Topic: Creating a guaranteed minimum income through crypto-coins - page 5. (Read 14970 times)

Sounds like a great idea, a way for low-income folks to supplement their income. In my case, for example, I earn less than $900 a month, am 59 and only have 20 hours a week of work. Property tax and car insurance are the biggest burdens, and I usually have to buy food with a credit card (we make a bit too much for food stamps). Just an extra $100-200 a month would make a world of difference. I've known about Bitcoins since its inception, but only got involved the past couple months in mining. Seeing how it was supposed to go up and up, I invested (on credit) $900 in an one ASIC rig, and another $2000 for GPU scrypt mining with building 2 new rigs and upgrading another. All this hoping that after the ROI it would give me about 50% more income a month to pay bills. I've only mined about $600 so far in 7 weeks due to the price downturn, but seems like a good investment given time.
As for your idea, a new coin based on a needy persons identity on Facebook or elsewhere who could sign up as a verified identity could work, then a pool set up with passwords given out only to people who maintain a good standing with the group and demonstrate need. Perhaps some type of CPU coin, where it wouldn't be so much the hashing power but "proof of presence" on the network to say that they are working/needing it, and then a fixed reward for the presence there alone. Just as an experiment, I've been mining memorycoins on 3 CPUS for the past week, and they only net me one every 3 days which are only worth a penny, but that doesn't take away from my mining other altcoins with my GPU's (which I would never give up). This sort of thing would give "presence" on the pool, and then the pool could distribute the rewards to members who are active both there and on Facebook. For some people just $2-3 a day would be a big help. This would also be an incentive to get a lot of folks interested in altcoins, many who have never heard of them before and be a boost to the "brand", including to Bitcoin. The coin would need to be stable, and each person should be able to  earn that. Then as you say, too, someone could earn more for getting new people involved and having them join and download wallets, among other things.

That's understandable - I had much the same reaction when I first heard of Bitcoin, so I ignored it for a long time.   

But if you could elaborate on WHAT you find hard to believe, that would be helpful.

The part I'm still having trouble believing in is the "network assigned tasks" system. 

But if we could get that to work, it might be a model for a completely new way of organizing ourselves to get things done, far beyond creating a medium of exchange.

Ooops - My apologies.  I've added an edit to correct that.   

And again, thanks!

its too hard to believe for me.

He was actually quoting me.  ;-)

I think your revision is improving things btw, imo.  ;-)

Dave: I'll take a look at your link.


One way that I've conceived of the altcoin proposed above, is as every individual loaning coins into existence for themself.
It's just that everyone defaults on every loan, and everyone who transacts in the altcoin pays a tiny 'fee' to cover everyone's defaults.

Hi forgive my newness, I signed up just for this conversation. I have an idea for modeling a block chain solution after a guaranteed income-style proposal that previously involved traditional banking. I am a founding member of the Coalition for Capital Homesteading capitalhomestead.org which at this time supports a plan that proponents of minimum incomes seem to like. I have been studying monetary reform for years and I along the way I discovered something called Binary Economics which I believe has the best principles for supporting all of humanity, expanding freedom and allowing maximum growth without inflation. It is not perfect but I feel strongly that something like it really needs to be tried, even of only in one state or region.

The main concept is that loaning money into existence is not necessarily a bad thing. It is just being done the wrong way everywhere. Fractional bank money is backed by government debt and used too often for usurious consumer debt and margin speculation. And of course it is done in a way to benefit the banks, their favored customers, and their lapdog politicians that enable them. You know that part. The concept that I have started focusing on is how productive credit is good, and how it can be really good if it empowers all citizens. The proposed Capital Homestead Act would allow every child, woman and man to open a retirement account and receive credit of several thousand per year (actually a formula based on new growth in GDP divided by number of citizens) to invest in the dividend-paying corp of their choice. The dividends would be spendable each year before retirement. There are many in-depth explanations at cesj.org and some (admittedly not-slick) videos on Youtube. I even gave a speech at the Fed in 2012 and at the Lincoln Memorial last year which you may find interesting; only about ten minutes each. Search my name and Capital Homesteading on Youtube.

When I heard Daniel Larimer of BitShares on LTB I started thinking that perhaps the blockchain concept offers hope for a Capital Homesteading-type plan to exist in the coming "distributed autonomy" world. I also had some ideas along the lines of what you were discussing above about making sure each individual person participates and that others can't fraudulently get multiple identities to abuse the network. I'm thinking smartphone app with biometric combo such as fingerprint, eye scan and voice recognition. Hey, they say a decent percentage of people in Africa are getting phones. Easier than PCs when it comes to meeting the objective of getting every human online. My ideas aren't bulletproof but I think that the bitcoin/blockchain community could work on this problem if something like what we are discussing emerges.

