2 is already under active development. Up to now it’s been possible with some personal investments and a lot of willingness. But right now, we need to open it up to our support network in order to be able to make it to the launch date which is scheduled very soon; between June and July.
Stability means liquidity
- The aim is to bring liquidity and stability to the open Faircoin markets and make it easier for investors, merchants and users to get in and out of Faircoin.
- Liquidity provider for cashout services, creating resilence for cashin and cashout of Faircoin, in projects like Fairmarket and all the merchants involved in use.fair-coin.org
- Provide funding for the development of the FairCoop ecosystem in a way that gives investors ample possibilities to recover and eventually profit from their investment in the project.
What?
At least 20,000 euros for development costs and reserves to cover producers + merchants’ needs to cashout.
Maximum 20,000 euros buys in the Bittrex exchange, contributing to put the Faircoin distribution more and more into the hands of FairCoop supporters, and recovering the spread between prices which affects Faircoin stability.
Total 40,000 euros
How?
If you don’t have a Faircoin wallet, and want to learn how to install it, first read this link and download it: /?get_group_doc=26/1447331472-FairCoinUsersGuide.pdf
Then, for this campaign only, you will be able to support the FairCoop ecosystem by getting Faircoin at half of the official price in getfaircoin.net.
All the investments through coopfunding.net or getfaircoin.net greater than 100 euros will be accounted with a rate of 0.025 (1 eur = 40 faircoins). The main condition is that you hold half of the investments for at least 6 months.
News from the Refugees Fund Assembly
On this past Tuesday 27th of April, the First Faircoop Refugees fund open assembly took place, and took some important decisons.
At the time of the meeting there was a total of 4031,84 euros in the campaign fund. From this, 2070 has been received in Euros, and the rest in Faircoin.
The following decisions were taken:
1) 300 euros was reserved to be spent by 4 refugee comrades, 3 living in Thessaloniki and 1 in Athens willing to attend the “1st Gathering of the Solidarity economy and Integral Cooperativism” which will happen in Karditza, (Central Greece,) from the 5th to the 8th of May. (see here: https://cooperativas.gr/1st-gathering-of-solidarity-economy-and-integral-cooperativism-in-greece/ )
2) The remaining 1770 euros and the Faircoin received so far was reserved for the Call Center Coop Network project, to be spent by the refugees involved, who are preparing the launch of the refugees2refugees service.
(more info about that project here: https://titanpad.com/callcenterscoopnetworkdoc )
This project would make socially positive uses of the infrastructures that are being created by the cooperative network of call centres which is a project by Freedom Coop, the European cooperative being built by FairCoop.
Refugees2refugees will be one of the call center sevices where refugee coopworkers will carry out support tasks via online chat and phone for other colleagues in need of help. This can work for any country for support related to how to earn a living or find housing etc. together with any need of info related to people in transit.
This service will be an important milestone, because it will be staffed by people who are equals to those being given support, who speak their languages and have lived through the same difficult experiences in transit. This will bring a level of trust and true collaboration with the people who contact refugees2refugees.
The refugees working on this project will be paid as cooperative members using contracts between the Call Center Cooperative and private clients who need the service. While they are online awaiting calls, they will be able at same time to cover the needs of the refugees2refugees project.
The Freedom Coop’s legal platform will be used to make these economic activities possible.
Refugees2refugees is strategic as a starting point for the refugees fund, because it allows for a communication flow between people who will be able to participate in other projects that we can fund further on. This will make the process easier, and will give a great opportunity to build more and more refugee-run projects as money flows to the Refugees fund.
The participants in the project will meet at the Karditza Gathering to begin their developments.
Apart from this, from the discussion it became clear that the money currently available isn’t enough to cover the project’s needs. Therefore all the participants commited to continue raising more money for the Refugees Fund.
Also, a proposal for facilitating the use of faircoin by refugees will be developed in the alternative economy and social currency theme to be debated at Karditza.
