Reply To: Questions regarding DPF.

[amcnea]

Of course, I’m thinking about FFS as a nonprofit organization with a mission. You’re thinking about investors in the LPP experiment – a for profit endeavor. It’s a similar thing.

What exactly is the relationship between FFS and LPP? If this is already discussed somewhere can you point me to it please?

Now, the only problem with this that I see is that “micro-investors” or, non-accredited investors who want to chip in funds to the experiment, will get nothing back from their investment. They can only donate. So, this tends to discourage people from donating. Let the big fish be a free rider on my dime! Hah! Let them come up with the whole thing. This issue has always bugged me.

Can something be done about this? I don’t know what the law is or how this can be handled but here is a hypothetical. Could FFS collect micro-investments from registered users, and hence keep information about 1) the Micro-Investor and 2) the amount invested. FFS Could then group this money together into amounts large enough such that shares of LPP could be bought @ $50 per share. Finally FFS could have a broker whom is an “accredited investor” and can purchase the shares from LPP.

Would that be realistic? Or is there just to much red tape to actually do something like this?

As for doing the tracking the users and amounts invested, this can be done easily with paypal. It is called IPN or Instant Payment Notification, and paypal will automatically contact your server whenever a payment is made. Anyways, I have written code to do this about 2 or 3 times now, and it isn’t that hard. I went ahead a found some stuff on Paypal IPN and ExpressionEngine. It says it can do it using off the shelf parts: http://expressionengine.com/docs/modules/simple_commerce/sc_cp_ipn.html