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What does this mean? You already have a unique identity as far as the government are concerned, and who would pay UBI if not the government.
by jabradoodle 3y ago
What does this mean? You already have a unique identity as far as the government are concerned, and who would pay UBI if not the government.
- ethbr0 3y agoAs with all crypto ideas, I believe this starts with "If we wanted to take government out of the picture..."
- twelve40 3y agoi think the question is more along the lines of how is this feasible
- yunohn 3y agoAnd replacing said government with a team of zero-moral tech bros like Sam Altman. Not that I think any politicians/governments are doing a good job, but I’d rather not ”change” the system and end up in similar shit.
- kstrauser 3y agoTo the best of my knowledge, the IRS has never scanned my eyeball, and yet I'm still able to send and receive money with them. I'm not getting the UBI angle at all. What part of UBI requires new technology?
- notahacker 3y agoThe problem it's solving or attempting to solve is "how do I create demand for a token that isn't redeemable for anything (generated by a private organization which intends to profit from exchanging tokens it generates for money)", and the only people that want those are cryptobros. Throw in the eyeball trackers as a "Proof of Personhood" twist on the "restricted supply" story, to go with the usual "future world currency, unlimited demand" spiel
- kstrauser 3y agoI think you're exactly right. A lot of its talk presumes that its goals can't be met with, say, a government issued debit card.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- JohnFen 3y ago> What part of UBI requires new technology? None of it, of course. The things that makes implementing UBI difficult to implement are socioeconomic, not technological, in nature. But I think WorldCoin is cynically hoping that invoking "UBI" will trick people into thinking that WC's efforts will be of benefit to everyone.
- kstrauser 3y agoNailed it.
- ericd 3y agoI’m guessing it’s a way to reduce fraud attack surface without relying on something easily lost, like a portable private key?
- kstrauser 3y agoOr an EBT card?
- px43 3y agoYou realize that the IRS deals with rampant fraud right? And with emerging technology, the capabilities of criminals to steal identities is only increasing. People file taxes for dead people or people whose identities have been stolen all the time. Recently, to deal with this, the IRS has outsourced their identity verification to a third party company, id.me, who gathers way WAY more information than Worldcoin does, and it's barely making a dent in the fraud. It's very obvious that the vast majority of people hating on Worldcoin have never taken a moment to consider the actual problems being solved here, and especially the critical importance of solving them now.
- landemva 3y ago> Recently, to deal with this, the IRS has ... Recently, to deal with this foot gun, Congress repealed the personal income tax. President Biden signed this bill into law and said it is a tremendous step toward civil rights and equality. Oh, wait, .
- kstrauser 3y agoWhat are the official numbers for that, compared to the legitimate traffic the IRS handles?
- px43 3y agohttps://www.allstatenewsroom.com/news/tax-and-government-fraud-cases-spiked-68-in-2022 https://www.allstatenewsroom.com/news/tax-and-government-fra... > Tax and Government Fraud Cases Spiked 68% in 2022 > The IRS flagged $5.7 billion in tax fraud in 2022, and there were nearly 8 million reports of suspicious tax-season activities.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoThat figure covers a lot of tax fraud identity verification doesn't solve. The actual figures are around $25bn a year of stopped fraudulent refunds, at a cost of a few thousand employees [1]. [1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-news/FS-14-01.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-news/FS-14-01.pdf
- sdenton4 3y agoCrypto schemes allow a lot of experimentation with the structure of money that no sane government would ever try for fear of crashing their economy in one way or another. Meanwhile, we /should/ be experimenting a lot more with the structure of economics and society, because the current super-structures have created massive concentrations of power and seemingly-insurmountable collective action problems that threaten the biosphere... Bitcoin was designed to act like gold, but this was a series of design choices. (as someone, maybe foldingideas, put it: the crypto bros looked at the concentration of wealth in society and decided that the problem was that /they/ weren't the ones with all the wealth.) You can just as easily design a crypto scheme to generate tokens and distribute them to everyone with an ID regularly: this is UBI, so long as the tokens have recognized value. The problem is that you need to prevent people from registering a million accounts to get a million UBI credits, deflating the value of tokens held by honest folks. Thus the unique identifier problem.
- dopidopHN 3y agoKYC is a thing and apparently crypto exchanges can implement it when asked nicely. But I think grand parent poster is right on the money, it’s a attempts to take governments roles. After all nation states are not that old of a concept. Basically Napoleonic wars. Some type of distopian corporate nationality might come to fruition to replace them.
- ethbr0 3y agoThere's the possibility of utopian corporate nationality too. Being an employee at a lot of corporations is nicer than being a citizen of a lot of counties. But corporate benevolence mostly demands on human capital supply and demand balances.
- kbenson 3y agoBut again, as GP noted, isn't that a problem governments have already solved? If you want UBI it's going to be through the government, as that's the entity collecting the funds through taxes that would be distributed, and they already have a unique identifier for people. In the U.S. it's your SSN, which is conveniently also how they track you for income taxes (again, where a large portion of the funds for distribution are gathered) If the government wants to link a retinal scan to a SSN, that might make sense with regard to UBI, but how does it make any sense for some random blockchain? Are we expected to think that even if a government wanted to use a blockchain they would use some third party blockchain and not roll their own? I find that highly unlikely.
- twelve40 3y agoHere is one answer: > How Altman plans to pay for Worldcoin’s UBI, however, remains murky. “The hope is that as people want to buy this token, because they believe this is the future, there will be inflows into this economy. New token-buyers is how it gets paid for, effectively,” Altman told Coindesk recently.