Comment by sdenton4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdenton4 | Hacker News Reader

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Crypto schemes allow a lot of experimentation with the structure of money that no sane government would ever try for fear of crashing their economy in one way or another.

Meanwhile, we /should/ be experimenting a lot more with the structure of economics and society, because the current super-structures have created massive concentrations of power and seemingly-insurmountable collective action problems that threaten the biosphere...

Bitcoin was designed to act like gold, but this was a series of design choices. (as someone, maybe foldingideas, put it: the crypto bros looked at the concentration of wealth in society and decided that the problem was that /they/ weren't the ones with all the wealth.)

You can just as easily design a crypto scheme to generate tokens and distribute them to everyone with an ID regularly: this is UBI, so long as the tokens have recognized value. The problem is that you need to prevent people from registering a million accounts to get a million UBI credits, deflating the value of tokens held by honest folks. Thus the unique identifier problem.

> Bitcoin was designed to act like gold

Bitcoin's emission is quite unlike that of gold. Every next generation gets to mine 32x less bitcoin. Over gold's millennia long history, every generation mines a roughly similar amount of gold as the next.

KYC is a thing and apparently crypto exchanges can implement it when asked nicely.

But I think grand parent poster is right on the money, it’s a attempts to take governments roles.

After all nation states are not that old of a concept. Basically Napoleonic wars. Some type of distopian corporate nationality might come to fruition to replace them.

There's the possibility of utopian corporate nationality too.

Being an employee at a lot of corporations is nicer than being a citizen of a lot of counties.

But corporate benevolence mostly demands on human capital supply and demand balances.

But again, as GP noted, isn't that a problem governments have already solved? If you want UBI it's going to be through the government, as that's the entity collecting the funds through taxes that would be distributed, and they already have a unique identifier for people. In the U.S. it's your SSN, which is conveniently also how they track you for income taxes (again, where a large portion of the funds for distribution are gathered)

If the government wants to link a retinal scan to a SSN, that might make sense with regard to UBI, but how does it make any sense for some random blockchain? Are we expected to think that even if a government wanted to use a blockchain they would use some third party blockchain and not roll their own? I find that highly unlikely.

It's 'solved' in the sense that there's a lot of machinery to deal with and remediate fraud and abuse. It's definitely not solved in a technical sense.

It might be helpful to stop and think for a moment about all the cool stuff one could do with a reliable way to link people to accounts uniquely, without fraud. If the government has 'solved' this, why not sell the solution to companies?

You're talking about the market in general, and I'm talking about with respect to UBI. My thought process is:

* Any UBI is going to be government based, as there needs to be a way to collect (tax) and redistribute (UBI) money between all people, whether or not the amount collected and distributed is the same relatively for each or not.

* Governments already have (in most cases, if not all. I can't speak for every country definitively) ways to uniquely identify their populace. They don't need some external service to do such.

* Given that UBI will be government based, and the government already has a way to uniquely identify people they govern, what purpose does a third party blockchain to uniquely identify people service with respect to UBI?

> It might be helpful to stop and think for a moment about all the cool stuff one could do with a reliable way to link people to accounts uniquely, without fraud.

There are plenty of benefits to that. That has nothing to do with UBI. I'm not making a case that there's no benefit to identity verification, just that I'm not sure how some third party is supposed to help with UBI by providing it.

> If the government has 'solved' this, why not sell the solution to companies?

In some small ways (at least for the U.S.) they do. For example, with Tax services to look up people. Additionally, while not provided as a service to companies, SSNs are routinely used to uniquely identify U.S. citizens for financial reasons.

The Government could offer more services to companies for this, but there might be perverse incentives involved. Again, none of this has anything to do with UBI from what I can see. Once someone gets money, who cares how it's spent? Let it be deposited in the financial institution or asset of their choice. Again, no third party arbiter needs to be present for this, we do this today with tax returns and while different services often help with this, they are both not requires and there's multiple to choose from, not one external trusted entity that must be used.

I wasn't starting from the assumption that UBI /has/ to be government-based, and was discussing a core problem (identifiability) that arises when a non-government entity tries to implement UBI. You've just got a different set of assumptions.

