I am a Catalan activist fully committed toward the idea of “radical social change” for the past 17 years.
Here’s my story: During my years as an activist, I have been working toward empowering grassroots social movements and building broad self managed alternatives to the capitalist system (which is largely disturbance of the status quo).
Since 2008, I have been in the limelight because I challenged the way banking system works, by taking out 492000 euros in loans out of 39 banks in 68 credit operations, and declare publically that I used that money for founding alternative projects to the capitalist system.
Essentially, I fund the creation of a new and better system for the people, using the old system as leverage (needless to say, I didn’t repay those loans). Since then Media has broadly named me the Robin Hood of the banks, or Robin Banks.
Between 2005 and 2008 I was preparing this banking disobedience action, to denounce the corrupt nature in which the centralized banking system has the privilege to create money out of thin air, and charge interest for it. On around this time without my knowledge, a guy named Satoshi was coming up with a plan of his own to destroy the banking cartels. Years later I learned about his experiment and my hat goes out to him for that, his development was indeed brilliant.
At 2010 I along with a group founded the Catalan Integral Cooperative. The main objective of the CIC was to enable grassroots social movements that could be entirely self-managed and have democracy, removing as much dependence from the current system as possible. 6 years later, we’re now an ecosystem comprising of more than 700 projects and upwards of 5 thousand people who are self-organized and determined to challenge unfair governmental systems. Through economical disobedience we are paving the way for autonomous institutions to rise.
In february 2013, I did not attend to the criminal trial, where I was asked to spend 8 years in prison for the multiple bank loans stunt.
Since then I’ve been living on the run outside of Spanish borders. So I started looking at alternate ways to hide my money movements, and that led me to discover Bitcoin and the technology behind it.
The blockchain and Bitcoin brought to the world one of the few missing pieces to make it possible to free ourselves from the shackles of the old economic system. The old centralized systems and the new decentralized systems have begun an open competition for domination in the world of the future. And for the first time in thousands of years, decentralized systems have another chance.
In recent years, new crypto currency exchange markets have appeared, uncontrollable by governments, and therefore it is no longer necessary to have a country and a central bank in order to have a currency that can be exchanged across the world. The banking system is outdated and more and more of us are realizing it, so the path we’re starting now is toward building something that will, some day, consolidate a global alternative. I thought that this should be adapted to be used by social cooperation ecosystems. Because for those of us who understand the world in terms of cooperation, decentralization is not enough; we believe this new world needs self-organization and mutual support, cooperation needs to infiltrate all those corners where domination is falling behind.
Cooperative, self-managed, collective, community-based projects are extending and multiplying everywhere. Although these kinds of practices are beginning to be quite interconnected at bioregional scale, they are still too isolated and there is mutual ignorance among initiatives that are thousands of kilometers from each other, on different continents, expressed in different languages.
We don’t want to stay as viewers in the confrontation between the old, oligarchy and the new Netarchy. We want a cooperative system that operates on a global scale as effectively as it does at a local scale. So my work largely focused on enabling social cooperation between humans with blockchain technology at the heart of it, facilitating true transparency and democracy.
FairCoop was born. Through mutual cooperation, we figured that we as people could come together and rise up strong and united. But we needed a cryptocurrency solution that at its core embodied the spirit of mutual cooperation and community spirit. So we looked to Faircoin. We brought it back from the dead and step by step, more little merchants in Spain, Greece and some parts of Europe use it, many of them are cooperative initiatives engaged with the faircoop vision.
That video was recorded with the launch:
We’re currently working on Faircoin 2, an upgrade to the faircoin blockchain to facilitate proof of cooperation. The goal of these changes is to turn faircoin into a currency that maintains all of the pros of bitcoin (transparency, fungibility, privacy etc) and adds mutual cooperation such that it paves the way for true balance between decentralization and fairness.
The collaboration between equals under FairCoop umbrella, multiplies the value of FairCoop’s social capital, which is expected to respond by growing in value relative to fiat currencies, and with this help to fund the cooperative development worldwide.
In other words, we have finally found a way to cooperatively organize, share, learn, help, one that can self-manage creating monetary value. Faircoin is essential the financial glue to help social cooperation and the FairCoop spirit. A lot of work has been done, since the FairCoop launch. Please visit http://fair.coop for more details.
Also look at this recent video on Vice. https://www.vice.com/video/daily-vice-robin-bank-enric-duran
But, I don’t want to finish my introduction, without mentioning the great potential of steemit (great work @dantheman and @ned), in the way for a very strong decentralized and collaborative media platform. I’m glad to be part of this revolution with all of you at steemit and together; we can finally achieve a strong alternative to centralized corporate media. This will need broad alliances of many peers, and perhaps Steemit and Faircoop communities could join forces and help us all have a fighting chance against the oligarchy.
My best revolutionary wishes,
Enric