Automation is a great way to make human life better. But middle class jobs are disappearing. And I think some form of basic income is an important element to increase overall human happiness in the 21st century.
Auroracoin is an interesting step in this direction, where every Icelander will get a fixed amount of money. Only once though. For a basic income scheme to work money will have to be transfered every week or month. That is not an insurmountable problem with crypto. As
@vitalik pointed out in the MSC skype chat:
have two kinds of tokens
class A tokens and class B tokens
class A tokens are nontransferable
1 per person, issued somehow
^ is the hard part
each class A token spawns N class B tokens per month, and perhaps also lets you vote
class B tokens are just money
Now the hard part, how to make sure that one person can not end up with 2 class A tokens? Vitalik wrote quite a bit about that here:
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7235/bootstrapping-a-decentralized-autonomous-corporation-part-3-identity-corp/ - but I don't yet see how this could work in practice. It's quite easy to copy someone's DNA, so it can't be just based on that. (
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/02/how-hide-your-genome could help with this part.)
For Auroracoin the hard part has been solved through the existing tech used in Iceland, but I think until another decade or so basic income is mostly needed in countries with a lot of poverty and high inequality in Asia and Africa.
I'm very happy to work on realizing a kind of basic income coin. Ethereum looks like a better platform to play with this than forking an existing coin.
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My solution so far for this is to search for something that can be done (preferably online, dunno the 3d world status on this) but only humans can do. By keeping the humans preoccupied with this invented work, we make multiple personality benefits virtually impossible. The produce, if this cannot be made by computers, would have an inherrent value even though it is unusable as such, similar to craftsmanship such as hand-made carpets or perhaps paintings. People working inside this system would be self-suffient which is good because then we don't have to hear complaints from tax-abolishionists and alike.
As far as a pure Basic Income Coin goes, I think if you want something truly universal at this point relying on government ID seems to be the easiest approach, especially in countries like Iceland where IDs are electronic. The more decentralized approach is to have it split up into smaller, self-regulating communities, where the rule is that you need 2/3 of the members of a community to agree to bring a new member in, and 2/3 could agree to take a member out. There would be an overlying social contract that each distinct human should only be allowed to have one membership. As communities get larger, this function could naturally specialize into a Liquid Democracy-like setup where there would be agencies dedicated to bringing new people in and weeding out frauds and people could register their votes to automatically follow whatever agency (or m-of-n agencies) they deem most trustworthy.
I also looked into go as a possibility, just don't really know how to go about it. Should we have people playing against computers or do we pose a more static go-problem, kinda like a sudoku? Could the problems to solve be auto-generated?
I'm much more excited about WMF's initiative: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero - but of course there's not much money in there.
Maybe the cryptocurrency world can come up with a better solution, that will connect *everyone* for free? It would definitely be in the spirit of a basic income for all.
If the A tokens are generating B token-money every month, you will get inflation. And if the velocity of B tokens escalate, you may even get hyperinflation and then a crash.
MMO games have this same problem. They try to stabilize the game currency by withdrawing currency from the economy through fees. The idea is to maintain currency inflation between 0%-1%. But this narrow target is hardly ever reached.
Putting on Tin-Hat...
As for ID registration. The elites are planning to use RFID chips implanted for every person on the planet. Those who refuse, will get ostracized from the economy.
I know this is not what you're saying. But the idea of government ID just makes me nervous. Vitalik's idea of community consensus sounds like a better way to go. It's not limited by trivial borders. We ALL live on Spaceship Earth (reference to Buckminster Fuller).
Good luck with your idea
Will definitely work with you on a solution for this one if you shall lead me.
Also, afaict the best such a system can do is to be Sigil proof, if invalid groups/persons are always below some level.
If the coin is ultimately accepted by shops, themselves controlled by people, there is a way out a compromised system, burn over the UBI coin and start over.
should be estimated by the free market, that is the best tool to understand the value in the system.
Also you cant assume all people in the system are smart, and people feel compassion towards assholes sometimes. Maybe they should but they shouldnt give them any power.
*If* you have a system, you could fund it with that 'magic wallet' that scripts might be able to have. The idea of 'magic scripts' is that creation of coins needs to take place to ensure there is some inflation against hoarding, and PoW is a useless endeavor other than some security.(PoS doesnt infact in-effect increase the money supply) So *specifically selected scripts* can get 'magic' income. I reckon this can be experimented with now, with sub-currencies.(I suppose you could also try to tax things, btw)
Maybe you can connect it to the value of open source activity as estimated by the free market... somehow. But there is a lot of how in there, i reckon? Things get exploitable pretty easy if you look at some approaches. This is why if implemented(not for testing/experimentation), 'magic scripts' need to be choosen meticulously, adversary, and attack angles considered. Also, magic income for each can be limited both just in case, and to control the level of activity.
