Viva, a Price Stable, Humanity Coin

How do you provide for people in a world where the only thing that is scarce are jobs?

VIVA is our attempt to answer that question.

No one wants to subsidize the life of someone who doesn't want to live theirs, but by providing an alternative means for humans to have their needs met, we push ourselves one step closer to realizing the fullness of human potential, starting by freeing a handful of individuals on a regular basis to peruse their passions whatever those passions may be. To accomplish this, what I propose is to take the excess economic energy contained within a typical economy and leveraging that energy to improve the human condition overall rather than line the pockets of a few.

• William Banks

I'm not sure how many of you have heard about the Viva Coin project. It is a big supporter of Steem and holds a view of this sites long term success.

Some proof of this can be seen in the early auctions for it's most fundamental 'coin' called crowns, where users were allowed to pay for their winning bids using an exchange rate of 1 Steem = $1 USD (at the time Steem was about .15-.20 or so.) On top of this, the Tradeqwik Exchange, which is a part of the Viva structure (I'll explain more below) powers up Steem sent to the @tradeqwik account to upvote posts for Steemit users that use the service. The Steem is planned to be held for at least 5 years in that account as 'cold storage.' Talk about a long view for our platform.

@vivacoin post: How to get $1 for each of your Steem

You can also see the 4 rounds of the initial ICO that were done held here on Steemit on the @vivacoin account. On top of this, a contest is being held (and still running) for people to work with the white paper (using those links above) to brighten it up with graphics as well as readable and exciting text while keeping the core concepts in place. The prizes for this contest are nothing to sneeze at, being:

• A cash prize of $500 USD
• A 1% share in our ICO
• Your very own VIVA Crown.
• Credit and your own byline within the whitepaper itself.
• Long term paid position with VIVA as a Graphics Designer.
  Source - Viva White Paper Contest

You can see an excellent entry to this contest by @cryptomancer: here.

To top all this off, they have developed Tradeqwik cryptocurrency exchange which is a big component of the Viva Project for the distribution of coins (which I'll discuss a bit below.) Steemit users also get the bonus that:

TradeQwik needed a viable long term solution to cold storage for our Steem, so we decided to take the step of powering up all of the funds we receive in excess of our average daily withdrawal demands. What this means is that we'll be using SP for cold storage. But that's boring! So just to shake things up a little, We'll be using that SP exclusively to upvote the posts of our best customers!
-Source - Join the TradeQwik Beta and Win Prizes!

Especially with this 'experiment' that has been going on, the usefulness of an upvote from a 50k+ SP account is rather meaningful.

The reason I wanted to start with this is so it's not viewed as a direct competitor to Steemit nor advocating to jump ship. I merely needed a little break from my more typical posts which is why I've put his together. While I do see VIVA being easy to take part in by the end-user, there is a lot of complexity within it making laying some of this out an appealing challenge.

As a disclaimer I have been lending a hand with VIVA and I do hold a few crowns myself. I'm by no means an investor nor an expert on trading. I will be as factual as I can from the whitepaper and @williambanks five Steemit posts on it. It should be pretty obvious which parts are more my opinion.

If you want to read up on it directly, it was posted here on Steemit some months back in parts:

• Introduction to VIVA : A Price Stable Crypto Currency with Basic Income (that's not Hypothetical)
• Introduction to VIVA, part 2 : More Than Meets The Eye
• Introduction to VIVA, part 3 : How does it work?
• Introduction to VIVA, part 4 : How do you bootstrap a new economy?
• and Introduction to VIVA, part 5 : VIVA CAN? You bet!
• Current Version of the Whitepaper
• Viva Rocketchat

What is Viva and Why I'm Excited

Now first off, the Viva Coin project has been spear-headed by one of my favorite people @williambanks. On top of this, I've personally been a fan of the idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI) while always having a concern that it would remain sustainable. The core of Viva takes a stab at both of these. What makes this unique is that rather than simply giving money for nothing, this project is really an economic engine to help create jobs that pay.

At this time, there are three kinds of worker nodes, Compute, Storage & Network, there will be others in the future.

