Universal Basic Income on Blockchain?

[Abiky]

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a kind of social welfare where citizens of a given population receive minimum income to meet basic necessities. I've read somewhere online about making a UBI system on crypto. Not sure if something like this exists, but it would be cool if it does. In layman's terms, you'll earn crypto by doing absolutely nothing. This will help minimize inequality, by allowing poor people to participate in the global economy. Even Elon Musk talked about UBI in the Dubai summit.

Is there a crypto with UBI? If there isn't one yet, do you think governments will implement such a system in the future? If not, why? Your input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[jrrsparkles]

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a kind of social welfare where citizens of a given population receive minimum income to meet basic necessities. I've read somewhere online about making a UBI system on crypto. Not sure if something like this exists, but it would be cool if it does. In layman's terms, you'll earn crypto by doing absolutely nothing. This will help minimize inequality, by allowing poor people to participate in the global economy. Even Elon Musk talked about UBI in the Dubai summit.

Is there a crypto with UBI? If there isn't one yet, do you think governments will implement such a system in the future? If not, why? Your input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Let's keep the crypto part away from this discussion.

UBI, is some kind of fund given to people who are below a certain income range seems like a good proposal but we know what government will do to give this money, they will just print out of thin air and give it back into circulation which will do nothing but inflate the economy which is not good in whole unless they decided to pay in something that has actual value like gold or even in BTC instead of creating their own crypto will ensure there is no inflation and the money provided solely from generated revenue.

[d5000]

This was discussed a lot in olden times. In 2014 or so there was a cryptocurrency called Auroracoin which airdropped coins to every citizen of Iceland. Worldcoin could be also described as an example for this concept. It's not exactly an "universal basic income" because it's an one-time payment and lacks regularity, but it's basically the same concept.

There is even an altcoin called Universal Basic Income (UBI), linked to the Proof of Humanity project. AFAIK it's quite similar to Worldcoin.

However, there's a big problem with such concept: they only work with a centralized entity who can verify the identities of the participants with a KYC-like system, otherwise everybody would register as many accounts/addresses as possible. Basically what Worldcoin and Auroracoin did. There are some concepts like "pseudonym parties" coming from Anarchist groups where on a kind of "gathering" people can confirm a pseudonym to a group, but that involves at least a bit of trust in the group "leaders" or "organizers" and also is probably vulnerable to malicious behaviour like doxxing.

And then there's a second big problem: how can such a cryptocurrency get any sustainable value? In the case of Auroracoin for example, the airdrop for every registered new participant was dumped by most participants as fast as possible. I guess WorldCoin will see a similar fate. So the coin must get value due to other reasons.

There's one way I could see something like that materialize: Anonymint (a very knowledgeable user which was banned a lot of times because of his behaviour in the forum) had proposed an "inverse commons" based on the model of Steemit. It's a space where the participants create value on the blockchain, for example a collection of articles or other media. I could imagine such a model where a small part of the income of this "space" is redistributed regularly among the participants. But the first problem (user identification) remains, or you need a PoS-style system where everybody gets his part of the UBI according to his stake in the system. And I guess the income which can be distributed in such a coin is quite low (couple of cents per month, perhaps ...).

Of course if governments implemented such an idea it could work, but how "universal" could it be? Perhaps if it was implemented by the UN or so ...

[Abiky]

This was discussed a lot in olden times. In 2014 or so there was a cryptocurrency called Auroracoin which airdropped coins to every citizen of Iceland. Worldcoin could be also described as an example for this concept. It's not exactly an "universal basic income" because it's an one-time payment and lacks regularity, but it's basically the same concept.

There is even an altcoin called Universal Basic Income (UBI), linked to the Proof of Humanity project. AFAIK it's quite similar to Worldcoin.

However, there's a big problem with such concept: they only work with a centralized entity who can verify the identities of the participants with a KYC-like system, otherwise everybody would register as many accounts/addresses as possible. Basically what Worldcoin and Auroracoin did. There are some concepts like "pseudonym parties" coming from Anarchist groups where on a kind of "gathering" people can confirm a pseudonym to a group, but that involves at least a bit of trust in the group "leaders" or "organizers" and also is probably vulnerable to malicious behaviour like doxxing.

And then there's a second big problem: how can such a cryptocurrency get any sustainable value? In the case of Auroracoin for example, the airdrop for every registered new participant was dumped by most participants as fast as possible. I guess WorldCoin will see a similar fate. So the coin must get value due to other reasons.

There's one way I could see something like that materialize: Anonymint (a very knowledgeable user which was banned a lot of times because of his behaviour in the forum) had proposed an "inverse commons" based on the model of Steemit. It's a space where the participants create value on the blockchain, for example a collection of articles or other media. I could imagine such a model where a small part of the income of this "space" is redistributed regularly among the participants. But the first problem (user identification) remains, or you need a PoS-style system where everybody gets his part of the UBI according to his stake in the system. And I guess the income which can be distributed in such a coin is quite low (couple of cents per month, perhaps ...).

Of course if governments implemented such an idea it could work, but how "universal" could it be? Perhaps if it was implemented by the UN or so ...

You do have a point there, mate. Cryptocurrencies giving away free rewards usually end up being "dumped" on the market. Developers might need to introduce some sort of mechanism that will lock tokens within a certain time. The idea of a UBI could work if implemented well. It would be of great help to people in need.

Wasn't crypto always about financial inclusion? Making it accessible only to those with capital, would totally defeat its original purpose. I'm yet to see if governments will implement such a system (UBI). Elon Musk suggested it, so anything's possible.

[d5000]

To be clear, I would love to see that, even it was only an experiment. But I simply see big, maybe unsurmountable challenges.

Even if you implement it with KYC: what to do with stateless people and refugees without ID? How to fight identity theft? What about corrupt politicians printing fake passports for example? I think maybe you could do something (in Worldcoin-style) with biometric features like fingerprints or ocular scans, but that would probably be a data protection nightmare. You'd need an extremely trustable entity to manage the data - and if it got hacked, then you basically can close the coin down (or have to re-KYC everybody).

One type of UBI coin I have discussed several years ago in this forum and forgot to mention in my last post was a "geolocalized token". The idea was: instead of distributing the tokens to individuals based on biometric features or national IDs, they could be "dropped" to places around the world and people would have to "collect" them. Tokens could even be dropped regularly inside people's houses.

Basically this would work a bit like Pokemon Go (remember that old game? ) or like geocaching games.

But of course this would also unfortunately a quite centralized verification mechanism, because it would need a closed-source "trusted" geolocation software you can't manipulate. However, if the system was managed for example by a kind of democratic cooperative, then I think a reasonable decentralized structure could be achieved, although still of course much more centralized than Bitcoin's.

On a very small scale this already seems to exist, see here: https://medium.com/coinmonks/proof-of-location-geospatial-data-on-blockchains-ea973adb0ee5