3 ms·

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 coll

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.
  - sdenton4 3y ago
    I wasn't starting from the assumption that UBI /has/ to be government-based, and was discussing a core problem (identifiability) that arises when a non-government entity tries to implement UBI. You've just got a different set of assumptions.
    - kbenson 3y ago
      Okay, but I'm not sure they're wrong assumptions, because I don't know how UBI could not be government based, and I haven't seen any explanations challenging it. Either it needs to be government based, in which case I think some third party service explaining how they are helping to enable it by providing identifiability is subject to the criticisms I've laid out, or it doesn't need to be through the government, in which case I'm honestly curious as to any explanations from anyone of how that works.
      - sdenton4 3y ago
        Expanding the comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37037606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37037606 Cryptocurrency systems proposed ways to handle the creation and management of monetary systems without government involvement. The implementation of such systems is open to definition by the designers of the system, and is extremely fluid. Most cryptocurrencies chose to go with the bitcoin model, which encouraged speculation and early buy-in, but fails like ~waves at the cryptocurrency space in 2023~. So, here you go: Set up a system which creates and destroys tokens programatically. Tokens are created uniformly over all user accounts, and destroyed in each account proportional to the amount already in the account. This handles the wealth-redistribution function of taxation, and allows control of the total number of tokens to prevent inflationary spiraling over time. A prime difficulty is assigning accounts. FWIW, AuroraCoin did /something/ like this in Iceland, using Icelandic identity cards for identifiability, but didn't destroy tokens: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/auroracoin.asp#toc-history-of-auroracoin https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/auroracoin.asp#toc-hist...
        kbenson 3y ago

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.
- sdenton4 3y ago
  I wasn't starting from the assumption that UBI /has/ to be government-based, and was discussing a core problem (identifiability) that arises when a non-government entity tries to implement UBI. You've just got a different set of assumptions.
  - kbenson 3y ago
    Okay, but I'm not sure they're wrong assumptions, because I don't know how UBI could not be government based, and I haven't seen any explanations challenging it. Either it needs to be government based, in which case I think some third party service explaining how they are helping to enable it by providing identifiability is subject to the criticisms I've laid out, or it doesn't need to be through the government, in which case I'm honestly curious as to any explanations from anyone of how that works.
    - sdenton4 3y ago
      Expanding the comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37037606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37037606 Cryptocurrency systems proposed ways to handle the creation and management of monetary systems without government involvement. The implementation of such systems is open to definition by the designers of the system, and is extremely fluid. Most cryptocurrencies chose to go with the bitcoin model, which encouraged speculation and early buy-in, but fails like ~waves at the cryptocurrency space in 2023~. So, here you go: Set up a system which creates and destroys tokens programatically. Tokens are created uniformly over all user accounts, and destroyed in each account proportional to the amount already in the account. This handles the wealth-redistribution function of taxation, and allows control of the total number of tokens to prevent inflationary spiraling over time. A prime difficulty is assigning accounts. FWIW, AuroraCoin did /something/ like this in Iceland, using Icelandic identity cards for identifiability, but didn't destroy tokens: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/auroracoin.asp#toc-history-of-auroracoin https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/auroracoin.asp#toc-hist...
      - kbenson 3y ago