Okay, but I'm not sure they're wrong assumptions, because I don't know how UBI could not be government based, and I haven't seen any explanations challenging it.

Either it needs to be government based, in which case I think some third party service explaining how they are helping to enable it by providing identifiability is subject to the criticisms I've laid out, or it doesn't need to be through the government, in which case I'm honestly curious as to any explanations from anyone of how that works.

Expanding the comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37037606

Cryptocurrency systems proposed ways to handle the creation and management of monetary systems without government involvement. The implementation of such systems is open to definition by the designers of the system, and is extremely fluid. Most cryptocurrencies chose to go with the bitcoin model, which encouraged speculation and early buy-in, but fails like ~waves at the cryptocurrency space in 2023~.

So, here you go:

Set up a system which creates and destroys tokens programatically. Tokens are created uniformly over all user accounts, and destroyed in each account proportional to the amount already in the account.

This handles the wealth-redistribution function of taxation, and allows control of the total number of tokens to prevent inflationary spiraling over time. A prime difficulty is assigning accounts.

FWIW, AuroraCoin did /something/ like this in Iceland, using Icelandic identity cards for identifiability, but didn't destroy tokens: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/auroracoin.asp#toc-hist...

The distribution portion of UBI is the least interesting from a theoretical and technical standpoint. Giving money to people is easy, and a solved problem, which is basically what I've been saying. Funding that money is the hard part, and the portion that basically requires a government because it's likely to be taxation that does it.

Some crypto company trying to help enable UBI by solving the identifiability and distribution problem is like some artist trying to help build a car by offering to find the right shape for the wheels, and then using the fact they offered in promoting themselves. Thanks, but really, you aren't offering much, pretty sure we're already going with "round".

That, in a nutshell, is what I've been trying to express. I think they just attached themselves to UBI as a buzzword to sound better, when really their change of usefully being involved in a real UBI implementation is likely close to zero because it makes no sense for them to be involved in any feasible plan that could move forward.

It's no different than if they said they were going to help enable people to pay taxes (except in negative connotation instead of a positive one). The portion of the problem they'd be helping with is a mostly solved problem, so what are they really offering that's likely to be of use? If it's extremely unlikely they'll be used for whatever reason in the problem space they're advertising themselves in, what's their reason for doing so, to actually advertise their intent or to associate themselves with something?

> This handles the wealth-redistribution function of taxation, and allows control of the total number of tokens to prevent inflationary spiraling over time. A prime difficulty is assigning accounts.

That's a prime difficulty of a cryptocoin, not of a government entity dealing with its citizens. Again, I'll note, in UBI the actual distribution of funds is so simple and solved as to be inconsequential. Who to give money to and how much are the main things to work out on the distribution side, and are entirely policy based, and thus no blockchain product is going to help.

OTOH, the impossibility of getting UBI on the government side is actually motivating adoption: sure, you've got a central identity repository, etc, but it will never happen in our lifetime (in the US) if you need 60 senators to vote for it... This is, IMO, basically insurmountable - we've seen governments toying with UBI but I seriously doubt we'll see any government pull the trigger in any reasonable timeframe.

I don't disagree that it's extremely unlikely that certain governments will adopt it, at least not without lots of other governments to point to as success cases at least.

I'm just not sure how it's feasibly funded in any other way. That's the main problem as I see it. Any non-governmental body can't actually fund it to any degree other than as an experiment for a subset of people (which has happened, from HN no less[1], but I don't recall the outcome).

Maybe, possibly, a religious organization such as one of the various Morman churches that strongly encourage tithing could do so, but it would probably be cast more as charity than UBI. That's also ignoring all the other problematic aspects of something like that.

1: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/basic-income

The other innovation of cryptocurrencies is bootstrapping 'value' for scarce digital tokens; in this sense, UBI based on a cryptocurrency can be self-funding.

That only works because of investment and speculation. You would specifically not want that for UBI IMO, because speculation could crash your currency leaving people that rely on it unable to purchase anything with it. I'm pretty sure you would need to tie it to a stable real world currency for it to function for its intended purpose as a basic income.

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