Try FairCoin CoOp Cryptocurrency: Buy and Sell without Banks

Fair Coop. The Earth cooperative for a fair economy from Radi.ms on Vimeo.

While Bitcoin has rightly been critiqued for the extreme and ever increasing levels of energy consumption that are used to mine Bitcoin and validate transactions; FairCoin is based on a blockchain that works dramatically differently, a small number of computers collaborate rather than compete to validate transactions through Cooperatively Validated Nodes (CVNs) and thus the energy consumption is both minimal and sustainable.

The figure who is most strongly identified with the FairCoop movement and FairCoin since its inception is Enric Duran, who raised around four hundred thousand Euros in 2008 by creating multiple overdrafts with fake solvency, and then invested this money into building the cooperative movement in Spain in 2008, leading to the creation of the Catalonia Integral Cooperative movement in 2010.

Since 2014, Duran’s focus has been on working with FairCoop to generate the alternative ecological and post-capitalist ecosystem that FairCoin is based on. One distinctive advantage of cryptocurrency as a tool to build social and political alternatives is that it is not geographically confined in the way alternative currencies typically are.

Local currencies for example are often associated with strengthening local economies and making them more sustainable. Yet FairCoin stresses its local to global to local aspects, in that it is based around local nodes that are organizationally autonomous but affiliated to the FairCoop ecosystem. There are over 50 different local nodes in existence although levels of activity vary considerably between regions.

The most active places tend to be in Southern Europe, such as Galiza in Spain, the the Greek city of Heraklion in Crete, and Milan in Italy, to name a few. But FairCoin also has increasing presence in parts of Eastern Europe, like Novi Sad in Serbia. And perhaps more surprisingly in Switzerland in Berne and Jura. From a UK perspective there are also local nodes being built in Yorkshire and London.

The term ‘ecosystem’ is crucial when trying to characterize FairCoop. It is composed of an alternative cooperative not-for-profit bank, Bank of the Commons, a range of lively – (if at times acrimonious) – discussion groups on Telegram that cover economic strategy, education, principles, and assembly meeting groups, amongst others.

There is also a tech team of activists who work (as far as possible) with open-source collaborative technology to build the web infrastructure of the ecosystem. Currently there are hundreds of merchants across Europe that accept FairCoin, although the social cryptocurrency faces the challenge that many alternative currencies face around how to upscale the distribution and production process, to cover infrastructural needs like electricity, collectively owned land, and transportation of goods between nodes.

The FairCoop ecosystem aims to develop a fully circular economy in which the different parts of the production and distribution process can each be paid for in FairCoin in a way that is environmentally sustainable, according to relations of trust and mutual solidarity.

This remains an objective that is some way off, but the FairCoop ecosystem is certainly growing and attracting participants from a wide range of different localities.

One pressing challenge for any cryptocurrency which sets its sights on post-capitalist, social finance is that it cannot be completely separated from capitalist markets that it necessarily operates alongside. And on cryptocurrency exchanges outside of the ecosystem, FairCoin is bought and sold at a much lower price than the internal value within the network of 1.2 Euros to 1 FairCoin.

Although within the ecosystem every effort is made to sustain the community price decided by General Assembly, thus face-to-face relations of trust based on shared principles and ideology are crucial to sustaining the ecosystem.

Efforts are also being made to make local nodes more organisationally and economically autonomous to ensure that trusted participants can exchange their FairCoin back to fiat currency if required.

With our FairCoin we can, in fact, beat the system.

To browse through our directories of products and services is to open up a growing economic space that is rapidly gaining ground from capitalist monoculture. Competition and exploitation of people and natural resources is giving way to cooperation and care for the common good.If you have FairCoin, you can purchase different products and services online at our FairMarket or go through the physical shops that accept FairCoin as a means of payment in many countries around the world, visiting our Use-Faircoin directory.

To give just a few specific examples, with FairCoin you can rent an electric car in Greece, where you can also get a haircut or hire interior design services. You can buy an electric bike in Barcelona, stay in a rural area in Tarragona or take a tour on an ecological sailboat on the Costa Daurada (all of them in Catalonia). Also go to the dentist in A Coruña (Spain) and receive an Abhyanga body massage in Murcia (Spain) or a relaxing one in central London.

Nonetheless makes FairCoin and FairCoop potentially such an important movement and experiment is that the existing money system and the model of infinite growth that it is based on through loans charged at interest presents major obstacles to not only imagining but practicing economic and political alternatives.