Payments, payments

My high level vision is like this: a payment gateway or e-wallet, or both, in FIAT, but worker and customer owned, and that would operate completely transparently, would not have huge CEO and shareholder rewards, but would instead return their surplus (after paying bills and staff) back to the communities that helped earn that surplus in the first place.

The solution would have to be either developed or one of the ‘white label’ solutions available - each having the pros and cons. Although probably it would need to be developed as otherwise it would run a risk too high of the software supplier blackmailing the project into or out of certain things.

Either way, though, the trick here would be to not return the surplus to individuals, but to localities - i.e. groups of people who live and/or work in the same locality and who were spending money using their e-wallets and payment gateways in that locality, and have therefore earned some surplus for that locality. Then they would, as a group, have to decide together how to spend those funds that they helped earn. There would be a voting platform for project proposals and voting, and every member would be able to propose projects and vote for them.

Of course it could happen that they just decide to throw a big party - but that’s good too, as people will socialise, get to know each other better, and that could lead to good things. But they could also use the funds they earned to help clean and green this poor planet - which I hope would be the case. We’d try and nudge them in that direction.
(Places like London would have people form many localities spending their money in it, so that may need to be thought about…)

I would not impose any controls on the local projects - I would trust people to do what they say they would do. This may come as a shock to many, especially in the age called ‘post-truth’, but I don’t think running a huge machinery of inspectors and controllers and admin overheads would be of help to anybody. Instead, I would invite people to be decent and honest - which majority of the people are. I would ask them to only support projects whose veracity they are sure of, and as the projects are going to be local, I would encourage everybody to familiarise themselves with them, go and visit the site, or people, and only vote for what they are sure of. This would prevent Mr or Mrs So and So siphoning money away to their brother in law - even though that seems to be somewhat of a fashion today. I would invite people to post video evidence of their project online, which would serve as inspiration if successful, but if not successful, then I would invite them to record lessons learnt.

This would all mean that having an e-wallet that is widely used and returns their profits to communities, can serve as a kind of perpetuum mobile of funding for local projects everywhere where the e-wallet solution is used. We would not donate 1% of the profits, but all of them. We’d pay the bills and staff, and we would return the surplus to people who helped earn it.

The fact that profits are returned to communities should be motivation to use the e-wallet and/or payment gateway solution.This would create some jobs, both as a result of solutions being implemented and of local projects being proposed and voted for by the members of communities. And importantly, it would (I hope) give people a sense of: ok, we are not powerless. We have some funds, and we can do SOMETHING with it, even if it is a small thing to start with.

Equally important,maybe, is the fact that they are trusted to do the right thing for themselves and do not have to prove that they are trustworthy. Trust and transparency are the norm. In this way, customers would be motivated to use the solution because there would be something in it for them, local businesses would be motivated to use the solution as there would be something in it for their localities and thus for themselves as well, the big boys and girls may want to use the solution as it would make some good PR for them - without any effort on their part.

But… equally, big boys and girls may try to surpress it if it becomes a threat to their profits. Advertisers may refuse to advertise it, internet site hosting companies may refuse to allow it on the pages hosted on their servers, Apple and Google may ban it on iOS and Android apps or may impose some punitive measures…

It could go either way - but is the world likely to stone wall a project like this?.. If it did work, it could be pretty good.

Whether it would make sense to do it Open Source, needs to be thought through. It seems to me it would probably have to? But it could also be developed as proprietory software in a way that makes sense for a project of this kind. If successful it will be copied, as successful projects tend to be. But if copied, it’s good - because it means more of the same, which is exactly what this planet and its people need. If open source, is it possible to prevent some Mr or Mrs so and so in some place somewhere using it to run their own empire in a language that we don’t speak? I don’t know about that, but I know that other people in that same country and in that same langauge can take it and run it as it should be run : decently and transparently and they can outcompete the Mr or Mrs Empire precisely by their decency and transparency and doing the right thing.

We would share knowledge, help each other start it up in a new territory or region or country…
It would be developed centrally, and run locally.
There you go. A dream.
I invite you to pick it and unpick it…
Thank you for readng.
Ivana

3 Likes

I just received a link to this page on the Unity Trust Bank site, Accepting Card Payments.

We bank with Unity Trust and I know some other co-ops here do so it might be a option worth exploring.

Yep, just received the same

It’s interesting that only one person suggested crypto spam, we have moved away from this, which is a good step.

It’s been awhile since I wrote this… What happened meanwhile is that I received a link to https://taler.net/ which is indeed an open source online payment platform. However, it isn’t exploited commercially yet. The Taler team told me that they have a bank in Germany who is interested in running a pilot scheme.
So I started looking (when I have spare time) how it could be run as a coop, with all the above criteria satisfied… What are the legal and other requirements within EU? And they are listed here https://www.eba.europa.eu/sites/default/documents/files/documents/10180/1904583/f0e94433-f59b-4c24-9cec-2d6a2277b62c/Final%20Guidelines%20on%20Authorisations%20of%20Payment%20Institutions%20(EBA-GL-2017-09).pdf?retry=1
This would be an online payment platform that does not require cards - it avoids Visa, Mastercard, and all other giants of the online payment world, it is annonymous for the user (but not for merchants, so merchants can be taxed). I saw somewhere also that they are working with another team GNUnet to also avoid the giants of identification and authentication.

My current understanding is: the Taler exchange would need to have its own business bank account in a bank. This could be any bank that agrees to host it and offers good conditions. Then, the transfer of funds from customers’ own bank accounts to taler wallet would be via a normal bank transfer, SEPA within the EU (with help of some digital tokens). Once the funds are in the wallet, the payment is = one click and done. Details like address etc, when needed, can come from re:claimID (when that is set up) or typed as usual.
However, about the legal entity - not sure. What kind? Ideally coop, where all members (staff and customers) have a say, but it is also a kind of non-profit (because it gives away its profits, not because it doesn’t have them)… I just started looking into DAOs, disCOs (https://disco.coop/2019/11/imagine-a-future-of-distributed-cooperatives-or-discos/) and ways of squaring these with legal entities currently in existence in France ( - where I live at present), and with the legal requirements for the Payment Institution in EU… But it doesn’t have to be France…

Anyway… just thought to give you an update, after having seen some messages here after a longish while…

1 Like