Contracts that are permanent fixtures are sort-of equivalent to ethereum features. For instance it has been suggested that if CPU usage is high, clients may implement scripts that are coded and compiled into binary.
Seeing it that way, you dont *really* need to have them as something else than contacts. Besides, contracts could be treated more flexibly, for instance you could add vote mechanism I mentioned.
On another note, ether creation might not be enough to fuel something like UBI.
http://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/538/self-redistributing-wealth/p2
I have a great deal to learn about computer science, but I am excited to to so. This technology has the potential to change the world, but we must be vigilant post-modernism will not pass quietly into the night. There are paradigms out there that will seek to destroy this in an act of self preservation.
Again it is difficult to express my excitement.
Secondly, because there is no reason to think mining for security and mining for some useful act will go together very well.(they might, but..) And the economic model and useful level of mining(also in terms of the environment) might not match well either. That said, i dont know those things work out in the first place.
Are we still thinking in terms of your identity being centrally registered in some way? Because what you really are anyway is the sum of a set of approximate encounters with people, subway turnstiles, banking machines, cell phone towers, conversations with friends etc. There should not have to be one single identifier that signals you, and in practice we don't identify one another by such a mechanism--we use gait, face, short-term memory of where you were last, sound of voice, email habits and a host of other mechanisms. If you DON'T use such a cloud of disparate mechanism you are flying in the face of Kant, by suggesting that there could be some access to "the thing in itself" other than the sum of qualities the object (in this case, you) possesses. We're going to have to suck it up and accept that things (and people) don't have "identities"--rather they are "identified" and that this process of identification is never completed and never fully authoritative. So, we'll move in a cloud of identifications, relying on the aggregation of these to guarantee a unified identity.
@coinfaq You cant just assume access the real world with measuring devices. And if you can you might need judges to look at if the things are working correctly/not being abused.
Even if you could do a measurement and processing of the measurement, so that no two persons are identified as the same, and no person is identified as being multiple persons, then you still need to spread the equipment, control who is using the measurements, and the data must work in a system.(like ethereum)
I'd earlier look at things that might be proxies to 'personas' like reputation/stake systems, size of transactions, combined with a system where people can sign statements about wether or not other people are individuals.(double personas) I suppose if you have content(books/pictures etcetera) and people indicate how much human-work that takes, and you know which entity registers, that is another proxy.
Or games that computers cant do well, and which ethereum can know about.
Mind that whatever you do, users of web wallets or compromised computers can easily have their personas misused. And that situation is currently terrible.
This project is based on openpgp and web of trust system, with some other information as age and place of birth. So you can check people identity.
Based on a "relative monetary theory", prices will not get inflation with the time. People receive each month more than the month before, but there is always the same amount of money on the system relatively to the people in the system. If you start getting prices fixed relatively to the universal dividend (basic incombe), prices will not get inflation. Inflation is only a problem in non-free money system when some individuals create money for their own benefit and to the detriment of others, and so the problem is due to that non-free money model.
Also an other implementation of this approach is visible here : http://ucoin.io
I dont know how ethereum could help to implement this free monetary system. I'm not sure for the moment that it's necessary to use a blockchain as this projects use web of trust / openpgp. Based on humans trust, it should be less energy consuming.
This question and this projects are maybe the most important to develop today because inequality in money creation is the cause of most of our actual society problems.
i think i am writing about "basic work opportunitty in some eco project for getting eco food for tonight's dinner" instead of a basic income as conventionally knwown, which could work, but needs some additional central-buro, useful sometimes, but we can get to further automate this i reckon with de-centralizing in easy metrics valueing and publicking practically infinite tasks generally liked,
i doubt hardly on distributing metrics (for estating values that could generate privileged rights in this example) because it is very obvious that we are harming the planet too much, and we suffer from "basic" goods access most of us..
me talking too much for a first post, hi!
http://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/1009/the-people-s-republic-of-doug-ethereum-based-decentralized-organization#latest
So I made a proposal for a coin where everyone can create an "account" that receives an basic income of unique coins (every account has unique coins). So this coins are worthless in the beginning and they only gain in value if people connect with each other and decide to accept each others coins (and trade them 1:1). So the incentive is to use all your social contacts and focus them on your one personal coin.
You find a way more detailed proposal here: https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/1598/basic-income-circles-reputation-market-based-approach-to-solve-the-identity-problem-sybil-attacs#latest