Bitcoin Forum

A major problem of civilization is the large wealth gap between the rich and poor. Since bitcoin has been called "programmable money", it seems this problem can be solved, simply by having the program calculate the overall wealth average, then slide everyone toward the average by a certain percent. I don't mean make everyone absolutely equal because then there'd be no incentive for anyone to work or innovate, just slid toward the average by a certain percentage over time (what percent would work best would have to be experimented with). I just mean society can be thought of as in same ship all being raised by the tide of overall total wealth together. So if a widget (like a computer) comes along that drastically alters society, everyone benefits, rather than just Bill Gates, etc.

Don't get me wrong; I am in the voluntaryist/libertarian camp, and know the argument Alex Jones makes against welfare of it being an attack on the middle class by the mega rich who are exempt from tax. And tax is a violation of the non aggression principle because people are forced into it. However welfare coin (or bitcoin reprogrammed as described above, moving everyone toward the wealth average) would be voluntary. Nobody would be forced to use it. What do you think?

Someone else said it could be exploited because people would make tons of extra wallets to catch all the welfare payments. So the technical problem seems to be limiting 1 wallet per 1 person (or even multple wallets per 1 person, but record which wallet belongs to who). It seems this technical problem could be solved with a fingerprint or similar somehow?

Isn't that dodge coin  :D

yes great idea. i was thinking about something similar. it should be possible somehow to come up with a technology that ensures that everybody has just one wallet or bank account or whatever.

in another thread i proposed the idea of an upper limit on how much a single person can own. people will shout at you for mentioning something like that but it would indeed be fair. There is no sense in one person owning 50 billion USD (Bill Gates).

Also there should be demurrage so that hoarding does not pay off. interest just guarantees that the gap between rich and poor gets bigger and bigger. quite stupid.

that's why dodge coin was made

http://racers-republic.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/dodge-coin.jpg

Brain hurts.   Lets apply the same logic to countries that we apply to people.  -  No country can have an excessively greater amount of wealth (assets, cash, property, etc)  then others.

So, ready to ship out your computer and a fair share of your material possessions to other countries where they are not as abundant?

Yes that would be a good start. Let's just stop exploiting the third world and shitting on them but share some of our wealth.

What's countries anyway, we're all humans on a little planet. But we divide it up into small sections to then say that the guys in the one section can't share their stuff with the guys in the other section. Because of what again?

People tend to get very irritated by these ideas as i said, might even cause brainache.



already did.

I'm glad you have, I can respect people who act on their convictions.   However, when you want to enforce your own convictions on other people, that is where the true issue lays.

I have to agree. I am in no way entitled to share my wealth with other countries. Neither is anyone else, why should they? To feel all warm and fuzzy inside? To do a good deed and make me feel better?

We don't have to share because that is our right not to. If you want to, then that's all lovely and fine

No I wouldn't want to force anything onto people. When did I say that?

These are, after all, just hypothetical thoughts right? If you don't feel the same way it's still all good. Greed is the dominating instinct in our society and the reason capitalism is so "successful". Nobody wants to share. Because it is their right not to as you say.

Bitcoin is trustless.
Welfare and charity requires trust.

Capitalism is a good economic policy, but it is a broad term. There are many different forms of capitalist policies, and throughout most of the world today, it is a mixed capitalism market. Pretty much every industrialized nation uses capitalism. Greed isn't the prevailing factor, it's private ownership, or the right of an individual to obtain wealth through the market.  

I read the wikipedia entry for dogecoin (you were spelling it doDge) and can find nothing regarding the wealth averaging behavior I described in the original post.

Note that a "welfare coin" (that term is kinda trollish since "welfare" often has negative connotations, so it needs a new term) would exist in a capitalist system. There could be multiple welfare coins with different percentages of averaging over time, all competing on the free market against other coins that do not have this behavior. I think it might be healthier for society overall, especially seeing how professional day traders are doing second-level big trades and trickery and possibly insider knowledge/etc to win everyone else's bitcoins on the exchanges. Is bitcoin just increasing the wealth gap? Then the exchanges themselves are exempt from their own fees so they can trade at the 1 cent level and still make profit while nobody else can == an enormous centralization of money and money == power. Money/power go hand in hand and centralization of it is bad. What would happen if people in north korea had access to a 'welfare coin'? Even if the dictator obtained the majority of the coins unfairly, it'd even out over time, giving the people more money and thus more power.

