Basic Income and Blockchain Courts | Hacker News Reader

Basic Income and Blockchain Courts

bloombergview.com

73 pointskgwgk24 comments

I don't know what cohesive point this article is trying to make. The writing is all over the place, jumping from one pop-finance idea to the next without exploring any of them in the depth they deserve. I've seen plenty of great pieces on both blockchain and basic income, but this isn't one of them.

The direction of the article deteriorates over time. The last section is an incoherent, unfocused mass of linkspam to Buzzfeed-quality stories. While I'm sure there are some great SEO reasons for Bloomberg View to do it this way, I think we're worse off as readers for it.

No upvote. Levine's work is arguably off-topic, and certainly not the quality I expect on HN.

It's not trying to make a cohesive point; it's a collection of short, unrelated posts bundled together. Many of Matt Levine's posts [0] are in this style, including his most recent post [1].

[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/view/contributors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matth... [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-06/hedge-fund...

It's a daily newsletter ("Money Stuff"), not an article. Agreed that it's a weird thing to post on HN.

Agreed. I'd the exact same feeling reading the piece.

Instead of a basic income, we could have Universal Jobs where anyone could make $X an hour in a government jobs center computing hashes by hand for a welfare cryptocurrency.

Roll the dice, use your government-approved paper to calculate the hash, and claim your prize if you're the first winner. Prizes and difficulty are designed to statistically provide a target $/hour.

Why do that when a computer could?

Because then rich capital-holders could buy up all the computing power and take control of all the welfare money. Chinese millionaires would end up taking money from needy Americans.

Using this system, we ensure that no single capital-holder controls too much mining power over the currency. Every working man is judged on his merits, using a system that is hard for any one actor to parallelize or scale. So many many distinct actors work to secure the underlying currency, and it is safer against large banks or governments.

This is silly. One small mining computer would be faster than all the human hashers combined. There is no special hashing function a human can always do better than a computer.

Except that if I tell you I have "a million people" in my secret facility manually hashing and in reality there's a single GPU crunching, I'd still make more. How would you audit this?

Thatsthejoke.jpg

Joscha Bach recently said something similar. [1]

A society that provides a basic income may also need an ethic that encourages not-for-profit activity, creativity and community involvement. The "Universal Job" is just to be a healthy human being and make your community - no matter if it's the global civilization or just your own family - "richer" in a non monetary sense.

It seems to me that this would be a much more efficient kind of "employment" for the public good than paying people to do some useless bureaucratic work.

[1]: https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/727893059934031873

But will women and non-Asian minorities be given more tries or more error tolerance as a way of affirmative action/lowering the standards?

Please join me in a tiny tear shed for the oppressed white male.

Universal jobs implies that the job in itself is why we work while the reality is that we work mostly for the benefits of that job.

If technology could be used to automate the whole chain of touch points and thus remove the need for human incentives to get things produced why insist on an old paradigm with what would mostly be the most shitty jobs you could find.

That seems like using technology for the opposite of what it's good for and for insisting on an very undesirable part of being alive.

Which is not a good substitute for Basic Income, add part of the motivation for Basic Income is to make it easier for people to reach their potential in an evolving market by allowing them to spend time retraining for jobs with emerging demand rather than stuck in dead-end jobs. Universal make-work jobs don't replace Basic Income, they are just an unproductive form of slavery by economic duress.

It doesn't make any sense unless you count human labour costs at $0/hour.

You take $10 of taxes and $10 of work ($20 total), and give $10 to the worker.

But maybe 50% waste is still better by order of magnitude than average government projects.

So people do pointless work to "earn" their bread? This is not a society I would like to live in.

The premise that everyone must work to "earn" the right to food and shelter is the essence of fascism. Humans have always been creatures of community.

This is excellent satire y'all.

Basic income is okay but it's missing non monetary rewards and education. Basic income needs to be tied to a system where users learn more about their natural behaviors and become incentivized to self improve in the ABSENCE of the government.

This can be done with libertarian paternalism/nudge theory concepts.

Why not pay a basic income to students for passing tests?

It would result in funneling government resources through gullible or cynical citizens into the test prep industry. Only a depressingly small portion would go towards actual education.

That would be student benefits[1] rather than basic income. At least here in Finland (and other Nordics) we already do that. Basic income is supposed to be given unconditionally to everyone.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_benefits

Is blockchain doing anything other than keeping hacky fintech "journalists" employed?

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