The tag line of universal basic income is so absurd for an iris scanner built on the blockchain.
Are we still in the world of 0% interest rates???
[1] it actually exist(ed) in France (see RMI/RSA, though the different governments recently added tons of bureaucracy to it as a way to deter people from getting it, ruining the point), but the political will that it requires (and whether this is a good idea at all, I don't have a strong opinion on that) is the limiting factor.
France minima sociaux are not enough to live on by themselves.
Last time I checked the RSA was around 400 euros / months.
The idea of UBI imply that you can live in a ok way with it.
I have friends who lives with the French RSA, they have previous stash of money to complete it.
One is close to spend only 400/month, but he lives on land he bought with his last job.
Not really, or rather it depends who you ask: on the left's perspective on UBI, you're right, but on the right side (Milton Friedman being the most prominent on that side having talked about UBI) then it should be barely enough to replace all other form of state wellfare without necessarily be enough to live from it.
Seems like the past 30 years have been ongoing interventionism to shovel money to war makers.
I don't think UBI will really work if it doesn't even have support at the poverty line. Part of the point of UBI is a segment of the population which can't find work due to obsolete skills can at least spend the energy to retrain, or perhaps pursue some endeavor that is difficult to monetize but provides some benefit to society. That's difficult to do when one is destitute. As well, it needs to be effective for large swaths of the population if we are indeed heading into a post-work society over the next 10-20 years.
The ideal UBI system would let you threaten to overthrow your government in a way that does not threaten the integrity of UBI. It ought to be a safety net that makes otherwise impractical growth possible.
As a crypto, CirclesUBI is a bit of a disaster (e.g. the hosted UI, and sensitivity to certain kinds of attack), but I think they got the tokenomics right: it encourages Sybil resistant behavior among the users without trying to bind an address to your body and without relying on an issuer's good behavior.
Crypto Anarchism is not attractive the vast majority of people.
I'll argue the UBI people want involves their government sending them a check, direct deposit, or cash.
I just have a hard time imagining a government that both:
- keeps the U in UBI
- is not under some kind if existential threat from its people
You need the latter to have the former. But if you're coordinated to achieve the latter then you don't really need the government to achieve the former anyway.
If you can, categorically, overthrow it without threatening the integrity of UBI in its territory, it was never actually the government in the first place.
Which underlines the ridiculousness of the thought experiment. The solution to wars being destructive is...a blockchain?
And even if you're not the magical mediator who ends the war, what matters is not some global market evaluation, what matters is your tokens' evaluation by the people who grow the food that you eat and your evaluation of their tokens as well. Reciprocal exchange and utility, not market value.
This isn't how currencies lose value in wars. If the amount of money doesn't change, but half the factories are bombed, the output of the remaining factories rises in value relative to that currency. (Ceteris paribus.) The only way around this is to backstop production with unbombed factories. Something a blockchain does jack squat about.
Contrary to the freshwater meme Inflation is rarely primarily a monetary phenomenon, but it's even less the case during a war.
I suppose you could burn tokens when the factories are bombed (or you know, when whatever other resources that back them expire), but that seems like a lot of extra bookkeeping just to keep two numbers equal.
It's always scarcity. That's economics. The currency will fundamentally, potentially permanently, devalue in purchasing power in that context without external support.
> you could burn tokens when the factories are bombed
How many tokens do you burn for a textile versus semiconductor factory? Keep in mind, you are in a war zone, which means no guarantee of safe imports or exports. (Also, whose tokens?)
Managing an economy on a war footing is old business. There is nothing Worldcoin does to even remotely approach giving a semblance of an indication that anyone on their team has actually thought about this, like, once.
> that seems like a lot of extra bookkeeping just to keep two numbers equal
This is, in a nutshell, the problem with anything that purports to maintain its value over long durations of time. Value keeping takes work. We can't meaningfully convert ancient currencies to modern ones because it makes no sense to ask how many days' labour a Roman peasant would trade for an iPhone. These problems are fundamental to the notions of value. They don't have a technical solution. Value is inherently, fundamentally, subjective.