Who WOULDN'T voluntarily opt into to welfare coin; Bill Gates types. They would prefer bitcoin where they can stay in the .00001 percent of the richest elite. However bitcoin would be COMPETING with welfare coin, so bill gate's bitcoin value would decrease as the majority vote with their dollars for the more fair welfare coin.

Maybe the algorithm would give more averaging weight for the mega rich and mega poor, so it'd be the bill gates types mostly giving their money to the very poor types. Different welfare coin forks would use different algorithms, all competing on the free market. This is like a fusion of capitalism and socialism; voluntary socialism.

Did the people of North Korea legitimately get an F, or were they outright conned/exploited/brainwashed by the people in power. They didn't get an F, they were given an F by a corrupt system. I mean their leader who fed his uncle to dogs gets an A I guess. Forcing A down and F up violates the non aggression principle, but if everyone opts into this voluntarily there is no force. Also it might not be A and F becomes C and C, but more like A and F becomes A- and F+, gradually over time. Just so some people can afford to eat more than their own fingernails which they can't even grow due to lack of nutrition. Centralization everywhere needs to be overthrown and such an 'averaging coin' would decentralize money and power, theoretically.

It won't work. Anyone who has anything won't use it. It will only help make the poor equally poor. Socialism doesn't work. We have countless examples that show how socialism consistently creates poverty.

What you're looking for is for people to be charitable. This won't accomplish that. The best way to encourage charity is to enrich people and make them prosperous. When people have extra, they're more likely to give. When people have nothing, they can't give. Socialism creates poverty and eliminates charity.

Now, if people are prosperous, some wealthy people might use Welfare Coin in order to be charitable. But still, I can't see that working out very well. Why would I try to be charitable through Welfare Coin when I can simply engage in local charity where I get to see the effects?

Hmmm what about Chavez lifting millions of people out of poverty? He used to provide cheap oil to poor people in the US, can't remember the last time Exxon made any discounts for people struggling to heat their homes. Argentina (pre US freemarket intervention) had higher literacy rates and less inequality than most western countries.

Wasn't Doge made by 4chan geeks as a joke to screw Redditor hipsters out of their money? :D

yep - give the man a doge coin.

You might be right that it might not work. The best agent to decide this would be the free market though. So the next question is: is it possible to overcome the technical problem of limiting 1 person per 1 wallet (so people can't simply make tons of extra wallets to collect the welfare payments). Its the age old sock puppet problem I guess. Each human has a unique fingerprint. But say a computer has a fingerprint scanner. What's to stop one human from faking another human's fingerprint (because the fingerprint would ultimately be digital so copyable). Craigslist had 1 lame solution which I hate (because I don't have a land line phone number so can't use their system much now) but they make you sign in with a landline telephone, knowing each person/house only typically has 1. Then they give a code to that phone number to prove you have that phone. Hmm.. online voting apparently solves this problem (not sure how), then again it is probably rigged on purpose so dead people/pets can repeatedly vote etc.

Probably pointless discussing this here because this subforum is apparently mostly a bunch of spam for obscure copycat coins trying to be the next get rich quick scheme. So naturally the mods moved my topic here, where it goes to page 6 in a few hours, then quickly buried forever after that.

Since this was sure enough on page 6 with no other replies, I edited the title to be similar to all the other spam posted in this forum to compete, and I used a smiley icon.

The nice thing about freedom is that you can allow people to implement ideas you think are stupid and let them fall or rise on their merits. I expect "welfare" coin would fail miserably but I would be interested to see you try it. I wouldn't expect it to work (I wouldn't really want it to work either, to me it's just like a postmine instead of a premine, of course some premine coins have proven successful so you just never know.)

I wish you luck and will watch with interest.

If it solves the world problems and we all start getting along then yes, absolutely and a resounding yes. They can have my shit.

What?

An assumption that has been proven time and time again to be questionable. It sits well with neoclassic economics to think that monetary incentives or incentives linked to gaining favorable position over others is a main motivator. But today we know that this view isn't true. There are loads of incentives that are non monetary or self-beneficial in nature. Many are altruistic, social, ideological etc in nature.

Check for instance evolutionary economics, social entrepreneurship etc.

Not that it changes your idea, but as a innovation management and business development person that dislikes the notions of neoclassical economics I got offended ^^.

wow indeed

Spoken like a true dictator. Next your going to say that Castro was a humane person.

what can you truly buy with it? Crack ? syringes? and bottle of ripple?