Let’s go on sowing seeds and grow more cooperative projects with the Refugees Fund!
FairCoop has a new Telegram Channel
With the aim of reaching as many people as possible, we have activated the new communication channel at https://telegram.me/faircoop. Being aware that these new applications are becoming more and more an essential tool for our daily communication, as well as a fast and personal way to have access to information of interest, we think this will be a great means of keeping in touch for everyone who wants to be updated about FairCoop’s work.
Telegram is an instant messaging application for different devices (mobile, computer, tablet) which has more than a hundred million users worldwide and is growing more and more.
Communication through this channel will be either in English or in Spanish, in order to reach the highest number of participants. So, we encourage you to join this new channel to follow the updates, news, new developments, and achievements of FairCoop.
Besides the channel, Telegram is also used as one of our main tools by the active members of FairCoop; we use it to hold assemblies and to organize the different work groups. Because of that, we encourage all the people interested in taking an active part in this transformative project to join us through it. You can find an updated list of our existing channels here: https://board.net/p/Telegramgroups
In the https://telegram.me/faircoop channel, we will provide information regarding all the active work groups in Telegram. And we also want to invite you to join us in becoming a registered member of FairNetwork (link), where you will have the chance to participate in its forums, discussions, projects, such as the online market, etc.
We hope you find this interesting and that our community gets bigger and bigger everyday. So, if you already have Telegram, join us through our new FairCoop channel, and if you still haven’t got it, get it downloaded and enter at https://telegram.me/faircoop.
Clearing up doubts about Faircoin. How is the price determined?
With this post we aim to answer doubts and questions related to Faircoin and its price, given the different ways to acquire it, and in order to contribute to transparency throughout the FairCoop project.
One of the most important questions about Faircoin is how its price is set up. All those who already have experience with cryptocurrencies know that nowadays there are mainly two ways of trading them: through exchanges (on line exchange markets where you can exchange between cryptocurrencies), and exchanging them for fiat currency (Faircoin is currently in Bittrex and Bitsquare).
It is through purchases and sales made with these exchanges which decides the price of a cryptocurrency, and therefore also facilitates the speculation and volatility that we see today: one of the major handicaps for its widespread adoption. Participation in these sites cannot be avoided, since Faircoin is decentralized and any business can decide to trade it. Nevertheless, we know that the future of Faircoin does not depend on speculation nor volatility. Also, one of the objectives of FairCoop is to sustain the value of the savings of people involved in it, so we cannot accept its purchasing power being affected by speculative factors. These reasons prompted us to create a unique pricing system that complies with the values and objectives of both FairCoop, the project which is closely linked to Faircoin, and the cryptocurrency itself.
Therefore, more than a year ago, we democratically dedided that, in order to combat these issues and bearing in mind that the objective of Faircoin is to be a fair currency that serves the real economy, we were going to set a fixed price so that anyone who started to use it; both customers and merchants, had a stable reference price. Some months later, we also committed to exchange Faircoin back to fiat currency, at this same reference price, for merchants that were accepting Faircoins as a means of payment and needed to change them into Euros in order to continue their commercial activity.
As part of the development and facilitation for everyone in the acquisition and use of Faircoin, in a manner consistent with the values and objectives we embody, we created our own exchange platform from official money to Faircoin, GetFaircoin.net, where you can buy Faircoins at this fixed price: 20 Faircoin = 1 Euro. Of course, you are free to buy your Faircoin where you prefer, but we would like to count on you to help us achieve the goals set and create a new economic, financial and monetary system, regardless of greed and manipulation, and of the imbalance of power towards a few that has led us all to disaster.
Local nodes. Experiences from across the lands of FairCoop
We start a series of posts with the aim of showing you what local nodes, the territorial extension of FairCoop, are doing. This is for two reasons: After a year and a half of hard work, we are extending our presence through new places and it has been an amazing experience that we want to share with all of you. The second reason is to show you where we are active so that all people interested can join and participate in this new economy, and if there is not yet an active local node you can start one.
