Im certain there's a paradigm shift here but Im not smart enough to know exactly how it could work. Hopefully someone has already thought about it and if not, Im here to start the conversation rolling. Im not well versed in technicalities so instead Im just going to explain how this idea has come about for me and what I am dreaming of!
The picture above is a field in England that has belonged to my family for many years and has mostly been used for local community events and camping. Now there is a new vision evolving. Recently my sister has returned home from her adventures as a ranger with the national trust where she learned plenty of skills in wild maintenance, permaculture, forest management, sustainability and volunteer herding! Now she wants to turn this field in to a permaculture farm running sustainable gardening education for volunteers and student groups while providing organic vegetables for the wider community. Its a lovely vision and one that we all support, but being the crypto-freak of the family, I have begun to develop some wild ideas about how this farm could utilise a decentralised economy.
I only recently dipped in to Decentralised Finance with the start of CUB DeFi and it has been a revelation for me. Don't get me wrong, I don't really understand how it works or how sustainable it is, but the fact that I can earn about $100 per week from a $5000 stake has completely blown my mind and started giving me visions of a liberated existence in which I could let go of all the stressful contractual obligation of this massively competitive and woefully wasteful capitalist system.
Then I heard about these (whatever the hell they are!) which I have loosely assimilated in to my delusional imagination world as some kind of new super awesome, community led company structure where the members of the company get to democratically and trustlessly steer its trajectory through voting and where the money doesn't all just float to the top but is spread like a beautiful community-approved blanket bringing peace and harmony and justice and equality and all the good things to everyone involved, and maybe others besides? Please feel free to correct me if Im already way off the planet here....
So here was the moment where my mind exploded:
My sister and I were talking to someone else who ran a community farm that used a subscription model to deliver boxes of seasonal vegetables to its customers. It went VERY well the first year and lots of people bought subscriptions and got lots of delicious fresh produce. Unfortunately the next year, the weather was unpredictable and the harvest was not so good, meaning that customers got a slightly less awesome product and subscriptions began to dwindle.
... I thought.
What if we just had a huge community bank of crypto being farmed for enough interest that we could cover the costs of the business? Which frankly shouln't be very high anyway. Most of the people on community farm projects volunteer in return for food or sometimes just because they love gardening and social time..... so, I thought, why don't we pay them as well?
We could PAY people to come and TAKE THE VEGETABLES!!!!!!!!
or am I just completely insane?
We could literally be TIPPING people to choose our food instead of the pesticide ridden, plastic covered, conglomerate veg of the supermarkets!
FREE FOOD, FREE MONEY, PAID 'VOLUNTEERS', HAPPY FARMERS, HAPPY CUSTOMERS, HAPPY EVERYONE!
Imagine how popular it would be?
Imagine how many volunteers we could have?
Imagine how many angel investors would love what we were doing and throw a bit of cash in to the community pot?
Imagine how appealing it would be for other community projects to take on a model like this?
Am I just completely delusional?
Lets be honest. I have no idea what Im talking about. Which is why Im hoping this awesome community might be able to set me straight a bit. I may be misunderstanding something, or perhaps even a lot of things, but assuming this concept isnt completely outside the realms of possibility, Im going to try and imagine what this would actually require in order to function. Please feel free to smash me down in the comments, or to provide some insight, inspiration or just another angle on any of these ideas:
Im not an investment banker, I dont understand the graphs and I doubt I have a particularly good intuition. Hell Ive been in the crypto space since summer 2017 and Ive only amassed about $10,000. I should probably be a trillionaire by now and then I could just pay everyone for fun, but investment was never my game.
HOWEVER, with the help of an awesome online investment community (wink wink) perhaps it wouldn't be so outrageous to think that a community investment couldn't be fairly well placed. Bearing in mind of course that all money would be freely DONATED with absolutely no obligation to see any returns on it, so there would be nothing contractual outside of just a strong expectation that it will be used positively by the decentralised community as far as is possible.
I don't know anything about having shared wallets in the cryptospace but Im assuming people are managing it one way or another out there right? Presumably making a withdrawal from a community account would require authentication from multiple people and be witnessable by the community etc. so that some crazy pirate can't run off with all the cash. I imagine that this would be some sort of regular occurence in which a portion of the harvested interest would be withdrawn and distributed to peoples wallets and/or turned in to FIAT money in order to tip all the un-crypto folk who don't understand it but like receiving free vegetables and a 50 pence piece : )
I don't know how much would be required to start this off but its fair to say its probably a significant pile, and the more the merrier obviously if we want to create a thriving community of eco-veg-legends who work with a smile on their face as they hand out beautiful food and cold hard cash to everyone who stops by!
This means we would need to fundraise and I guess Im wondering how best to incentivise the donations.
The obvious one, which Im not too keen on, is to make donation a prerequisite for being part of the community. That way we pull in lots of small donations and also determine who has priority to come and work at the farm or receive the bountiful fruits of the project. It sounds a bit pay-to-win to me and smacks of the usual middle-class members only club. I would love it if ANYONE felt they could benefit regardless of investment.... but maybe Im too much of an idealist.
The best one, which is perhaps more unlikely, is to have benevolent wealthy folk donate largish chunks of capital purely because it looks like an awesome experiment and everything is well in place for it to be a success. Obviously there may be some vegetable benefits on the side.... This would be great but we probably need to offer more to these angel investors if we want to entice them. Im imagining maybe some kind of VIP statuses for special events, general love and thanks on social media etc. and maybe even some passive income.... but any suggestions would be much appreciated.
An additional income stream could be paid events and education although again, Id rather work towards being an idyllic paradise where no-one has to spend money for anything and in fact they get paid to participate but hey, Im prepared to consider the options. And there is plenty of those when it comes to event holding and education. We already host various camps on the field behind (we even have a creativity themed camp called LEO camp - nothing to do with finance im afraid!) and we are planning to build an indoor/outdoor classroom for hosting educational permaculture classes and courses. We have also hosted small scale music festivals so we have a good reputation in the local community for providing cool social events. Anyway, you get the gist.... we could have fundraising events if we really wanted to make the poor people poorer.....
And seriously, thats what it feels like doesnt it? The 1% of humanity exist in a world of riches beyond our imagination while the rest of us have to charge each other everything we've earned just to keep our own communities alive. WHY!? Why should we keep willingly enslaving ourselves to the yoke of robbing each other when we know well enough that there is plenty of wealth to go round in this world.
ahem sorry for that outburst. Im normally so reserved....
Anyway, as I was reading back, I realised that of course the community fund could be used to offset all the costs at first, making things somewhat cheaper than they would be, and slowly working towards my vision of Free Produce and a tip. But somehow I feel like that tip would be the gimmick that would put us on the map. You know, like a seminal project that gets everyones attention, makes the newspapers, gives people a hint of what crypto can really do for the world if its utilised right. Right?
Im sure there's loads more I should say but my brain is starting to run out of braincells and they were pretty scant to begin with so its time to go eat food and meditate in this miracle existence we seem to be residing in.
Please don't hold back. Tell me everything. Make me look stupid. It wont be hard. Even the tiniest thoughts will be absorbed gratefully. Maybe this is brilliant and it will change my life and even the world! or maybe I can just forget it and go back to sleep...either one sounds pretty great right now.
Big love to you all x x
DEEPEST ACCEPTANCE. EFFORTLESS FURTHERANCE!
Basil
