Steem Dollars for Real Estate?
We've been accepting bitcoin at Fort Galt since we first began. As everyone here knows, there's a whole lot more to the cryptocurrency landscape than just Bitcoin. Our latest member offered to pay in Ether but we weren't set-up to accept it so we declined and so he paid with bitcoin instead... but this got us thinking.
We've since discussed the matter and begun to research our options. As luck would have it, Onceuponatime, one of our newer Fort Galt members, came to visit us in Chile and suggested that we should, in the future, accept Steem Dollars as well. We couldn't help but agree.
This is where you come in
I've only been on Steemit for a week and still have more to learn about everything going on under the hood. I know that many of you reading this will likely have excellent suggestions regarding the best way for us to proceed. Any and all ideas are welcome. We really just want to make it as streamlined and user-friendly as possible.
-Gabriel Scheare, Fort Galt
www.fortgalt.com
Accepting them is easy, the challenging part is handling them correctly. Liquidity is an important factor and may prove to be a challenge for bigger amounts. At least until SBD becomes a commonly accepted currency ;-)
Of course I welcome the idea very much, and if you need help with the technical side you can count on my support.
Thanks, Pharesim. Yeah, it will probably be tricky, in that regard. Thanks for volunteering to help :)
Perhaps a more relevant question is, what currencies do you plan to actively encourage merchants to accept at Fort Galt? Of course, one of the biggest ways to do this is to choose the currency you accept for membership fees. I'm sure the "Fort Administration" has no intention on mandating which currencies will be accepted by merchants, but people will tend towards certain ones for convenience and you can certainly weigh in on those decisions.
Which brings up a second question, have you considered creating a membership token for Fort Galt? A Bitshares user-issued asset would be a fine option for this (these give you far more control over your asset than any of the Bitcoin add-ons can), and if you create such a thing, you'll be able to easily use Follow My Vote's software to run polls of your membership, stake-weighted and/or one-member-one-vote. Just something to consider. :)
Full disclosure: I am CTO of Follow My Vote, so I am pushing my own product, but I'm an ancap, so what do you expect? ;) I'm also one of the two architects (the other being @dan), and one of the core developers, of the Graphene Blockchain Framework which now powers Steem, so you're already using one of my products. :) But also, one of the primary reasons I'm working on FMV technology is because I think it'll be an invaluable tool to voluntaryist communities, such as Fort Galt (we're also working closely with Liberland), so I'd be quite interested in working with you to ensure we're building a tool you find valuable. :)
That would be fantastic. Of course you're right that no currency will be mandated here, but we are all about embracing tools that help us to operate faster, cheaper, and more conveniently. Bitcoin has been awesome in that regard but we don't want to close ourselves off to superior alternatives, as they present themselves. We want to encourage experimentation and competition in the marketplace so that the best tools are swiftly discovered and implemented. I'd love to work with you to develop a suitable solution for projects like this. When it's demonstrated and proven, we can promote it as an integral part of every start-up society's tool chest. I'm not a programmer myself, but I would love to put you in touch with the guy that's building our IT infrastructure. I bet you guys would get along famously. He already owns and operates an independent ISP in Oregon and has developed a plan for a DAOISP. http://www.daowisp.io/
Brilliant! I'd love to see more freedom in the ISP market (since there is none right now). And he's already got a BTS UIA up too! I'd love to learn more about the status of DAOWISP. Are you planning to use that technology to provide internet at the Fort?
Hi, IT guy here!
Yes, we're going to be using Airfiber long-range wireless equipment from the Wireless ISP (WISP) industry to get bandwidth out to the Fort.
I'll be at Porcfest in a few weeks to demo some of the gear, and speak about the benefits to freedom communities.
DAOWISP is a gradual project of mine to develop a decentralized ISP model. All the Internet-Freedom projects take the semi-centralized physical landscape of the Internet as a given, being government-controlled territory and something to work around. But we WISPs have been operating a viable alternative for almost a decade now and cover something like 60% of the US population at this point.
