Decentralised peer-to-peer crypto-veganism on the blockchain
The crypto-vegan blockchain you've been waiting for if you've been waiting for a crypto-vegan blockchain.
"Someone can be the biggest vegan activist but when they have a dollar bill in their pocket, yesterday it could have been at McDonald's," said VeganNation founder Isaac Thomas to the Jerusalem Post. "It's like the idea of blood diamonds. For the vegan person, the old currency is the same thing."
That's his explanation of the existence of VeganCoin, and its system of proven clean providence on the blockchain.
Whether it's possible for any kind of electronic money to ever be tainted providence might be a purely philosophical question. Even without crypto, and just with credit cards, electronic bank transfers or any kind of transaction except physical cash, you aren't actually moving any specific dollars. It's just a mark on a ledger designed to keep track of who owns how much.
So if you're worried about your money having been previously spent on animal cruelty, just pay with your card and imagine that you're moving only the cleanest dollars. If that doesn't work, you could try either printing your own cash at home (legal note: do NOT do this) or starting a vegan-themed cryptocurrency.
"The VeganCoin will bring the transparency vegans demand," says the VeganCoin white paper, or green paper as it calls itself, "assuring consumers that their money won't eventually end up in the hands of business owners that do not meet the nation's cruelty-free standards."
Of course, there's no possible way to assure this. If VeganCoin ever accrues value and starts being traded on exchanges, there's no reason someone couldn't use it to transparently buy or sell an abattoir as long as there's a willing counterparty.
"The idea is to build a full vegan ecosystem where vegans can find food, commerce and content in one place," Thomas explains. When members join the platform, they'll be given a VeganNation passport in the form of a digital wallet, which can be used to interact with other community participants and create a closed economy that only runs on the cleanest imaginary money.
"This makes it easier to sustain a vegan lifestyle," Thomas says. "One of main challenges of turning and staying vegan is the lack of a support system around you. So by bringing people together around dinners it will help provide a support system for people who are going vegan."
VeganNation also flirts with actual functionality in the form of blockchain tracking to prove the vegan origins of products being sold, including food, clothing and anything else. Supply chain security and tracking is one of the most widely accepted functions of distributed ledger technology, so it could quite viably serve this purpose.
Much like the planned DHL/Accenture pharmaceutical supply chain blockchain could theoretically save up to a million human lives per year, or other blockchains that could help curb the devastating opiate epidemic or just save countless billions of dollars over the year, the VeganNation blockchain can reassure people that they're using real faux leather instead of real leather leather.
According to one ICO review site, VeganNation completed its fundraising on 1 July, having raised US$3.8 million of its intended $60 million. But according to the VeganNation website, it hasn't even started yet and is in fact still in some kind of open pre-sale stage, with over $5 million behind it. They even have a sales live chat, so it's easier to hand over money.
Source: The VeganNation website.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author holds ETH, IOTA, ICX, VET, XLM, BTC and NANO.
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