We begin with the Galiza Local node, one of the most active nodes in Spain.
Galiza Local Node
We started this node from the connections that were happening among activists in the Imaxinaria network for Galiza and northern Portugal. Some activists are from la Casa Colorida in Nigrán, Alg-a, SPG A Gavela, Sede and A Praça. Most of us are already involved in the FairCoop project. After some meetings and based on the knowledge we had on cryptocurrencies, alternative economies, integral revolution and social/cultural activism, some of us started to take some action towards integrating FairCoop’s model in our social context, mainly in the local area of Nigrán-Vigo (southern Galiza). Our first presentations/talks about FairCoop in Nigrán and in the Commons Festival in Porto aimed to involve more people in those local areas. We also had a sucessful presentation in the social market fair in A Coruña (northern Galiza) with about 20-30 attendants. We ended this presentation with the promise of more practical workshops in that town.During this first phase, we found people were always curious and motivated, but at the same time overwhelmed with all the tools, implications and potential of the FairCoop ecosystem. This made us doubt about real implication, but at the same time, the use.fair-coin map has in Galiza many collectives already into the knowledge of FairCoop, so we aimed to recreate real use of this economy and started thinking about ways to go further.
After some months of talks and presentations, we organized our first collective experience in the use of Faircoin during the Feira Imaxinaria in 2015 summer. This main Free Culture event in Galiza was the perfect spot for activists and curious attendants to start using this coin. During two days about 15 people used Faircoin to buy food, artisan beer and drinks. The experience was overall interesting, and we engaged many people to start using their mobile wallets. But we needed more.
This experiences and our motivation to begin a real local market based on Faircoin and on Faircoop’s principles, led us to design a bigger plan to help stablish spots around Galiza that may use and integrate our model in their product sales and services. Our knowledge about social networks in our region is that the most related spots to begin could be consumer cooperatives, for they already integrate their own network of conscious users, producers, activists, etc. and also they are already into ethical consumption, economy, degrowth, and sustainable ways of living. The idea is to try to activate first a consumer cooperative and motivate some experiences inside it. The second step would be, through their network, to reach some other stores or service providers.
1st Gathering of Solidarity economy and integral cooperativism in Greece
Summoning to a meeting for Integral Cooperatives and Solidarity Economy. Mouzaki, Karditsa, 5-6-7-8 of May 2016
We live in an era in which it is becoming clearer to everyone just how cruel and inhumane the centralized power and economic establishment system is. Moral values, democratic achievements and lives are being lost in chaotic turns of events, both locally and globally. All this is happening around us, in a social context of the deafening silent acceptance of most of the people who are witnessing it. For some, it might all be seen as just part of a planned development within the increasingly reactionary capitalist development model we are following. In whatever position we are, whatever point of view we share, certainly we cannot ignore the grave situation that has been created and which concerns us all.
Recognising that the way capitalism has been manifested for so many years has only served the purpose of plotting a steady course towards disaster, we have decided to take things into our own hands. We can join up with grassroots energies, both collective and individual, that are based on the fundamental values of direct democracy and cooperation, and try to create an alternative path. We need to talk and communicate to agree and work together on issues that affect us all, in society in general and across the planet as a whole. We realized that we have the power and the will to start building a post-capitalist reality and a society by means of the participation of everyone for the common good.
The proposal we have made and the implementation plan we propose is based on the concept of Integral Cooperatives. Some may have already experienced or have heard of the Catalan Integral Cooperative (C.I.C.), or FairCoop, the Earth Cooperative for a Fair Economy, which together promote Integral Revolution. Basically it is a self-management model which, through economic (and political) disobedience creates an integral, direct-democratic community and social system based on solidarity, proximity and trust in the members of the community.
This post is also available in: Spanish Catalan German Greek Italian