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Comment by zaguios | Hacker News Reader

For anyone who is interested, I actually recently started a basic income experiment of my own. You can check it out here: https://www.swiftdemand.com/

Essentially the way that it works is that anyone who signs up will receive 100 coins each day and they may be freely traded among users. Ideally over time people will start assigning real world value to the coins and then the daily income you receive from Swift Demand will function exactly how Basic Income is supposed to work. If anyone has any questions or suggestions relating to the service I would love to discuss them.

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Interesting idea. The problem with this, though, is the same problem video game economies have with similar systems - people just make extra accounts.

Ensuring a single person has a single account would be a sort of holy grail here for many things. I'd love to hear ideas of a way to make it possible without sharing private information.

Yea, the extra account issue is something that I have thought a lot about. My initial plan is to slowly increase the requirements for information. In the very near future I will be making email verification a requirement. After that I will be adding required phone verification as an extra step. Eventually once the service grows large enough I will be forced to start requiring private information to ensure that people are unable to game the system by creating multiple accounts.

I had similar idea few years ago, and my rudimentary solution to this was web of trust. Create a way for every user to have ability to verify that they know another user. The user gets the whole daily allowance only if they are verified by at least 5 verified users. Until they are verified they only get a small percentage of the allowance. Tie this to crypto and you can help pretty decent web of trust that is so badly needed for crypto to be usable with emails

couldn't you just verify your own alt accounts?

first you need to be fully verified, so you would need to have at least 5 fully verified users vouch for you. System could also implement limits on how often and how many tomes one can verify other users. last but not least yoy could have cost of verification set very high, ie daily allowance paid by both veifier and the verified to the system to make fake verification costly

I think this sort of approach is required, but won't be sufficient. If you are going to give away money on the world stage, you will be dealing with both sophisticated, and barbaric efforts to undermine your system. You will have users being tricked, blackmailed, and violently forced into providing false verification.

In order to establish a "one account per human" rule, I think using some form of biometric identifier will be inevitable.

My first attempt would probably be a 600 DPI flatbed scan of both hands, palms down, with a nonce written on them with a marker. But since I am a stinker, the nonce would be a procedurally generated phrase similar to "22Feb2017 @randomhandle 03D6A9C1 #RateMyHands", and my trust would wither in the ensuing user data privacy scandal.

I'm sure someone more mature and responsible than I am could do better with that idea.

If you can determine that a new account has the same hands as an existing account, you can stop depositing into the old one, and continue with the new one. You can start with human eyeball inspection, and work your way up to automated hashes of extracted features.

I don't want to be too negative, but this seems very meaningless.

I've just given you 5000 morgante points for your comment. I'll give you 5 more tomorrow! Nobody accepts morgante points for anything so it's inherently meaningless.

A basic income program is only interesting if it's actually giving out something of value. Your first step should be to assign value to a new currency, not to start handing it out.

I don't see a plausible path to value for your currency. Fiat currencies derive their value from government. Cryptocurrencies derive it from math. Yours is derived from your "word" that you won't just give yourself half the currency if you feel like it.

Not to mention that you don't seem to have any mechanism in place to ensure 1 person:1 account.

"I don't want to be too negative, but this seems very meaningless."

It is meanigless but it wouldnt be hard to add some value to these "coins". For example, I can offer that one hour of my time as automation consultant is from today worth 100swifts. All you need is enough people to trust the system and it becomes real currency. after all money is just a way to allow people to trade their time or products without having to barter.

Sure, but it's a catch-22. If nobody trusts the currency, nobody will offer significant value for it. If nobody offers value for it, then nobody will ever trust it.

If I can buy an hour of your time for this, awesome. Make that offer. I'll take you up on it. Prepare to give me all your working time.

