Today I was meditating on an idea that has been in my head for years. In college I wrote a business plan that was a 20 page paper assignment for my productions class as part of my BBA requirements. The paper was recognized as best paper out of a class of 300 students.
The plan was basically for a company that would setup a grocery store in Austin, TX that was really more of a farmers market because it would focus on contracts with local farmers and producers. The company would also have a local farm and green house so it would be involved in every part of the business all the way from production to distribution to the sale of the local goods.
I have been thinking about the business plan for years and as I see the current local food/farmers market movement towards more decentralized local food production/consumption, as in the past, I am beginning to incorporate cryptocurrency into my business plan and thinking about how that would work.
Farmers Market Coin FMC - a hypothetical coin for future local food markets
As I was envisioning it, alive and well in the future, I saw how it could work with cryptocurrency. Automating the contracts that the local market has with local farmers and using FMC for all transactions. This would mean farmers/producers would be paid for their products with FMC and could use it to buy products from the central market or trade for BTC, USD, etc.
To shop at the market, you would have to have FMC. If you didn't have it already, you would quickly exchange your USD or BTC for FMC. As much as this might seem like a hassle, it could actually automate things to work in a very efficient way, especially for the local producers that were selling to and buying from the central market.
The system could be implemented in any farmers markets or any local markets going on anywhere in the world. There would be a strong use case if government currencies were failing as this would be one of the very first markets that must exist to have any kind of stability in the face of something like a local currency collapse.
Any market could do this if supply and demand actors saw the benefits. Requiring the specific cryptocurrency to be used would immediately give the coin value and local people a way to interact. Access to the internet and processing software and hardware (wallets) would be the main requirements.