Show HN: Swift Demand – A Basic Income Experiment | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Swift Demand – A Basic Income Experiment

swiftdemand.com

16 pointszaguios22 comments

Why "Legal First Name" and "Legal Last Name" for me this threw up warning flags. Why do you need to know that?

What's to prevent me from lying? Also, with no "work" (cpu or human) required to get coins there's no incentive to NOT lie and just make a ton of accounts to multiply your effective daily income.

Basic income is a great concept, but the cash isn't magically created. The govt's don't just print new cash. if they do they cause inflation which devalues the current cash that's in circulation. every day you put more "money" into circulation you're devaluing the money that's already there. This just seems to violate fundamental economic concepts. I don't see why anyone would want to take this in exchange for goods or work.

For Swift Demand to work your account will need to be completely tied to your true identity. Initially the methods of verification aren't very strong to prevent any unneeded friction for early adopters of the service. Once Swift Coins start having real value I will be placing much stricter rules and requirements for identity verification. Starting with extremely strict regulations is both hard to enforce at the start and will harm the ability for Swift Demand to succeed.

Adding more money into the economy will constantly devalue it, you are correct. As I mentioned in another comment in order for this to work there needs to be speculation that the currency eventually will become more valuable and people start to buy it as a form in investment in a similar style to how bitcoin started. Once value has been established and new coins are created at a constant pace the hope is that it will be usable in the same fashion as any other form of currency.

Government due indeed print new cash, it is what causes the constant inflation that is present for all major currencies. All of your arguments appear like they would be the same for other real world currencies that do indeed function normally. There's a decent chance that it will fail, but I believe it's worth it to try.

This looks really interesting. I think I get what you are trying to do. Just want to give a bit of feedback:

Even after clicking through "Learn More" and your FAQ, I still wasn't sure what this is or how it works. I am familiar with online currencies and basic income, so I would imagine a visitor to the site less familiar with this stuff would be even more confused.

I get it's an "experiment" and TNSTAAFL and it's still very new. But maybe a sample explanation of how a new user might sign up, receive coins and then use them somewhere would help clarify things.

Thanks for the feedback! I really appreciated it.

Is there anything in particular that you would suggest to add to the landing page to clarify it? I was hoping the graphics would give users a basic idea on how exactly it worked. I would like to focus on making the intent as clear as possible so I'm all ears as far as suggestions go.

I would like to make the process more clear with an example, I think this will be much easier to accomplish once I can get a few vendors to agree to use the service for some small items. The site was just released today which is why it's difficult for me to implement this currently. I do agree that having instant feedback of being able to sign up and immediately use coins is crucial for people less familiar with Basic Income to grasp the idea quickly so I will make this a focus of mine.

I understand this is very new. As more people visit the site hopefully a lot of feedback will stream in for you. I'm just one person so I can't really suggest what you should add, only where I found things wanting. If you aggregate feedback from visitors and do your A/B testing or whatever system you use, that should point to the right places to make changes.

For example: Your landing page says "You can do whatever you want with them". Imagine a person not familiar with any of this stuff, I could imagine such a person asking themselves, "what can I do with them?" and "what's the catch?"

For someone familiar with online currencies and/or basic income, I could imagine such a person clicking around and finding no info or evidence of a back-end infrastructure that would support this idea. Nor is there any explanation how you expect to give away something every day and have users or vendors want to accept such a thing for something they do know the value of. Play all product launch games you want, but you are asking for people's real first and last name and their email, I don't see experienced early-adopters giving this up without more proof of concept and knowing more about you guys and your plans.

I wish you a lot of success, just wanted to point out two groups of users who might be more apprehensive to sign up and why.

Be warned, this is a very very elaborate scheme to phish peoples cc data. If you dig around, you will see that there is a ton of fake blog posts to give it some fake credibility citing the same thing with fake timestamps and such. Once you look into the coin itself, its linked to a bunch of super shady sites and if you want to "cash out" theres only one super shady site that requires you to enter your cc number cvv and expiration date. Wonder why they need that :)

There is a cash out option? Where did you dig? google for the domain?