The other components that I am excited to see implemented are:

• A way to get business to use and accept Viva
• The ability to draw dividends for life
• Subjective voting on user generated content, worth $1 each (with maximum weekly votes based on stake)
• Monetary Awards being given out to those subjectively selected as 'worthy'
• Starting the project off with optional debit cards to purchase where MasterCard is accepted or to make Cash ATM Withdrawls
• Their own exchange, Tradeqwik.com (on steemit @tradeqwik)

^{Credit to @cryptomancer}

Basic's and Currencies

Without getting to in depth, there are three currency components; Crowns, VIVA and vX. To keep the price stability of Viva, the crown holders will be able determine how many of these coins can be minted and/or destroyed as time goes along.

We do it this way because the VIVA coin is engineered to be price stable. It isn’t pegged per se, but it does orbit a value. This value is set by the Crown Holders, and is presently set at $5.30 USD per VIVA. This figure was selected for a starting value because it is the average amount of money earned per hour by an average person living in a first world economy. It was derived by dividing the average annual household family income by the annual household size and then dividing it by 24 hrs in a day, 7 days a week and 52 weeks in a year.

Crowns: There are a limited amount of crowns available (eventually maxing out at 42,000.) Rather than being used as the currency used to buy or sell things, provide a 'Treasury Right' which can be rented to a mint, allowing it to then print some Viva. Each crown can provide one Treasury Right.

On top of the earnings through the rental agreements (that last 90 days at a time,) crown holders are given certain rights including "the right to control coin fundamentals, such as price, marketcap, supply distribution rates etc."

Viva: This is the liquid currency that is used for actual transactions such as buying or selling things. Viva is printed by a mint that have paid to rent a Treasury Right from a crown holder. The amount it can print is proportional to the number of Treasury Rights it's rented to the total number of crowns. (i.e. If there are 100 crowns, each Treasury Right allows printing for 1% of that cycles printed coins.)

vX: Think of this in the sense of a Steem Backed Dollar (SD.) One SD holds $1 US worth of Steem which when Steem is at 10 cents per share is worth 10 Steem tokens. It essentially keeps it's value of one USD, even when the price of Steem fluctuates. Simply replace the X in the vX with a fiat currency (such as the US dollar, Mexican Peso, Japanese Yen, etc.) Each vX is worth an amount of viva that equals 1 unit of that fiat currency.

Business buy-in to use, accept and pay workers in Viva

A new startup wants to run a business and needs infrastructure but doesn't want to rely on Amazon or similar services due to cost concerns.
For the cost of a good quality rack mounted server and colo agreement, they can spin up a business activity and attach to a mint. They acquire a Treasury Right, the mint attaches to the network and begins minting on their behalf. From here, the business proposition is that VIVA is infrastructure that pays you. In exchange, the business accepts viva as payment.

The appeal here is to make it easier and more cost effective for businesses to start up, hence providing jobs. Right now these jobs will be available to people who simply have a computer with an internet connection and help the business to Compute, Storage and/or Network. Other types of end-user services will be available as time goes on. In many parts of today's society, simply having a computer on the net is already a staple, but now it can also earn you some money.

^{Credit to @cryptomancer}

A varying interest rate, set by the crown holders, is charged when a business asks for Viva coins to be printed by a Mint. Most of the time, the charged interest is put back into the liquidity pool instead of being given to the requesting business. Not wanting to over-complicate things here, I'll simply say there are two other scenarios it doesn't make fiscal sense to have money printed (but may be desired in an emergency to cover payroll) or to remove coins from an over-saturated market.

Dividends for Life

As @williambanks stated "no one wants to subsidize the life of someone who isn't trying to live theirs." So dividends are provided to those who have Viva into the liquidity pool. (see more on this pool in @cryptomancer's Entry into the Whitepaper contest.) Funds can moved over to be available for immediate spending, but this does reduce their stake and hence how much dividend and potentially how many 'subjective votes' (explained below) they will get.

Whatever else you may be doing, you'll get a dividend payment every day for life so long as you participate in the Subjective Proof of Work, i.e. upvote at least one person every day. Yes, you're being hired to give money away to friends, family and even people you haven't met yet. But this has a specific purpose. It acts like a heart, pumping blood through the body of our economy which we treat like a living being. This is the push effect, but there also must be a "pull".