It does not mean that the price wont change soon;). Or that only limitrd amount of my time will be available for that price. also since you can only get 100swifts per day you can only get one hour of my work per day. of you need something done sooner you wineed to either invite more users to get paid for referral thus increasing number of users, or you will need to buy swifts on the market somewhere. that means you build value of swifts with your fiat currency. I might actually go for this;)

I just (trivially) opened two accounts. I didn't even have to use a proxy.

Since I have 800 coins now, where should I contact you to cash on on my day of free consulting? I've got some fun projects for you to work on.

> It does not mean that the price wont change soon;).

That's the problem though (that I'm trying to illustrate). All I'm doing is trusting that you'll want to continue to offer this trade, there's no guarantee of that. As it is, I wouldn't even pay $1 for 100 coins, even though your time is almost certainly worth more than that.

Obviously currently swifts are not worth anything so you will not be able to hire me using this "currency",but I dont see why this currency with few changes could not have a real value.

I tried to make a service to pay with swiftdemand If you are interested, please try it.

http://ameblo.jp/toshi-atm-yamato/entry-12249882284.html

#Toshiatyamato

A few years ago a bitcoin startup gave every MIT student one bitcoin to ivest or spend as they please. I never heard the followup of this project.

This is an interesting experiment. The one thing that people keep talking about is that with BI, people will have the freedom to do more things. Some might start a business (but that still usually requires additional extra money) or they might do things like volunteer or teach a class or help others.

I just had the thought that what if there was a currency that flipped it around. Doing good things for others is the only way to earn the currency. It obviously requires controls but then you could exchange it for food at a restaurant that accepts "good". I'm still thinking through a lot of implementation details but it feels like there is something here.

Interesting that you've created a centralized system. This means that everyone needs to trust you at all times, as there are no miners or active nodes that can "fork" your ledger or ignore your code updates by working off an old/alternative ledger.

This could actually be quite dangerous for you if your project gains any sort of traction. Some unsavory individuals might be quite tempted to harm you to gain access to your digital "mint". If you made any unpopular decisions regarding the rate of inflation, market access, experienced a security issue, etc. you would also be subject to a lot of vitriol and potential violence. Not to mention that the government of any country where this is introduced would probably be itching to shut you down (whether they could would be an entirely different story).

Personally I think the answer to inequality, which is the main issue that BI attempts to solve, lies in tax reform. Especially on the rate at which we tax capital, and the loopholes that allow corporations and wealthy individuals to harbor capital in some low-tax jurisdiction; capital that they could not have earned and accumulated without access to the infrastructure and public services in the nation where they live and conduct business.

I'm glad BI is raising awareness of the problem of inequality, but I think it focuses too much on the wrong side - the distribution of benefits, rather than the taxation of profits. Piketty studied wealth/capital for the better part of 20 years and came to the conclusion that we need a global income tax [1].

For further inspiration on your project RE: fake identities, check out how Auroracoin was "airdropped" to Icelandic citizens, who had to verify their identity with a government-issued ID number to be eligible to collect their coins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroracoin

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-05-11/picketty-...

>Ideally over time people will start assigning real world value to the coins and then the daily income you receive from Swift Demand will function exactly how Basic Income is supposed to work.

How is this going to happen?

Hopefully the same way that Bitcoin established value. Speculation that the coins will be more valuable in the future. Obviously since the coins are constantly being generated you are never going to have the coins reach values of $1000 each, but it is possible if people suspect eventually they will be worth $0.10 a piece they might try to invest now by buying them at $0.01 a piece. Hopefully after this happens and the currency starts becoming more established it will be able to maintain that value.

>Hopefully the same way that Bitcoin established value.

Bitcoins value fluctuates so fast that no one really knows how much something real costs in bitcoin on any given day.

As a result, even though Bitcoins are surprisingly valuable, as a currency it has very low velocity. Bitcoin is closer to gold, real estate or shares than it is to dollars. It makes an ok place[1] to park your value in the hopes that it'll beat inflation, but much like gold and houses it's extremely difficult to directly buy something with it.

