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Crypto 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 o

Crypto 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 ago
KYC 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 ago
  There'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 ago
But 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.
- sdenton4 3y ago
  It's 'solved' in the sense that there's a lot of machinery to deal with and remediate fraud and abuse. It's definitely not solved in a technical sense. It might be helpful to stop and think for a moment about all the cool stuff one could do with a reliable way to link people to accounts uniquely, without fraud. If the government has 'solved' this, why not sell the solution to companies?
  - kbenson 3y ago
    You're talking about the market in general, and I'm talking about with respect to UBI. My thought process is: * Any UBI is going to be government based, as there needs to be a way to collect (tax) and redistribute (UBI) money between all people, whether or not the amount collected and distributed is the same relatively for each or not. * Governments already have (in most cases, if not all. I can't speak for every country definitively) ways to uniquely identify their populace. They don't need some external service to do such. * Given that UBI will be government based, and the government already has a way to uniquely identify people they govern, what purpose does a third party blockchain to uniquely identify people service with respect to UBI? > It might be helpful to stop and think for a moment about all the cool stuff one could do with a reliable way to link people to accounts uniquely, without fraud. There are plenty of benefits to that. That has nothing to do with UBI. I'm not making a case that there's no benefit to identity verification, just that I'm not sure how some third party is supposed to help with UBI by providing it. > If the government has 'solved' this, why not sell the solution to companies? In some small ways (at least for the U.S.) they do. For example, with Tax services to look up people. Additionally, while not provided as a service to companies, SSNs are routinely used to uniquely identify U.S. citizens for financial reasons. The Government could offer more services to companies for this, but there might be perverse incentives involved. Again, none of this has anything to do with UBI from what I can see. Once someone gets money, who cares how it's spent? Let it be deposited in the financial institution or asset of their choice. Again, no third party arbiter needs to be present for this, we do this today with tax returns and while different services often help with this, they are both not requires and there's multiple to choose from, not one external trusted entity that must be used.
tromp 3y ago
> Bitcoin was designed to act like gold Bitcoin's emission is quite unlike that of gold. Every next generation gets to mine 32x less bitcoin. Over gold's millennia long history, every generation mines a roughly similar amount of gold as the next.

dopidopHN 3y ago

KYC 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 ago
There'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 ago

But 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.

sdenton4 3y ago
It's 'solved' in the sense that there's a lot of machinery to deal with and remediate fraud and abuse. It's definitely not solved in a technical sense. It might be helpful to stop and think for a moment about all the cool stuff one could do with a reliable way to link people to accounts uniquely, without fraud. If the government has 'solved' this, why not sell the solution to companies?
- kbenson 3y ago
  You're talking about the market in general, and I'm talking about with respect to UBI. My thought process is: * Any UBI is going to be government based, as there needs to be a way to collect (tax) and redistribute (UBI) money between all people, whether or not the amount collected and distributed is the same relatively for each or not. * Governments already have (in most cases, if not all. I can't speak for every country definitively) ways to uniquely identify their populace. They don't need some external service to do such. * Given that UBI will be government based, and the government already has a way to uniquely identify people they govern, what purpose does a third party blockchain to uniquely identify people service with respect to UBI? > It might be helpful to stop and think for a moment about all the cool stuff one could do with a reliable way to link people to accounts uniquely, without fraud. There are plenty of benefits to that. That has nothing to do with UBI. I'm not making a case that there's no benefit to identity verification, just that I'm not sure how some third party is supposed to help with UBI by providing it. > If the government has 'solved' this, why not sell the solution to companies? In some small ways (at least for the U.S.) they do. For example, with Tax services to look up people. Additionally, while not provided as a service to companies, SSNs are routinely used to uniquely identify U.S. citizens for financial reasons. The Government could offer more services to companies for this, but there might be perverse incentives involved. Again, none of this has anything to do with UBI from what I can see. Once someone gets money, who cares how it's spent? Let it be deposited in the financial institution or asset of their choice. Again, no third party arbiter needs to be present for this, we do this today with tax returns and while different services often help with this, they are both not requires and there's multiple to choose from, not one external trusted entity that must be used.

tromp 3y ago

> Bitcoin was designed to act like gold Bitcoin's emission is quite unlike that of gold. Every next generation gets to mine 32x less bitcoin. Over gold's millennia long history, every generation mines a roughly similar amount of gold as the next.