Distributed autonomy and modeling systems based on consensus of what is just for humanity is looking like the answer to so much. I am trying to convince some of the older economists in my movement to consider the possibilities. I and my friends often quote Bucky Fuller "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” I am starting to think this forum can do just that. I hope that all who are in any position to influence what kind of money system the world has will please consider economic justice for all. We the tech-enabled should not want to become the plutocrats of tomorrow. And keep in mind that whatever business you want to be in, it will be easier for it to succeed if there are plenty of customers with money out there.

Thanks for reading and for any constructive conversation. Be patient for replies I don't get online much due to work.

BTW - a word of thanks to odolvlobo for his two word inspirational contribution ("A Job?"), which helped me come up with this approach.    

EDIT: ACK!  Sorry CR1776 for incorrectly attributing that to odolvlobo!

I think I've got an approach to preventing fraud.  It is not simple but perhaps others can see ways to improve on that. 
Details of some mechanisms are still TBD.

Here's a summary of the modified proposal, starting with added/changed elements, then the original elements that are retained:

ADDED/CHANGED:

While coins would be dispensed continuously, they would not be "free", but rather considered payment for the receiver agreeing to accomplish certain simple tasks generated and assigned by the altcoin network.  Some tasks would help verify true identities associated with the altcoin generation accounts (e.g. visiting someone nearby who has set up a new ID'd account, random checking older accounts, etc).  Other tasks would help maintain the altcoin network (e.g. block chain validation, distributed/redundant storage of identity evidence, random selection of contributors for task assignments, automated task generation, etc).   Some tasks would be "in person", others automated by dedicating processing/storage to the network, some might be in person online. 

The frequency of "in person" task assignments would be light - once an identity has been verified for an account, it would only occasionally be spot checked.   People could sign up for different tasks, depending on their situation.  Unpopular tasks might yield a coin payout bonus. 

Failing to accept or attempt to fulfill tasks, as well as committing fraud, would be grounds for barring the identified abuser from receiving altcoin distributions for some period of time - by rejecting coin creation transactions.


ORIGINAL:

A new altcoin.  Any person could voluntarily register to tie their true identity to a verified account, in order to be allowed to generate a fixed amount of coins into that account on a regular basis (likely weekly).  If desired, coins could be transferred to 'anonymous' wallets/accounts, for enhanced privacy.   

Coins would be timestamped at creation, and their value would decay logarithmically at a fixed rate, to prevent inflation due to accumulation of coins.  The value of a coin at any time could be calculated based on its age and value at the time it was stamped.  Any time a coin is transferred (or broken into change), its decayed value would be calculated and a new coin or coins generated with the remaining value and a new time stamp.  Validity of coin transactions (including creation at the approved rate) would be verified in a manner similar to Bitcoin, though at far lower computational/energy cost. 

Anyone agreeing to accept the coin distribution would also be agreeing to accept the coins in payment for goods or services at a reasonable market-determined exchange rate (there might initially be an upper limit on this requirement, but once the altcoin is well established this should cease to be a concern).

I can help you with the "proof on concept" stage.
Here's how we do it.
First you send me bitcoins.  1PBKvxmHqKJbEBtGGBWGfgfAGWL8j3ZL7d
 $2 worth, daily, should be a sufficient "minimal" amount?
Then I will spend it on basic necessities for myself. Bread, toothpaste, bar of soap, a razor, etc.

You have the money. I don't. So lets see you put your idea into action; Provide me with a minimum income.
Until we get that first step out of the way.... this is a total non-starter.

However once we prove this idea out for a year, then we can approach investors and the crypto-currency community and say "look what we just did, lets allo support this endeavor".

Get your ball rolling man. Send me mBTC daily.

Well, no, that wasn't my suggestion, though there might be something to the idea of voluntary gifts of Mincoin.

Perhaps my comment on people acting voluntarily on behalf of Mincoin created that impression; but that was really just to suggest that the idea of creating a minimum income for all, without government compulsion, might be popular enough to garner voluntary actions to help promote the spread of Mincoin as a viable currency.

Think of it this way:  a monetary system, by its usefulness, creates a systemic value above and beyond the sum of values of the units of currency that make it up.  That's why governments have been able to inflate money supplies, without the users immediately deciding to stop using the currency being inflated - money as a system is just too valuable to give up except under the most extreme exploitation.   It is that value that Mincoin would tap into, to provide a guaranteed minimum income. 

