Basic Income and Cryptocurrencies
Some time ago I came across a concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and fell in love with the idea. I started reading some articles here and there, following different UBI advocates, I even joined a Slack channel.
Today I saw someone posting about a new platform that they are building, that basically recreates UBI concept using software and volunteers. À la shared economy 'slash' basic income mix.
Also recently I started mining Gridcoins. Love the concept as well! Feels good to be able to help the scientific community and get paid at the same time! ❤︎
So today when I saw the Group Income project, my second thought was somehow mixing it up with Gridcoin (first one was "oh that's cool!"). I have no idea how that would work or even the potential benefits of combining the two, but here are few bullet points:
- Both projects are
altruisticsemi-altruistic - Both projects are for the greater good and for the better future
- Both projects are revolving around personal monetary benefits
- Both projects are based on decentralized software
Perhaps there are more similarities, which probably means nothing. But... I though I'll just start a discussion and hope it inspires someone to do more better things. =)
I've recently started running BOINC and mining Gridcoin. I did quite a bit of BOINC mining back when the Ripple folks were handing out XRP as a reward. Turns out I scraped up big pile of XPR worth quite a bit (a few BTC) all for just helping out a bunch of science projects.
I won't pretend that running BOINC and getting GRC is ever going to be that lucrative - I'm basically running a new loss when power cost is considered. However it is fun and I still love feeling like I'm helping out some science projects. I've even started running BOINC on my phone. It would be nice if it would pay for my cellphone bill but that isn't going to happen.
And UBI - it's the future, in civilized societies that is. Make take a few civil wars to get it. But I reckon they will be short ones because billionaires don't have much of a stomach for their economies and stock markets crashing when the people rise up and revolt taking their fortunes with them.
Welcome to the gridcoin team where we make money by making the world a better place :)
Thank you! =)
While the concept is neat, practically any crypto could be used as a universal income payment. Gridcoin is definitely not the most suited for the job.
Further, the difficulty is in using cryptocurrency to actually pay your living costs. Just like paying a German resident Thai Baht as a universal income, paying them Gridcoin also does not allow them to buy local goods and services.
Hopefully in future, the gap between cryptocurrency and the 'real world' will be bridged to allow anyone to spend cryptocurrency at their local supermarket, but until then this may be a pipe dream.
While it's true that you can't spend GRC in your local store, the coins still have monetary value.
What's in your opinion makes a crypto suitable for UBI?
A combination of:
No crypto really ticks the second box (yet!). However, there are many pegged assets on the BTS DEX that could very easily fit the first category.
I also love BMI! = )
I'm hesitant, though, to get excited about this concept of group income. Wouldn't that reality be very similar to today's?
The push for BMI is due to two major issues:
I do not see how this fixes the loss of income due to job automation. Income is still distributed by sale of time (work). A group of friends with no jobs makes 0 dollars. 0 dollars divided by...
I do not see how this fixes the gap in wealth and income distribution. The majority of generated income continues to go to those who own the machines, as the machines do the work which once provided income for individuals. Moreover, the geological and sociological division of wealth will create groups of those receiving incomes and groups of no income individuals.
In this model, what is attributed to individuals today will simply be attributed to groups instead.
BMI as I understand it hopes to make a large impact in the context of redistribution of income (not wealth). To simplify in the extreme, its idea is to encourage those few who receive 90% of the income -- new production generated wealth -- to distribute that a bit more fairly; "we, as a society, have developed to the point where we're producing loads with very little work and frankly, mr. owner, you don't deserve the enormous share you're receiving right now."
I think group income might work, but with heavy regulation.
I thought the whole point in universal income was to get rid of the excessive bureaucracy by making the benefit system redundant. Everyone would get the same therefore no more mean testing required.
It sounds like a good idea but I'm not sure it will ever work. Who does the jobs that need doing when everyone is paid enough to live on? What about immigration? Everyone will want to move the countries that have UBI.
