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Author Topic: Idea of an Universal Basic Income in the form of cryptocurrency  (Read 117 times)
Elucoin (OP)
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January 11, 2018, 12:35:57 PM
Last edit: January 11, 2018, 01:29:44 PM by Elucoin
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I was thinking about an idea of using a cryptocurrency to make the first Universal Basic Income that is really universal for all humans. The idea would be that each human on earth will get a fixed amount of the coin every each period of time. For example, let’s call it UBI (don’t know if it’s taken or not), every day each person get 1 UBI automatically.
Many questions and problem will come with this concept.

First and most critical, how to ensure that nobody could clam multiple times the daily amount of UBI. We need a system to identify uniquely each human and make sure that only the real person can get his UBI, not someone using ID of other humans that are not part or not aware of the system. Maybe the only ultimate way to do that is to have a DNA match, but even then it’s not impossible that someone stole your DNA signature from a hair or a corporal fluid taken without mutual consent of the person. On a side note, if we end up with a system to uniquely identify each human on earth it will be even easier to spy, track and control the population, so it will be a huge negative.

Maybe a simpler solution could be based on passport but not everyone has a valid passport and many people avec multiple ones (multiple nationalities), so we would need a way to dismiss multiple passport of the same person but it would be a nightmare to do so and also it would need a way to give the UBI to the ones without passport too if we don’t want to exclude a large part of the population.
Secondly, we would have to decide if we emit the coin only to the one that redeem it from the day they claim their right to get it or if we redeem for each human from the start, so people joining late will get all the capital waiting for them from day one. The first case will reduce the emission of the coins but it will make it unfair for the one joining later and it will end up like most if not all current cryptocurrencies, the ones joining earlier have a clear advantage over the one joining later. So the second method of distribution should be applied, but that will of course make the value of the currency highly inflationary. But this is not necessarily a bad thing, as it will force people to use the coins to cover their immediate needs and not spare them for the future, but this will make the value changing at a fixed rate so price could not be set in UBI as they will change constantly. One solution could be to have a validity date or a destruction rate of coins, that will force you to spend them while keeping the value more stable, so it means they would need to be exchanged for a stable coin as soon as they are redeemed by the person in order to keep enough value to use it while older coins not redeem would have their value dropping fast. People joining later, thus having more coins initially would be disadvantaged versus people having sold them UBI coins each day at the best rate and stacking the stable coin all that time, but at least it will be a little more fair than starting from zero and it will push people to redeem their UBI as soon as they are aware of the project.

Third, the only purpose of a basic income system is to provide the minimum of money necessary to barely live without other income, that mean it must pay for the cheaper possible rent, the cheaper possible food, the basic health need (paying the base health insure coverage) and having still a few remaining for cloths and if possible a very little pocket money for other will and need (we would accept that a person living only on basic income would have free access to library (with books, movies, computer with internet access…), to the basic education (for kids and young), possibly the need to have a minimal computer (i.e. smartphone) with internet access would be discussed too.

In any case, this means that the UBI coins will need to be accepted to pay for these services and goods directly or indirectly. Again we have a major problem that for the same money you can afford more or less depending of the country or even the area where you live. Of course we can encourage people living mainly or only on a basic income to move outside of expensive cities and goes to the country side to find a rent low enough to be paid with their UBI but you cannot said to someone living in Switzerland that he must leave his country and family to go live in the cheapest country in the world (apparently South Africa according to the Time) just because we based the value of the basic income on the cost of living in the cheapest country.

Then if we find a way to adjust the quantity of IBU for each country/area, we might get fraud from people pretending they live in the most expensive place but in fact spend a king’s life on a beach in Thailand.  Again this will force the tracking of people to be sure they live where they say they do, that will be against privacy of people and the idea of freedom that come with the basic income.
So at the end it could be very difficult to make it as fair as we wanted it to be, but it could still be an interesting experiment or a kind of artistic performance to make people talk about basic income and how we can get there eventually.

What do you think? Has there any cryptocurrency that tends to do something similar? Any idea to address the problems cited here ?

[PS: I'm not new to the forum but I lost my old account somehow, I've been reading since 2013 but not posting so much]
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