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I'm going to say something that triggers people on HN (because it involves creating our own currencies, like berkshares, bristol pounds, etc.) Here goes. Our t
by EGreg 5mo ago
I'm going to say something that triggers people on HN (because it involves creating our own currencies, like berkshares, bristol pounds, etc.)
Here goes. Our towns and cities need to create our own money supply, especially to survive the coming depression (Both Keynes and Hayek would agree). The vast majority of our money is currently issued by banks, which have exactly the opposite incentives, they will issue less credit and on worse terms the more you need it. In fact the banks love to lend to the ultra-rich (including the guys who pay $0 in taxes and use their shares as collateral, while having their corporations buy back the stocks).
If you want to tinker around the edges, keep using their money. But in a world where AI makes everything cheap, why not have communities roll out their own money, and pay UBI in it? Waiting for the federal government to issue UBI is a fool's errand (not even Nixon was able to get it done, as president, much less someone like Andrew Yang who I supported and built campaign apps for, http://yang2020.app http://yang2020.app).
The community acts as the source and the sink of the money. And since we don't want to "trust" any given member of the community to operate the database, we need... a blockchain. I know, this is where I will get heavily downvoted for mentioning that (I have a feeling that there is even keyword matching to do it automatically). But... what is the alternative?
https://community.intercoin.app/t/rolling-out-voluntary-basic-income-in-communities/1069 https://community.intercoin.app/t/rolling-out-voluntary-basi...
The alternative is that people keep relying on giant corporations to give us jobs, and on giant banks to issue our money supply, while they just siphon more and more money to the rich. But any time someone says "hey, we have the technology to self-organize and serve each other" there are people frothing at the mouth angry at this person. Frankly, towns could build socialist cooperatives for everything, e.g. their own Uber without the shareholder class taking most drivers' salaries. AI makes it easy. But the main thing is making our own money supply, and giving it out as UBI to each citizen to spend on food, robots, etc.
- slopinthebag 5mo agoSo bitcoin, but without calling it that because of the political implications.
- EGreg 5mo agoNo. Bitcoin is one coin for everyone. The attempts to create "colored coins" back in 2013 fell flat, then it became a "store of value", and punted on being a "peer to peer payment system". https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/ https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/ I started Intercoin in 2018 to try to fix this. Let every community have its own coin, and Intercoin acts like the internet of coins... interconnecting them. We raised about $1M, and built the system, but we couldn't compete with the zero-sum games and scams in crypto, because investors and even "crypto VCs" wanted to just 10x at the expense of everyone else. And also regulators don't actually allow creating fake volume, which is table stakes to be listed on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko and taken "seriously" by crypto investors, so it instead became a business where we go town by town, community by community, influencer by influencer: https://intercoin.org/currencies.pdf https://intercoin.org/currencies.pdf I've interviewed lots of economists from different schools of thought, such as community currency economists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXTn52kL0Yo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXTn52kL0Yo I've also interviewed regulators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocrqgkJn4m0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocrqgkJn4m0 And also founders of decentralized networks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ And there's a lot more resources on https://community.intercoin.org https://community.intercoin.org that discusses this stuff. But Intercoin kind of failed as a "crypto" project, because we were unwilling to stoop to what projects did in order to attract capital.
- Apocryphon 5mo agoIs it something like Great Depression scrip? https://www.depressionscrip.com https://www.depressionscrip.com
- EGreg 5mo agoYeah and something like https://scf.green/story-of-worgl-and-others/ https://scf.green/story-of-worgl-and-others/
- amanaplanacanal 5mo agoThere used to be a ton of competing currencies in the US. Banks regularly went bankrupt taking everybody's savings with them. Your suggestion doesn't really sound like anything new.
- 2fdsed 5mo ago[dead]