Followed by
> Value is inherently, fundamentally, subjective.
Which is it? Does value exist in real terms or is it made up?
If I'll give you a beer for two of your UBI coins, and you'll give me a pound of barley for one of my UBI coins, then it really doesn't matter that there's a war on somewhere, nor does it matter what the "value" of our coins is in terms of some number, so long as they are issued to each of us at the same rate.
You only have to bother with establishing a correspondence with some allegedly valuable thing in the real world (gold, factories, whatever) if you want a globally consistent notion of value. A notion which, as you've explained, is a fiction, and which I'd argue, is a harmful one.
Yes. (It’s paradoxical because it is, though an unremarkably old paradox at that.)
> If I'll give you a beer for two of your UBI coins, and you'll give me a pound of barley for one of my UBI coins, then it really doesn't matter that there's a war on somewhere
It does if that war just blockaded the barley!
> Better to just value the coins in a nonspecific way
With each area that tends to trade together having a common coin or set of coins for reference purposes, and large interchanges between them?
Things would differ from traditional currency in cases where users are not well connected. Imagine a newcomer, flush with tokens from a disconnected or distantly connected part of the network. They may not be able to find any locals that will accept their tokens. (This sort of hygiene discourages Sybil accounts and makes difficult the kind of bank-driven shenanigans that were typical of US foreign policy in the 70's). If you want to do remote business you should have to gain the trust of the locals first, and you should have to fear that they'll revoke that trust in response to bad behavior on your part.
The value of a loaf of bread, as expressed in a conventional currency would then be a function of whether the baker had needs that weren't met by the local economy. Communities that are highly dependent on the global economy would have a great need of conventional currency. Self sufficient communities, less so (this is to prevent the formation of the overly complex, and therefore fragile, supply chains that we see today).
So yes, I expect that the structure that you describe would emerge, with densely connected hubs etc. The UBI token would only make sense for use within a hub though. You'd probably use a strictly-scarcity-based currency like USD or whatever for inter-hub commerce.
This is because if the goods are coming or going a great distance then you don't really need all the trust stuff since you're unlikely to be in a position to care about the externalities of their manufacture/use anyway. By contrast, if the goods are coming from your neighbor's back yard then you probably want to be using something besides conventional currency, something that lets you threaten to revoke trust if their operations are poisoning the drinking water or whatever.
Mostly this design is inspired by how CirclesUBI does it, but there's a few tweaks I'd make of I were going to try to build such a thing.
That's not how economics works.
The purchasing power of any currency, for example USD, isn't the same everywhere even at a fixed point in time, because we don't have negligible-cost transportation in war zones (amongst other places).
Besides, if borders had anything to do with it, it was never UBI in the first place.
Yes, it would; neither form of the “U” in UBI includes free of borders in the sense used in the term, and reinterpreting that way and pretending its what the term means is just lazy equivocation.
“Universal” seems to be a later construction, it was originally “unconditional”, and in both cases the writings on it for many years under either name made it clear that the reference was principally freedom from means- and behavior-testing, contrary to status-quo welfare programs, but that it would target a population based on (exact scope differs in particular proposals) residency, citizenship, and/or age. Not surprised that the “no borders” crowd has seen it differently, and their version certainly is a valid instance of the general idea, but they don’t get to rewrite history and narrow the scope of the broader concept to their new version.
Is there a book or something you'd recommend?
You could do it through the agency known as the IRS by adding a standard refundable credit, you might need a few more employees, but nothing like twice as many.
World coin has always looked like a thinly veiled attempt to generate a biometric dataset which would later be used against its users.
I just don't know who its audience was supposed to be. If you're suspicious enough of fiat to want this kind of escape hatch, how can you simultaneously be trusting enough to embrace a system that relies on biometrics and allegedly trustworthy hardware?