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Comment by perpetualcrayon | Hacker News Reader

I think the big breakthrough with cryptocurrency will be when someone invents a "Basic Income" cryptocurrency.

I've been thinking about it for a while, and have even started writing up a specification (may not need to write the actual implementation).

I think it's a tricky problem, but I'm almost 100% certain now that it's probably going to be invented and used in the near future.

EDIT: And by "near future" I mean "within 5-10 years".

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This doesn't really make sense. The thing that gives cryptocurrencies value is that they are scarce. The thing that gives them security is proof of work, allowing a distributed consensus algorithm that is hard to game.

Cryptocurrency isn't a source of magic money in the sense that you could tap it for a "basic income" type scheme-- where the recipients are not doing anything to earn it.

In cryptocurrency every actor in the system has a job that they do, namely, miners mine and that's how they get paid.

I'm not saying its impossible, it just seems like it doesn't make sense at first look.

It has also already been tried and basically failed. The coin was called Auroracoin. It has a 5 million market cap after a few years.

I agree that it does seem counter-intuitive given what we've come to expect a cryptocurrency to be.

Thats.. not a sufficient response..

He may have answers to those issues, and I understand he may want to keep them under his hat until they are thought out.

But know this-- if you want a chance at success, peer review is going to be needed when you are ready. And a lot of testing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15544554

I apologize, but when I double-checked I didn't see a specific question in the parent comment.

Its more of

>What if we do this thing; its tricky but I think its viable

>I dont believe it'd work because reasons A, B

>I agree its pretty counter-intuitive, isn't it?

You just kind of skipped right over the part where you'd actually address the proposed issues with the idea..

It's an interesting idea. Did you write something to explains how it produces and maintains an economy?

There is "work" that needs to be done, but "work" means something completely different.

The basic idea is that each participant can distribute 'X' # of coins to every other participant in the currency. The caveat is that each individual needs to be held accountable for the choices they make as to who they "vouch" for when distributing currency.

That's not to say the amount distributed can change in some obvious way. My current thinking is that if person A, B, C say person X gets money, then they get the same "agreed upon" (or fixed) distribution as everyone else.

On the other end the coins that are created have a "depreciation" built in. Something that depreciates 100% in 5 years won't appear too valuable. But something that depreciates over the course of an entire lifetime will feel plenty valuable to the people who are the original recipients. So in other words my current target is 100 years.

Things to consider: 1. Create lots of accounts, allocate money to yourself. 2. How do you hold people accountable in a distributed trustless manner? 3. Once you have centralized identity or accountability, then there is really no use to doing a blockchain. So solving 1 & 2 is the hard part of your idea. 4. Freicoin had demurge built in, you had to spend it or it would go down in value. This is anti-capitalist-- literally, they were marxists trying out their idea-- the consequence of this is that it undermines people's ability to save and invest for the future. If your coin goes down in value over a lifetime (Which you can accomplish easily by simply having increasing inflation over time-- very much like the USD) then it becomes difficult to save for retirement or that time of your life when your medical expenses go up.

I'm looking at the "accountability" part a little differently. It's not necessarily going to be some built in rules in the coin that hold people accountable. Instead one of the critical philosophies I've adopted is "enable the people who hold the coin". The coin won't hold people accountable, the tooling needs to be available to allow people to hold other people accountable.

If you can verify one person as being a single participant then you've stumbled onto something as big as Bitcoin itself

That's definitely an important objective. Although admittedly it won't be as pure as something like Bitcoin. I'm targeting what you could loosely equate to a scientific proof of existence, not a mathematical one.

There are multiple, including GrantCoin.

There is GrantCoin

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