It is my expectation that the market would quickly render the value of a mincoin to a relatively low and fairly stable value, through the mechanism of a high currency velocity due to its fast decay rate.  Anyone relying solely on free mincoin for a living would still be quite poor - but hopefully no longer desperately poor.

Kaiji - your suggestion of considering a crowd-funding/investing model could be a fruitful way to consider Mincoin.  (Still hoping for suggestions for a better name!)

Instead of just making coins for myself, to get free stuff, I can give away the right for others to call upon my efforts in support of efforts I consider worthy.  I would accept that there will be those who are less fortunate, who might create Mincoin and give them to others in exchange for things they need.   

Operationally, instead of accumulating mincoin in a public account, that might mean generating them into the account of someone else, while accepting an equally time-decaying debt into one's own account.

Worth thinking about...

It's unhygienic!

Hehe 

human proof of work coins have to be implemented. Only human work is inherently decentralized. Mining in itself is a waste, if mining becomes centralized (as it is now) this waste can possibly miss his only reason of beeing.

I'll reply briefly to the unacceptable point of views showd by certain contributors to the thread: if someone thinks that any distribution of value should be in accordance of work time (so the producer is "enslaved" by the time he produces some more than what he gets) he is  ignoring the fact that hourly income is not equal for all, and in NO WAY you can check the productivity of a single worker in one firm, that could account for this disparity.

People does not work simply because land and means of production have been privatized, which can happen only with violence (as it did), and because it is not possible to choose a medium of exchange not backed by violence as fiat currencies are, without incurring in this violence. 

Alaska pays a dividend every year, or used to, to every resident of the state. It is justified because each resident sacrifices a little to accommodate the business of extracting and moving oil into the market.

I completely agree with the suggestion from the OP that simply being a citizen in the USA we are all in small ways paying for the success of businesses with no compensation. I pay a little more to phone companies because they have price controls that are strong enough extract more money from me than is fair (near monopolies), but not strong enough for the govt to take action (true monopolies). I pay more for cable because cable won't break channels into only small chunks I can buy and I have no other choice. I pay more for gasoline because of panic and price manipulation. I refer friends to see movies and I never get a commission. And the story goes on and on.

If you had a truly transparent VAT tax that did not destroy commerce, and was fairly distributed, I think it is a great idea. A distributed currency is perfectly suited to address this problem because you would can programmatically remove corruption in the collection and distribution.

And it is just software, you don't need a new coin, Bitcoin could do it.

I don't understand why tying coin creation to true identity is a problem if you are trying to provide free income to individuals. There is no reason that you could not provide basically a faucet of Bitcoin to registered addresses that in fact are tied to a person.

You could even make the private keys public but add another usage validation for public coins, lets say a physical key that you get from the government.

I actually had the crazy idea that Satoshi should do something like this with his million of bitcoins. He could both create incredible hype around Bitcoin by starting to give them away in a methodical fashion and with some implementation that benefited those that truly need it.

For sustainability, Bitcoin could implement a VAT tax to every txn that follows some complex progressive algorith. The VAT tax would replenish a government address which then trickles payments to registered bitcoin addresses.

Anonymity while a feature of Bitcoin is meaningless drivel when solving the worlds problems.

It seems your original suggestion is to disperse a minimum wage to everybody from voluntary gifts.
This is the same as voluntary supporting an organization that gives to the poor. Not exactly the same, as everybody would not get the minimum. It could be enough.

I just don't see how creating an altcoin for it solves anything.

You will need to find a way to create a fool proof identity linking each person to one account.

Instead of just giving the coins away how about some sort of crowd-investing similar to crowd funding where numerous people purchase a company, mine etc. together. There has to be real life value for it to become a viable source of income. Otherwise what you are suggesting is some hi tech form of communism which is unnatural to a natural market.

If you can produce some way to eliminate embezzlement and fraud using a crypto you could scale down your idea and give it to some third world country. I know Africa is notorius for supervisors stealing entire monthly payrolls from employees in the private and government sectors.

I mostly agree with you regarding minimum income, though I also agree with those who would not want to be compelled to support it.  I mainly find that those who oppose it either fear that they will be forced to pay to support others and thereby would be worse off, or else fear that by giving everyone a minimum income the poorest would be deprived of income that could have been concentrated on them alone:  both fears are based on zero-sum thinking.

Unfortunately, the fact that it hasn't happened by now is a pretty good indicator that it isn't likely to be accepted and implemented any time soon, and even if it were, the poorest in the world would almost certainly not be covered by it. 

However, I would invite you to explain why you think it cannot be solved with an altcoin, as I do think that might be possible.   If you see issues that I have not noticed, I would appreciate your explanation.   See my previous posts for some of the issues I've tried to address.