Your question shows the problem with a labor market without UBI. Think about supply and demand and apply it to jobs. A job with high demand should have a bunch of people competing for them, right? And a job with low demand should have few people competing for them for the same reason, right? So low demand jobs should pay well and high demand jobs should pay less. But that's not the way it works is it?
How it works in a system without UBI is that the shittiest jobs pay the least because people require money to live and are competing with each other in a race to the bottom to do that work for as little as possible. As an added effect, human labor is artificially cheaper than machines labor due to the requirement for humans to do work in order to live. So technology that should be invested in, isn't invested in, which means productivity is lower than it would be if the cost of human labor weren't so low.
So to answer your question, once everyone has basic income, the people that do the jobs that need doing that people don't want to do, will need to pay more for people to do them, or also allow people to do them in smaller increments. Think about it. Would you do a shitty job for $8/hr? Would you for $20/hr? Would you do a shitty job for 50 hours per week? Would you do it 5 hours per week? These variables are important, right?
Additionally, if people aren't willing to do a job for less than the cost of a machine to do that job, then suddenly investing in automation makes sense for that employer. Imagine a machine that can do a job for $15 per hour. As long as people will do it for less than $15, that job won't be automated. As soon as people demand more than $15, that job will be automated.
Personally, I think if a machine can do a job humans don't want to do, machines should do that job and no human should be forced to do that job with the stick of poverty. Let free people with the power to say no in the labor market, do jobs without being coerced into doing them, and in doing so earn incomes on top of the basic incomes providing them the bargaining power to refuse low wages.
One other thing. UBI also allows people to say yes to working for low wages, or even for free, doing work they really really want to do. Think startups. Twenty people could get together and work for free for however long it takes to get the startup profitable. Right now, that's not possible without VC funding, or without a group of people who aren't worried about monthly survival. With basic income, no one is worried about monthly survival, so everyone can choose to work for free on what they feel is most valuable to work on.
As for immigration, UBI is for citizens and citizenship can be a real bitch to obtain. It also requires legal documentation, which means UBI could even incentivize legal vs illegal immigration. Additionally, if funded by a VAT, immigrants would be paying into the UBI pool that only citizens receive UBI from. This could potentially flip people from being anti-immigration to pro-immigration, since more immigrants who aren't citizens could potentially mean higher UBI for citizens.
If you have another question, please read my FAQ.
You make a lot of great points that I've never thought of which makes it sound good. But how do we get people to support this and see it implemented?
I doubt employers would want to pay more for low skilled workers and I don't think people that are less well off will want to see it happen because they will think the rich should not be entitled to it.
I think mining and gathering masternodes for coins that have this feature is a great way to achieve this goal.
I myself hold 2 masternode coins however i dont mine.
great post :)
Where I think the two (UBI and cryptocurrency) align is in a platform like like this (steemit). I'm totally new here and essentially a noob at cryptocurrency, but as far as I can work out this Steem currency is being created (edit: I don't think that part is true, after further reading) and distributed where the community most sees value. Keep in mind this is how a regular fiat money works, except that regular money is brought into existence as debt (see https://politicsforpeoplenotcorporations.wordpress.com/2016/10/28/the-economy-is-a-ponzi-scheme-no-really/), which requires a never ending run of borrowing new money into existence to meet the interest payments on that debt. Which also promotes financial gambling. But we need new money created to more or less match the value that is added to society. This Steemit model seems like the perfect way to create new money for valuable contributions to society. The link between UBI and Steem is not direct, like others have pointed out above, due to the fact that UBI is supposed to be unconditional (i.e. you don't have to technically provide something of value to society for it). The link is more indirect and centres around the novel approach to money creation that Steemit uses. A UBI could be funded by similar mechanisms, but instead of each individual explicitly showcasing their value to society, we should consider that each individual automatically and inherently adds a certain minimum amount of value to society. That value can be recognised with new money created in a similar debt-free way as Steem is (well, as far as I can tell how it is created).