Research #14
Updated by didi about 8 years ago
Utopic idea / social experiment:
Bootstrap basic income by creating a coin together with some basic governing smart contracts which could - if participants decide so - become a basic income.
* Every participant gets paid 100 coins per day
* Payment is done from a central _pool account_
* In case the pool account doesn't have sufficient funds, new coins are created
What this means is that the value of the coins will very directly depend on the willingness and ability of the network to fund the pool account.
A DAO like governance structure should provide basic tools for making policy decisions, e.g. what are the rules for accepting new participants and - crucially - how to make sure the pool gets funded in order to give the coin a chance to become and remain valuable.
For example a requirement for participating could be payment of crypto taxes (probably alternative terminology would be better here). How to enforce this? E.g. it could mean all economically relevant activity on any Dapp (no matter which platform / coin) is taken into account. Without central authority it may not be possible to avoid any chance of "tax evasion", but that should be an acceptable trade-off for getting rid of central authorities (let alone central authorities also don't give that 100% guarantee). It should however be "hard enough" to cheat the system, basically making non-cheating behaviour less expensive.
Of course this approach would mean low or very low initial value of the basic income (which should be communicated in order to not fuel any false expectations), but if the basic mechanism works, it could with time grow proportionally to the size of decentralised economies.
While this may sound fantastic, it may actually work if a network of cooperative people is formed who manage to avoid abuse by non-cooperative people.
Open Questions:
* Is it a good idea to have only one, global pool?
* Is it a good idea to have just one, fixed rate?
* How to proof physical identity without falling back to a central authority?
* What basic governance mechanisms should the DAO provide?
The idea is not all new (see "Grantcoin":http://www.grantcoin.org/, "basicincome.co":http://www.basicincome.co/), but so far I've seen no proposal for a mechanism which could give and preserve value of the coin.
Bootstrap basic income by creating a coin together with some basic governing smart contracts which could - if participants decide so - become a basic income.
* Every participant gets paid 100 coins per day
* Payment is done from a central _pool account_
* In case the pool account doesn't have sufficient funds, new coins are created
What this means is that the value of the coins will very directly depend on the willingness and ability of the network to fund the pool account.
A DAO like governance structure should provide basic tools for making policy decisions, e.g. what are the rules for accepting new participants and - crucially - how to make sure the pool gets funded in order to give the coin a chance to become and remain valuable.
For example a requirement for participating could be payment of crypto taxes (probably alternative terminology would be better here). How to enforce this? E.g. it could mean all economically relevant activity on any Dapp (no matter which platform / coin) is taken into account. Without central authority it may not be possible to avoid any chance of "tax evasion", but that should be an acceptable trade-off for getting rid of central authorities (let alone central authorities also don't give that 100% guarantee). It should however be "hard enough" to cheat the system, basically making non-cheating behaviour less expensive.
Of course this approach would mean low or very low initial value of the basic income (which should be communicated in order to not fuel any false expectations), but if the basic mechanism works, it could with time grow proportionally to the size of decentralised economies.
While this may sound fantastic, it may actually work if a network of cooperative people is formed who manage to avoid abuse by non-cooperative people.
Open Questions:
* Is it a good idea to have only one, global pool?
* Is it a good idea to have just one, fixed rate?
* How to proof physical identity without falling back to a central authority?
* What basic governance mechanisms should the DAO provide?
The idea is not all new (see "Grantcoin":http://www.grantcoin.org/, "basicincome.co":http://www.basicincome.co/), but so far I've seen no proposal for a mechanism which could give and preserve value of the coin.