50% of the spread is immediately paid as a dividend to each person in the liquidity pool.

Subjective Voting (similar to Steemit) and Tipping

25% is used to fund a subjective proof of work system similar in many ways to Steemit's but with some important differences.

However, on VIVA each vote cast will award $1 vUSD and there is no limit how many times you can vote for the same person. The catch here is that you will have a limited number of votes available to you. Every 1000 Viva of stake (which can fluctuate over time) will give you one vote for the week.

These votes can be cast on user created content (indefinitely) as well as can be given as a tip for job well done (such as a storage worker providing a file quicker than expected.) There will be downvotes, however these only effect a users reputation, but not their earnings. These reputations cover a rolling 90 day window and with disuse does trend to zero.

Votes that are not used after one week instead of being destroyed, are donated to the award committee (discussed below.) increasing the award pool that they distribute to those they deem worthy.

Monetary Rewards by the Award Committee

All money in the awards pool must be given away by the end of each quarter (90 days) or be destroyed and removed from the system. This group can choose to give these away however they wish whether it be wholly to a single person, or distributed (evenly or unevenly) to a large number of people. How this is done is completely at their discretion.

####The point being to find the people who need it the most and provide the biggest IMPACT!

Without getting too complicated, Crownholders generate "Award Rights" over time (4 per year per crown) which they can either exercise themselves or give out to others to use for them. Much like how a Treasury Right allows printing a percentage of Viva coins, an Committee Right allows giving a percentage of the Award pool.

Crownholders can give these awards away themselves or they same give this Award Rights to somebody else to give it away for them (like a proxy.) So technically the Awards Committee is comprised of Crownholders themselves and the people they have asked to use one of their Award Rights. This means that it's a subjective decision by each person on who gets what, without a need for voting to find a consensus.

MasterCard Debit/ATM Cards

Many people are turned off with the often multiple steps need to get a cryptocurrency, let alone a new one, into an easily spendable form. While for many of us dealing the our wallets and transfers are no big deal, to a non-tech, non-crypto individual this can just seem scary. To help with this, VIVA has provided a solution for this right from the start.

"VIVA has partnered with our bank to offer debit MasterCards from day one." Anybody with funds in the liquidity pool can purchase one for $25. It has no spending limits and it automatically loaded with any dividend payments earned over the previous month.

Their own Exchange, Tradeqwik

VIVA needs to be able to gateway between the fiat and crypto worlds as quickly and cheaply as possible. If you think of VIVA as an economic engine, TradeQwik is the transmission. TradeQwik puts idle funds to work immediately and this turns the wheels that move the economy.

Cryptocurrencies have found some difficulty in gaining acceptance by businesses. Some of this is due to the value fluctuations, hence rather stable pegged tokens like the Steem Dollar. But beyond this is also the issue of charge-backs, which aren't possible on a blockchain.

To facilitate that, we built a Tier 1 card card processor that will process traditional card transactions for merchants, clearing all transactions directly to VIVA. This works great for the merchant because we completely eliminate the risk of charge-backs and fraud from the equation if they process all their transactions in vX. We also waive the normal fees and clear everything at the industry standard of MCX spot +1%.

In order to speed processing and order matching, TradeQwik charges no trading fees at all on limit orders with market orders only being 0.05%. Trading on TradeQwik is designed to save the active trader about 90% on their trading fees.

Final Thoughts

This is one of those projects that I just want to see succeed. I know there are other Universal Basic Income projects out there, even within the cryptosphere. But this one seems to approach this in a rather unique way (hence calling it a Humanity Coin) and has worked through so many aspects such as providing 'work,' closing the crypto to fiat gap, user engagement, business buy-in, as well as the big one, SUSTAINABILITY. One thing that I do fully believe is that the system we all have known throughout our lifetimes can not last forever. We are going to have to come up with a better way.

I truly hope to see this be that better way!

If you want to read more:
Check out the current version of the VIVA Whitepaper
Join the VIVA rocketchat channel at : https://chat.vivaco.in

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Image Sources:
VivaCoin
Dividends
Vote Counts
Umbrella
Mastercard
TradeQwik