Transitioning existing companies into Basis

[orthecreedence]

Some thought needs to be put into how existing companies might "dip their toes" into the Basis network.

As far as in-network buying power, a very interesting idea came up in the Matrix room: let companies purchase their initial allocation via dollars at an exchange rate of 1:1 (assuming the peg #88) which allows them to start ordering products at-cost up to that allocation. This gives them a way to start trying out the network in small bits, while also contributing. Obviously, they would have to be a co-op.

More thought is needed here, though:

• If a company has one foot in, one foot out, how is this handled? Is it handled in any special way? Does it need to be?
  • If they have an allocation, then they can only order that amount of stuff. They can't just transfer it to their market-facing side of the company, because then their buy-in capital is locked away. They would need to "sell" it, and must do so at a profit or their allocation is chipped away.
  • How do we keep the costs from getting polluted? There's no way to tell if the inputs leave the system then re-enter later on. In other words, they could order widgets from the network, run them through a number of internal processes, then make them available to the network again as chairs (but with none of the original costs in-tact). In other words, Basis operates on the principles of transparency, and if we don't know the input and output chains for a particular product (because the company is only half-in) then it's impossible to trust the resulting costs. We need to be able to follow the chain (or to just set it as a currency cost and call it a day).

So companies would have to account for costs, but unless they are using Basis for all their ordering, there's nothing stopping them from injecting bad costs (via replacing products). Are there machanisms we can employ to fix this?