And our gear has taken a quantum leap in performance over the past year, putting small business ISPs on an equal speed/price footing with the likes of Frontier, Comcast, Centurylink, etc. And of course we can push bandwidth around WAY cheaper than a fiber-optic network like Google's! 2016-2017 will see some big shaking up in the ISP competition landscape...
I'd really like to see the thousands of WISPs spread around the world team up with the freedom community, as just about every blockchain project out there could benefit from an independent network.
Yeah, but getting the economics right on this kind of thing is tricky, especially without massively spamming blockchains with expensive microtransactions. I'd love to see more about this, though. You say ~60% of the US population is covered, so how do I get on one of these networks instead of the local cable cartel's?
In your area, it'd be New River Valley Unwired - https://www.nrvunwired.net
Their listed speeds aren't quite as fast as what I offer here in NE Oregon, but similar technology.
The idea with listing on Bitshares is as part of figuring out how to set up a localized crypto-equity system for DAOWISP so that interested customers in an unserved area could essentially self-franchise via the DAO system (hire from a contractor pool for construction of their tower site(s), hire contract home installers, support services, etc.)
And of course set up a smart-contract 'Interconnect Agreement' to obtain bandwidth from their closest DAOWISP Ring Network.
It's a slow-going solo effort for now, as I have time between running my ISP and building my place.
If I had the capital, I'd love to hire Cryptonomex to help build the framework. Haven't yet gotten enough exposure though.
I'm actually in Austin, Texas now, but clear your cache soon, as I'm moving in a month. :) I'm staying pretty mobile, right now.
The speeds they list are OK, but not competitive with the local cable cartel (Comcast), so if I were to go with them it would be as a protest against ISP monopolization. :\
Sounds like you've got some pretty elaborate plans in mind for how this will work. I'd love to learn more about it (and I'm quite confident @troglodactyl would too). I could write the Bitshares smart contracts for you too, when you're ready for that. The most qualified devs for that are probably Dan Larimer, myself, and Ben Johnson; and I think both Dan and Ben are pretty heavily involved with Steem these days (Dan obviously is; not sure about Ben). I could definitely make some time for those integrations, if the price was right. :)
Cool, well that's how sleeper-phases of big projects work, gradually pulling talent together! As I stitch this thing together, I'd definitely like to keep in touch. tech at hyperborean.io
Yeah, a lot of WISPs out there are using the older-generation AirMax-M radio equipment - they'll probably have faster options in certain areas if they're rolling out the new AirMax-AC stuff that is hitting the market. And the customer service is usually above-par :)
I've had a lot of background experience to draw from as there are only 2 of us covering 1000 square km with our own telecom grid, part of which is solar-powered. So almost everything is done in-house, server admin, tower construction and climbing, off-grid power wiring, switch/router/firewall setup, billing & accounting, on and on!
And with the DAO frameworks, cryptocurrency payment acceptance, and internal blockchain databases tracking the relevant metrics, and decentralized media systems like MAIDsafe/Storj/LBRRY/etc, there's potential to decentralize the whole telecom industry. :)
Accept any cryptocurrency you want at zero cost:
https://steemit.com/crypto-news/@kencode/smartcoins-pos-the-free-way-for-companies-to-accept-crypto-currencies
oooooh, this looks fantastic! Thanks :D
Wow! Fort Galt looks like a fascinating project!
Thanks Stevie. It's been a pretty awesome way to spend the past couple years and it's only just beginning :)
I don't see any big downsides in accepting SMD. Because it's price stable, value will hold (as long as dollar itself keeps it's value).
Biggest problem might be liquidity. If you have lots of SMD that you need to convert other currencies quickly, will there be enough liquidity in the markets?
That's the big question, yeah. Will there be enough liquidity on July 4th or will we have to wait for the market to blossom a bit more first?
This might be a non-problem. If there is not much liquidity, not that many will want to pay with SMD. And if somebody pays with it, it's not necessarily a big sum so there will not be any problems to get it changed to other currency when needed.