At sufficient scale, Glo can lift every person out of extreme poverty | Hacker News Reader

At sufficient scale, Glo can lift every person out of extreme poverty

globalincomecoin.com

14 pointsglocoin21 comments

Forget "money" for a minute. Instead, think in terms of "stuff" - actual, physical goods, and also services.

Where does the stuff come from to lift every person out of poverty? There are only two possible answers - create more stuff, or redistribute the stuff that we have (or a combination of the two). Which one does Glo do, and how does it do that? Especially, "at sufficient scale", how would it do that?

A bit of both.

The long-term vision is to move (some portion of) economic activity onto a globally accessible stablecoin. We think this has potential to reduce friction in international finance & commerce, which will grow the economic pie. (The fact that it's actually still pretty hard to venmo someone from the US to Canada, or move dollars out of Argentina, creates a lot of deadweight loss and opportunities for rent-seeking.)

But ultimately Glo is redistributive. In the near-term, putting money into Glo is like putting money into a T-bill-linked savings account, except someone else gets the yield.

Hope that helps, happy to keep chatting, etc.

Re-hashing "long-term vision" with happy talk does not actually answer the question. Try answering the question.

Which part could I have done better on?

I interpreted the question as asking whether we grow the size of the pie or redistribute differently and i answered that the goal is to do both. Step 1 is to be a good (the best, ideally) stablecoin, step 2 is to become increasingly viable as a currency, etc. We articulate these steps in more detail in the OP link, and for serious, if there is a part you’d like more clarity on or that you think isn’t very well fleshed out, I’ll do my best to engage directly with it.

Also, I know that crypto has a lot of scams and there’s good reason for distrust, but let me disclaim that answering these questions is literally part of my job and I’m trying my best to be candid and responsive. Please be kind if you can, thank you.

Poverty is the part you could have done better on. For a family living in poverty, what about Glo specifically helps them?

That they get a basic income of $30/month, which if you live on less than $1.90/day helps.

ok but if GiveDirectly is doing good work, why not side-step the crypto-everything and spend your efforts helping people with IRAs to make qualified charitable distributions give directly to GiveDirectly? Or other ways of directly supporting GiveDirectly?

I find the idea of "Passive Philanthropy" revolutionary. This would be the first model to demonstrate such a concept. That alone is worth the effort IMHO

For prior art, see "taxes".

I mean, yes, a charity that is 1) not a government, and so not subject to politics, 2) doesn't require continual donations because it is self-funding, and 3) big enough to do massive good... that combination is in fact revolutionary.

I'm just saying that government programs to help the poor, and even to do foreign aid, are kind of on the same model, except for point 1.

[Edit: I guess foundations are also kind of prior art. It's just that none of them are big enough for the kind of impact that Glo is reaching for.]

(In the future, at scale) Imagine if foundations kept their funds in Glo. That would be a philanthropic force multiplier. They are doing good on the front end and the back. We aren't a replacement of any giving channels but we could potentially be a maximizer to any of them.

Another prior art, and a non-governmental one, is tithing. Lots of religious charities use tithings in ways that combat poverty. Or they could, at scale, if everyone joined the religion.

Great, happy to clarify.

Glo is a fully-backed stablecoin, which means that for every dollar of glo that’s in circulation, we have a treasury of cash & cash equivalents equal to that amount. Some of that reserve is invested in short term Treasury bills, which create a yield. We give that yield directly to a charity called GiveDirectly, which then distributes the money directly to very poor people.

The idea is that Glo will compete with other stablecoins, and do all the other things that people currently do with USDC or tether, except that it will generate basic income for people living in extreme poverty as a side benefit.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the explanation.

I'll check back in a decade to see which has increased more: poverty, or "Glo".

He did. The question was, "create more stuff" or "redistribute existing stuff", and the answer was "redistribute existing stuff", with a side helping of "increase existing stuff by reducing deadweight loss".

Is this basically a low friction way to help people in poverty to invest in an index-fund? Not a bad idea

On the right track, but the core idea is:

Glo is a stablecoin that crypto investors/regular folks buy that generates returns for people living in poverty.

Glo gives money away through GiveDirectly, so the recipients get the money in their local currency.

More on the basic model: https://twitter.com/GLO_incomecoin/status/157187934049285325...

Somebody really needs to explain the law of supply and demand to these people.

They propose to invest 7% of all the money in the world in US Treasury bills and use the interest to eliminate poverty.

Of course if they came anywhere near that goal interest rates on T-Bills would plummet.

We note this elsewhere [0] -- and it's a fair rejoinder that we should probably include this on our actual website -- but if Glo reaches trillions of dollars of market cap, we're most likely operating in a world where we issue multiple stablecoins in different currencies. Each reserve would then be backed by government bonds denominated in each stablecoin's currency.

It's certainly true that if we added trillions in new demand for any particular asset, or even class of asset, we'd change the market a lot. At the point where we 'exhaust' demand for government bonds and drive their returns to zero, the global monetary environment would look so different that we'd probably need to adjust multiple things about our strategy and implementation. The doc in the original link is intended as a vision of what we think is possible in terms of scale, but the fact that we're talking about the far future pretty much necessitates that some of the implementation details will have to be clarified when we know more.

[0] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EAiwxZN4Jiyup8d9G/...

As with the previous article on this topic, happy to explain why I chose to join GLO as someone who is relatively crypto-skeptical or answer any questions I can. :)

"How long before the founder of this "stable" coin is on the run from authorities" should be something a can wager on Sport Books.

i fully endorse the creation of this market on PredictIt but we're real people, have pre-existing reputations and social ties, etc.

Our main funder is Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab, who's pretty integrally involved, whose reputation is linked to Glo's success/legitimacy, etc.

More on us here https://www.globalincomecoin.com/articles/careers

P.S. I am a real live person and my website is seth ariel green dot com

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