Now I'm imagining a crypto currency that just gets awarded randomly to any person on the planet in a world-wide lottery. Or it could get distributed evenly like UBI to everyone.
If you devise a way to have a proveably fair worldwide lottery for every human on the planet at essentially zero cost to each participant, in a decentralized network, I think you would will win a Turing at least if not a Nobel, aside from making billions of dollars.
You need a random oracle that outputs a value that maps 1:1 to a human in the world, probably without any form of pre-registration, because any registration function can be reused by the same human multiple times.
Basically a decentralized technology that can identify souls on the planet and randomly select them in a Byzantine fault environment. As of today, entirely indistinguishable from magic.
Of course it’s possible to do with a centralized registration system, but building and deploying such a tracking system IMO is akin to a war crime.
Imagine you did that, everybody has 1 UniversalToken every newborn gets one (and people are absolutely not killing they own children for personal gain as it was done throughout the human history, I diverge). And by yet another miracle this token has some value.
You know exactly what those struggling financially do with that token right away. Food is better than tokens.
You also know who will buy it.
Thy system self-"corrects" itself right away.
I've been thinking about it for some time. Fiat system is flawed, it literally takes money away from the bottom and puts it at the top (inflations + being able to diversify outside cash + loans + bailouts). But even the most perfect forms of money seem to have inherent unfairness in them. Money makes money. Having time to research possible investments, having money to do them, being able to afford risk, liquidity that allow you to avoid loans (unless you want to use them for leverage) etc. At least as long as people sell their time which seems like the foreseeable future.
If you were hoping for me to offer some solution I have none.
<daydreaming> But on the long enough run (if we have one) I think money will become irrelevant and our society will be more like a single organism. A shift in entity and entities mindset to be more oriented towards information processing and achieving specific goals / playing specific role and less driven by the limbic system which now can be satisfied at will if still present. I mean, it sounds mooshy wooshy, but look around your lucky good coders bubble. I think money is already losing value for those who don't worry about basic needs (while of course still being solution to 95% of problems for those less lucky, which seems great to remember).
In more strict terms, the only valuable thing on the long run is information. I hope for some well-grounded disagreement on that.
That being said, this has been done, but usually off the backs of existing blockchains. In Etheriumland this is known as an "airdrop" and is considered a form of annoying spam these days. Of course, if you actually wanted a wallet full of no-name ICOs you could just send coins back and forth to yourself to keep your address on the blockchain so that you got more airdrops. This is bounded mainly by gas price (which is artificially made scarce through protocol limits), but I wouldn't consider this system robust or equitable.
Are you seriously asking how having the value distributed out to a large number of people could ever have utility without oligarchs to "set the value" to some "proper" value?