This is complete nonsense. There are no blog posts about SwiftDemand nor is there any place where you have to enter in sensitive data. If you want to make claims like this please cite sources instead of being an "online detective".

Edit: I just did some digging myself, it appears that there is another currency called Swiftcoin out there that is based on the blockchain that I was not aware of. Please be aware that this Swiftcoin is in no way related to Swift Demand. I may need to change the name of Swift Demand's currency to avoid people accidentally assuming these are related.

Second Edit: I have updated the website and removed all references to the term Swiftcoin. The website will continue to be SwiftDemand, but the currency will simply be called coins.

Sorry for the accusation, but the two sure seemed very similar in terms of naming. One thing I did notice is that your execution of the website was leagues away from the rest of the guys but I just assumed they uped their game. I'll play along with the project since if it is legit is, it is interesting to me and would provide value.

Good luck with the project. Also if you need extra input feel free to ask.

Happy to write anyone a poem at the rate of 100 Swiftcoin per Haiku. Simply respond to this post with a subject for the poem and transfer the 100 to #Poetry.

This is awesome, I'll take you up on that offer. Can you write a poem/haiku about Swift Demand itself? Coins have been sent.

Sweet deal. First customer buy one get one free bonus. Is it easy to see I am not a poet?

  Swift demand oh boy!
  Writing poems for a money,
  It gives me such joy.

  It's ideas like these 
  that inspire hope for us yet.
  We won't stop growing.

Poems can also be requested via... http://swiftpoetry.club/

Hoping to open it up to other types of poems in the near future.

While I disagree with some of the details with your approach, I think this is a great Idea. It really has gotten my mind racing with different solutions for the problems such a system presents. I signed up and will definitely keep an eye on it.

Is there an rss-feed I can add to my rss reader to keep me updatet on new developments?

I would love to discuss your disagreements, I've thought a great deal about my implementation, but there may very well be several ways I could improve my approach. Feel free to shoot me an email at zaguios@gmail.com if you would like to talk more.

I don't have anything set up yet to update people on new developments, but it is something that I'm looking at implementing soon as I continue development. I'll let you know once I set something up.

Free stuff! Great!

But I imagine one barrier to this gaining traction is trust. Cryptocurrencies are open source and peer to peer, everyone can see everything that goes on. Do you have any plans on open sourcing the current implementation or perhaps moving to a blockchainlike implementation after the initial experiment?

The big problem I see is the 3%. why wouldn't I just use paypal if I wanted to lose 3% per transaction.

outside of the transparency/trust issue.

The 3% is there due to the fact that Swift Demand is trying to be more than just another currency. It's also supposed to be able to act as a way to perform normal day to day commerce. This 3% fee is needed to provide buyer and seller protections as well as support the development of new features for Swift Demand. I'm assuming you are asking why you want to use this over Paypal from a vendors point of view and there are several reasons.

The first one being that Paypal isn't known to very trustable and often freezes funds. The second is that I intend to eventually make a very developer friendly API that lets vendors add Swift Demand to their websites very easily. Early merchant adopters will also have the potential to set it up by allowing people to essentially sign up for their service for free by letting people set up a Swift Demand account and automatically transferring Swift Coins to the vendor for a subscription based service (This means merchants can sell their products without ever requiring a user to break out a credit card which could be a potential large source of extra revenue).

Signed up. Would be hard pressed to actually supply any products/services in return for Swift coins though. Cool experiment!

Agreed. I'm genuinely curious as to why anyone would start accepting Swift Coins as payment for anything.

Yea, it will be very difficult at the beginning to convince people to actually accept Swiftcoin for services. In order for this to occur there will need to be speculation that coins will be worth a certain amount in the future.

I.E. if a person is willing to make the bet that Swift Coins will become valuable in the future they might try to buy a large amount now for a discounted price so in the future they can turn a profit. Once this begins to occur it will likely become a self-fulfilling prophecy since more users will want to sign up since the coins will have value due to people buying them as an investment. Once the price stabilizes at a reasonable number it can then proceed to be used as a normal currency.

send me monies #Shravan

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