You need to find a way to make your project a high velocity currency. I don't know how to do that though. Good luck :)

[1] Your mileage may vary. I personally wouldn't invest in bitcoin because it's too volatile for me to be bothered tracking it, but some have done so with success.

Yea, you are correct in stating that Bitcoin is much more similar to gold than it is an actual currency. That's one thing that I'm attempting to solve with Swift Demand, since coins are constantly being added to the economy you can't really use them as a long term investment and hope the price will increase. This will ideally lead to the currency having a stable value. As for making the currency move at a high velocity this is definitely one of my primary goals for making Swift Demand successful. My current plan is to implement an easy to use API and then get some online services on board to start accepting the currency to get the economy moving at a healthy speed.

>This will ideally lead to the currency having a stable value.

That's not guaranteed. If I can't spend it on anything, it's monopoly money: regularly printed, but not actually currency.

Monopoly money is a stable state item, too. We've no reason, barring outside influence, to believe that anyone will ever start accepting monopoly money as a currency. The first person that did would be taking tremendous risk; there's an awful lot of monopoly money sitting in peoples cupboards. If they break ranks and no one follows, they'll be left with piles of worthless paper.

If too many of your coins enter circulation before someone starts accepting them as a currency, you could be left in the awkward situation where in order for a merchant to mitigate the risk of accepting your coins, they have to set the price of a loaf of bread so high that no single user of your service actually has enough coins to purchase a loaf.

> Bitcoins value fluctuates so fast that no one really knows how much something real costs in bitcoin on any given day.

True.

> ...even though Bitcoins are surprisingly valuable, as a currency it has very low velocity.

Is this part really true any more? Trades of something other than Bitcoin aren't denominated in Bitcoin. But the exchange rate, though variable, is available in realtime and companies like Coinbase take the short term fluctuation risk for traders. It's easy enough now for a seller to say "I will accept $X worth of Bitcoin" and a buyer to say "Sure, here's $X worth of Bitcoin" and for both sides to be happy. Bitcoin clients have UIs that work this way now too.

You're missing the part about Bitcoin having a fixed rate of inflation. There's nothing to stop you from deciding to totally devalue your currency tomorrow, so it's impossible for people to even speculate on its future value.

From the rest of your comments, I'm curious how much research you've actually done into economics and currency. A currency which is being constantly and unpredictably printed is the opposite of stable.

I didn't see any referral codes on here, so here's mine if anyone else decides to sign up: https://www.swiftdemand.com/users/sign_up?referred_by_name=c...

I've signed up for it. Not sure what I'll do with it yet either but I have some ideas for a webservice to toy with it. Do you have an API of any kind for interacting with the service? (e.g. to see the latest transactions on my account?)

An API is on my todo list. There are three main things I am looking to add in the near future:

An exchange to allow people to trade their coins for normal currency An API to allow businesses to easily hook Swift Demand into their platform Added verification requirements (This one depends on the rate of growth)

Assuming people do assign value to these coins, how do you plan to handle inflation?

Inflation will be handled in by simply increasing the amount of coins given to users. For example if there is a target of 3% inflation YoY then then amount of coins given will be based on that target inflation level. Figuring out the exact numbers will be decided in the future once the service has gained mainstream adoption.

How is the experiment going. Are people using this yet?

You can check out some information on the stats page: https://www.swiftdemand.com/stats

I actually only released the website less than a week ago so it's still incredibly new, but people have already done some cool stuff with it. This guy set up a website to write haikus in exchange for coins http://swiftpoetry.club/

I'm planning on setting up a service to allow people to more easily exchange coins into their local countries currency and develop an API so websites can more easily accept Swift Demand as a payment option, but these things are still in the pipeline.

Pretty cool! Any plan to open source this thing or give it to community. Would not want to do anything substantial for a swiftcoin if there is a concern that they could be taken away or lost or something.

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