Cooperatives, Open Source Technology, and Cryptocurrency — The Perfect Mix

What are Cooperatives?

Very few people understand cooperatives. Despite the business model of a cooperative being of the oldest business models known to man, still it is a mystery to most — especially people from the USA.

Did you know one of the top richest companies in the world is a cooperative? That cooperative is none other than Land’0'lakes. They are a multi-billion dollar cooperative.

So what is a cooperative?

A cooperative is a business or organization that is owned and run jointly by its members who act as equal shareholders to elect officers and board members to represent the company. Members usually also share in the profits and/or benefits of the cooperative.

Sadly, that doesn’t really mean a lot to most people, so allow me to break it down in more realistic terms. Cooperatives, are businesses that run as democratic societies, or republic within national societies.

Basically they are a community and all the members work together for the same common goal — in business this is typically about profits though not always.

So if we look at Marketers Cooperative what we find are a bunch of business owners that all work together towards the same common goal. Our goal is to increase the success rate of startup businesses on the internet.

In that mission, we have graphic artists and video creators that sell their services at extreme discounts to other members, and in return they may get things like discounts in web development or help with marketing or whatever may be needed. Like a say, a society working together.

Because our cooperative is made up of business owners who each pay their own taxes, we are a type of cooperative that is except from taxes when dealing with member to member services. Instead each business owner must claim their own services on their taxes. Our community itself is tax free.

Everyone works to support everyone.

What is Open Source Technology?

Although its been around for years, most people don’t actually understand a lot about open source technology either.

They have no idea what the difference in open source is verse that of free software.

They have no idea how open source helps innovate the world and challenge mainstream companies to come up with better software and design.

In general, open source refers to any computer program, software, application, website or image whose source code is made available for use or modification as users and other developers see fit within limitation of a specific license.

Basically it is software, that others can use for free. The largest open source project in the world I do believe is the Linux operating System and second to that is the wordpress platform.

Opensource software drives companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft to be extremely innovative in order to bring a premium service to a marketplace that already has free alternatives.

At our advertising cooperative we have embraced this technology as it seems only logical if our mission is to increase success rate, we need solutions that reduce costs for startups — and opensource is that answer.

So we created a marketing platform called Open Source Marketing Platform — OSMP.

OSMP has a TON of marketing applications built into it. Anyone can come and download this platform and setup a marketing network, or strip it down to a multitude of marketing websites, or just one, or whatever they need. The features it comes with are:

1. Social Network: OSMP is a complete social network featuring friends lists, block lists, social streams, ability to upload photo’s and video, ability to communicate with friends messenger system, social profiles, and a ton of other features. They also earn crypto rewards for making connections, comments, liking things, etc.
2. Badging Network: OSMP comes with 35 different badges integrated with the system. Users of OSMP websites are awarded badges, bonus advertising, and crypto rewards for each badge they collect. Badges are displayed on the social profile of the user’s account.
3. Gaming Network: OSMP comes with two games by default.There are several add-on games that may be purchased. All games allow members of OSMP sites to earn crypto rewards and advertising credits.
4. Traffic Exchange: OSMP has an integrated content discovery network, also known as a traffic exchange. Advertising come here and use advertising credits to get collectors to view their websites. Collectors in turn come to view websites in exchange for MCCR crypto rewards.
5. Safelist/Viral Mailer: OSMP has an integrated safelist, also called a viral mailer. The way it works is very similar to the way the traffic exchange works only instead of using advertising credits to get website traffic views, advertisers use them to send emails to collectors. Those collectors in turn earn rewards for opening emails, clicking links, and correctly solving captcha images.
6. Banner Exchange: OSMP’s banner exchange works as any standard banner exchange. A user ads banners and is given a banner code. They can then use that banner code on their own websites and in other places banners are allowed to be displayed. They earn credits for displaying those banners, which they can in turn use to have their own banners displayed. Collectors also earn crypto rewards for displaying banners.
7. Social Post Exchange: OSMP social post exchange does not work like any other social post exchange on earth. We do not require access to API’ to verify posts have been made. This means we can assign credits and rewards for making posts on social networks without fear of violating that network’s terms of service. Current OSMP works with Apsense, Twitter, Google+, and Facebook Pages.
8. Article Exchange: The article exchange is very unique to OSMP and is a first of its kind SEO marketing method. The way it works is simple. Advertiser can request articles be posted about their businesses on any public site online. The advertiser fills out criteria of the article. Collectors can then earn crypto rewards for going out to blogs, article sites, and social networks to post articles. Articles are all hand written and then automatically scanned to ensure criteria was met. Credits and MCCR rewards are assigned after correct verification.

