Written by Hey everyone! We are so excited to let you know the site is monetized. You have the ability to accept cash payments for which you keep everything, online payments for a fee that plants trees and draws down carbon, and of course points payments!
Cash Payments
Cash payments are obviously a bit difficult to coordinate, but: It’s great for keeping physical goods local if you want to try that out. The marketplace can be tooled to accept physical goods too we just don’t want to add to shipping emissions even if we are planting trees with every transaction. So cash payments for local goods keeps things neat but we don’t want to force you 🙁 you keep everything when you accept cash, to encourage buying local!
Online Payments with Stripe and Paypal
You can accept online payments using Paypal or Stripe to cash out. You get 92% and we take 8% and plant a tree in a food forest through Trees.org for $0.35USD or £0.25 GBP with the payment fee. Stripe also gives 1% to Climate initiatives, more on Stripe Climate here. We can bump it up to 1.5% if you want. Physical Goods (categorized as such) add a £2 GBP charge to plant 6 trees which will absorb 60kg of CO2 in their first year, to offset any and all shipping.
Point Payments and The Roots of Trust
You can also of course still accept points payments, labelled “Mycred” at the checkout sometimes, these are site points, Dews. Dews prices are equivalent to money prices. They are only for digital goods and services, physical goods cost money only. However, this means in theory people can get your goods for free using site points. So be prepared for that. It is a type of benefit to the Fastfrwrd Commons but people will not always have points, some will want to be financial patrons and you can also probably have offsite upsells to your Venmo and Cashapp or whatever. If you provide a service you can detail what you offer for points different from cash on the product page.
The rules are not strict. We know asking for you to give things for points makes you think differently about what you would want money for but could also give away free.
It is a different kind of marketplace with different kinds of requirements. We are preparing information on how the system secures and guarantees itself. We want you to give to the Fastfrwrd Commons because you know we are doing ecological things.
So to build trust we view the ecosytem as having a world tree with roots below everything offering support and structure. The roots have large veins and small ones that secure the system. Here are some of main roots and veins they channel:
- There is the root vein of proof posts related to removing oil, gas or plastic.
- There is the root vein of cross-referencing. As posts and points accumulate, you are able to distinguish patterns that corroborate the overall veracity of the posts.
- The root vein of referencing/reviews. Doing eco work and climate actions with someone opens up the opportunity to get a review. Eventually, someone in the ecosystem will realize you do not know anything about ecology or eco work/climate action and can leave the evidence should they wish, or rather, encourage the person to join the game of planet saving fully, try again, and hopefully get some real reviews next time.
- The passive root vein: By virtue of being on a green platform, the user is of ecological benefit and advantage and has wise information to impart, even if we don’t like it. They are a part of our ecosystem and we want to grow trust, grow participation and increase group benefit.
- There is the root vein of community where your local community group where you get references/reviews from when you start out, they can help keep people accountable and corroborate efforts.
- There is the root vein of mutual opportunity. If you have the ability to sell on the marketplace at any time, you may want to keep the ecosystem honest so that people are not ripping you off when purchasing what you have to offer.
- There is the root vein of intrinsic merit. The cause of Climate Action stirs millions to take on the crisis, people are already motivated. Points, payments and reputation is just the cherry on top.
- The non-monetary root vein where alternative currency and sharing mean that in order to participate you have to present yourself well.
- The data root vein, is the fact that we require information to process payments which means unlawful behaviour can be tied to the specified details.
There are other roots, just as a tree creates networks underground, and of course there are possible optimizations. But suffice it to say, we are instituting a system of trust and coexistence, acceptance and growth.
And we gonna take the money from the fucking billionaires and circulate it with ecologists!! >_<
As for reviews/references, it is recommended to start local with people in your community. Build trust there first before relying on reputation and interacting with unreferenced internet strangers if you do not want to.
Reputation is a sort of payment because you are letting the internet know about your track record. It is a currency that requires data relinquishing of a sort for minting. So that is also a part of the exchange.
How excited are you? Of course we still face the issue of not paying taxes in Jamaica fully or having to split the benefit with UK entities (the reason why the website currency is in GBP). We are still working toward a Global South and Jamaica benefitting payment portal that allows maximum wealth tranfer from Global North to Global South or at least balances… I guess that is what we have now. Mutual benefit. But it is digging into the Jamaican’s pocket who needs the money more to deal with more issues but is often given less to work with.
Anyhoo.
Payments! Capitalism meh. Giving people a means of earning? Yay! Helping ecologists maintain balance and redistribute wealth? HECK YEAH!!!!
<3