Faircoin

Interview

Stacco Troncoso, interviewed by Cat Johnson on the cryptocurrency of Fair Coop:

Shareable: What's the importance of having a cryptocurrency focused on alleviating economic injustice and promoting social good?

Duran and Troncoso: Up until now, cryptocurrencies have held great potential, but it hasn't always coincided with a practicality that would alleviate [social] ills. Certain elements such as bypassing the need for central banks are steps along the way, but there was something missing. A holistic social and economic system is urgently needed to address the inequalities inherent in the current system.

How is Faircoin different from other cryptocurrencies?

For one thing, Faircoin is technically different in the currency generation protocol used. Faircoin uses Proof of Stake (POS), instead of Proof of Work (POW). The use of POS prevents any unfair advantage which could be afforded to those who can access and invest in the environmentally destructive means of mining (destructive for its consumption of energy and resources needed for the servers). What really makes Faircoin different is its specific use as a tool for Fair.Coop, as a cryptocurrency designed to act as a store of value for Fair.Coop and its redistribution of capital to socially and environmentally coherent projects.

What's the relationship between Fair.Coop and Faircoin? How will they intersect and/or interact?

Our intention is to be “Fair in name, fair in practice.” Fair.Coop uses Faircoin as its social capital and store of value. Fair.Coop is Faircoin's conscience—it's a cryptocurrency attached to commons-oriented responsibility.

Fair.Coop already holds 20 percent of all Faircoins in existence, which guarantees that the growth of the currency's value will go to the common good. This is guaranteed by Fair.Coop's democratic accountability system.

Do you see Fair.Coop and Faircoin working on a global scale? What could that look like?

In fact, Fair.Coop can't be anything but global; it's been specifically designed to be global; for this reason, we call it the Earth Cooperative. It's not a scaled-up local project. One of Fair.Coop's key objectives is to facilitate a global body of knowledge, capable of generating concrete impact locally.

At any rate, we could make a working distinction between two sets of mechanisms that'd be produced by Fair.Coop: global and local. At the local level we'd be seeing local, specialized mechanisms and knowledge which, in turn, would feed into a global open knowledge economy comprised of, among other things, valuable data and monetary and economic tools. This will be a bidirectional relationship, as both parts will nourish one another for the benefit of the whole."

Who will the funds raised with Faircoin go to? Do you already have organizations or projects in mind? If so, where are the organizations located?

Who the funds will go to isn't something that's decided by the promoting team. Identifying who the potential benefactors are and following through is an ongoing democratic process of the whole coop, as it's coming together right now where each of the different Funds is co-managed by a council that works in conjunction with the other Funds, as well as with the entire community built around Fair.Coop.

The type of organizations we want to work with will be those who could potentially generate peer production in the material plane, as well as benefit from the shared knowledge accrued by the coop. We also want to focus on projects that lack the necessary means to activate this type of peer production.

Other examples would include strategic projects that can add more value to the global commons. Projects which, on their own, maybe wouldn't have the ability to network at this scale to share their knowledge. The projects would also benefit from the moral and material support of a global community if and when attacked by hostile interests. All in all, Fair.Coop will increase the resilience of these projects.

More than naming specific organizations, we are very open to being approached so that everyone can participate in Fair.Coop's co-creation and ongoing development. We are also very interested in empowering the Global South to increase its resiliency. When we say Global South, while there's an undeniable geographical truth to this, we also mean the 99%, independent of where we may reside." (http://www.shareable.net/blog/faircoop-using-cryptocurrency-to-bring-economic-justice-to-the-world)