Marketers cooperative created the Open Source Marketing Platform using an open source license called CDDL v1.0. The majority of open source software seems to use GPL license. We opted for the CDDL because it allowed the most freedom for the end user.

CDDL unlike GPL allows users to take our opensource code, and use it in other commercial applications that they have without having to worry about closed source licenses.

What is Cryptocurrency?

Most people at this point have at least heard of bitcoin. Still many are skeptical about it and don’t trust it, and even less understand that bitcoin is not cryptocurrency — its simply A currency.

Cryptocurrency is a digital currency in which encryption techniques are used to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds, operating independently of a central bank.

Now those who are not technically inclined about crypto technology have fears it can somehow be hacked or cracked despite that not being the case, however overall cryptocurrency is a new form of currency run entirely from computers — in a similar way that credit cards are all run by banking networks.

The idea behind cryptocurrency is to give people the ability to own their own money outside any existing federal banking or government system. Although not impossible its very hard to follow bitcoin transactions around to determine who had the currency and who didn’t — making it very hard for countries to tax.

From a cooperative perspective, this is absolutely brilliant. Not only can a cooperative now act as a society within a nation, now it can also fund and regulate its own currency thus giving the members of a cooperative absolute control over their cooperative, their business practices, their board members, and the currency they receive their income in.

Now the way a cryptocurrency works is off a mining system. Mining is the act of solving complex equations as a “proof” of each transaction. Its a complex system that most people don’t need to understand. What they do need to understand is it works very similar to gold.

People mine, when they do a “proof” its like “finding gold”. Each time they find another piece, they have more of the currency. Anyone can be taught to mine and any computer can mine. What types of currencies they can mine, vastly depends on the hardware. At this point, unless one has lots of expensive equipment mining bitcoin from a computer, is very hard.

What the MCCR?

What Marketers Cooperative did is we mixed all these technologies into a perfect business model.

First we created our own cryptocurrency called MCCR — Marketers Cooperative Crypto Rewards. We integrated this into the open source marketing platform that we talked about above.

Every person using the Marketers Cooperative website which is running OSMP earns a little fraction of MCCR for everything they do on the site. The complete list of how they earn is above already. Just small little actions of interacting and using the site and viewing other peoples ads and that sort of thing.

We call these people collectors.

Now as mentioned, OSMP is integrated with MCCR however as an opensource platform, we give all OSMP administrators the option to disable MCCR. If they don’t, they can instead opt to purchase MCCR from Marketers Cooperative and they can distribute that to their members.

Marketers cooperative will then offer to buy back all MCCR from the members at rate determined at the time of the sale.

All people who setup OSMP website we refer to as OSMP administrators. If they enable MCCR on their sites, their members have the ability to download a crypto wallet to their desktop to store all the MCCR they collect.

This is how we spread our coin to others.

How does this benefit Cooperative Members?

Marketers Cooperative

Marketers Cooperative has a series of services we sell to the public. These include 5 website upgrades, 5 advertising credit packages, 2 forms of advertising within specific systems of OSMP, 5 cryptocurrency sale options, web hosting, webinar hosting, and additional plugins and games sold for OSMP.

On top of what we offer to the public, we also have membership dues for those who wish to join our cooperative. These dues give one hosting at no additional cost, we setup the OSMP platform for the user on the hosting, provide them webinar solutions, and offer bi-weekly marketing education realtime internet classrooms .

80% of all sales we make, is taken and put into a fund that is used to value MCCR. The other 20% is used to pay bills and commissions on sales.

Now unlike other cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin MCCR is not public. This means not just anyone can mine the coin as they can with other coins.

Only members of marketers cooperative can mine MCCR. This means — the more MCCR a member mines, and the more sales that Marketers Cooperative makes, the more the value of the cooperative that member holds.

This allows for a truly fair cooperative. Members earn solely on the mining efforts they put in, mixed with the marketing efforts they put forth to bring in new members.

Now there are other ways to earn the coins and we grant bonus coins to members the more they help. We premined 50% of 100,000,000 total possible MCCR. These premined coins are not part of the evaluation of the total coins in circulation.

That is to say, when a member comes to sell MCCR to Marketers Cooperative, we take the total number of MCCR that exist outside the premined wallet, and divide that by the current value of Marketers Cooperative to come up with the value per coin at the time of sale.

This means the longer one stays a member of the cooperative and the more MCCR they mine, the more money they will make.

It becomes a perfect mix of social equality in the business place by members of the cooperative being the owners of the cooperative, it allows open source technology to create a fair competition in the marketplace, and it allows one to control the currency that they are paid in without fear of government or banking regulations.

Please check out Marketers Cooperative and reach out to us on the community forums to learn more about becoming a cooperative member and to get more details about what the benefits are.