RE: How I noticed Verge and FairCoin looking at market charts alone
As far as I can now tell, Faircoin is pegged 2:1 to EUR, backed by FairCoop's promise to redeem for EUR if asked by a registered merchant. This explains market price movement during the recession. So far, despite quick 20-30% recession, the peg held.
FairCoop itself seems to be a group of idealistic rebels. Fascinating story of a guy robbing banks for half a million € to eventually fund a cryptocoin-based freedom movement speaks for itself: <1> <2>
Ideological questions aside, their tech seems solid for my unsophisticated eye. They have a working net that serves real people and real merchants - not much of them so far, but it works. Whitepaper is open and honest about what, how, and why they do; and does not have obvious technical flaws visible to my eye. My initial concerns about governance centralization were pretty much answered by their FAQ. It's still not a democracy, no matter what they claim - it's an oligarchy of (hopefully benevolent and well hidden) chain admins who has power to replace themselves and validated nodes if voted 5 of 8. FairCoop uses telegram channels extensively for collective decision making. Further investigation would require one to dive into those telegram channels.
Meaningful research, congratulations. Just a precision.. The chain admins just execute decisions of the assemblies of Faircoop. So they are not any oligarchy. If any of them disobey the Faircoop consensus, would be discarted of this role...
As long as chain admins are (mostly) benevolent, that works. But I don't see any protection from the case when corrupted chain admins collude. Did I miss something? There's no public voting mechanism built-in to replace admins. Therefore, it can not be called a democracy.
Maybe that's fine. Maybe sole possibility of hard fork should keep admins in check. But still, my point being that a single non-forked instance of FairCoin is an oligarchy.
CVN also have a technical way to not obey chain admins actions... At this point CVN and chain admins control each others.
And yes, as a last chance, ever the Faircoop assembly can deploy a new wallet, which change the chain admins... if there are the need.
Thanks for enlighten me on faircoin. Are you still not involved? The main idea is to keep the money in their own system and by getting more and more people involved to increase its value and create a parallel economy.