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> Using a cryptocurrency to provide basic income would manifest simply as the creation of currency, with no actual value being created to correspond to the new

> Using a cryptocurrency to provide basic income would manifest simply as the creation of currency, with no actual value being created to correspond to the new currency, so it's just going to be inflationary. CryptoUBIs/group currencies can be deflationary. Have a look at the first item in the FAQ [1]. If the value represented by AcademicCoin is increasing faster than the issuance of tokens, AcademicCoin becomes deflationary. [1] http://groupcurrency.org/#FAQ http://groupcurrency.org/#FAQ Disclaimer: I am a co-author of the document.

jasode 11y ago
Your FAQ says: >Provide others with a token that represents the group's value and potential as human beings. That is already non-zero (researchers are very valuable!). If that's the logic, you can do that today without any cryptocurrency. Take a blank sheet of paper and write, "the bearer of this note acknowledges my value & potential as a human being." Go and take that paper out on the street and see if you can trade it for other pieces of paper such as Euros, US Dollars, or real goods such as hamburgers. If your experiment works, everyone can have "basic income" just by writing affirmations on sheets of paper and trading them. I'm not being flippant with my example. Warren Buffet can take a piece of paper and write, "the bearer of this note is entitled to a 1 hour lunch with me." Someone could take that note and sell it on ebay for over $1000. (A similar type of transaction happens everyday with celebrity autographs.) There's a reason why Warren Buffet's piece of paper (scrip, IOU, whatever) is more valuable than your piece of paper or my piece of paper. Cryptocurrency doesn't solve that. Basic income is also not something that can be solved by cryptocurrency.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - Eliezer 11y ago
    If you understand jasode's objection, it is not apparent from this reply.
    - itistoday2 11y ago
      Let me try again. The underlying concern seems to be (correct me if I'm mistaken): "How can a group currency provide a basic income?" By definition. For a cryptocurrency to qualify as a group currency, it must provide its members with a basic income. This basic income is backed by the value that the group creates (whatever it may be). In other words, profits go to paying back members for their existence. To be accepted into a group it's assumed that you will be providing some kind of value, but the group understands you might face hard times and so it provides you with a basic income. The wider community in turn, has faith in the group's future, and that results in an appropriate price for the group's currency, which is being minted by group members. It's certainly possible that a group could fail to provide a basic income to its members, but the point is that it tries. Otherwise it doesn't fit the definition.
  - jasode 11y ago
    >I don't think we disagree. Both your FAQ and your reply to me is focused on the mediums of exchange: the paper scrip (and its flaws) and the cryptocurrencies (and its benefits). Your FAQ and reply still have not addressed where __REAL VALUE__ comes from.
    - itistoday2 11y ago
      > Your FAQ and reply still have not addressed where __REAL VALUE__ comes from. Here's an excerpt: In the future, the AcademicCoin is very valuable. It represents 1000+ respected researchers who accept it as payment for their time, early access to research results, papers, etc. Some examples of value are clearly listed there, so I'm not sure what the confusion is. I also wrote a followup reply to another comment that might clear things up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501494
      - jasode 11y ago
        >Some examples of value are clearly listed there, so I'm not sure what the confusion is. Some of your cites for basic income mention $30k a year as a target. Therefore, your 1000 respected researchers would have to generate value of $33 million just to provide themselves the bare minimum of basic income. Where does this $33 million magically come from (and reliably appear every single year)? Ask graduate students how hard it is to win grants for modest amounts of $250000. In the real world today, if 1,000 researchers are mostly grad students on stipends, would the sum of their incomes[1] exceed $33 million? Also to keep in the spirit of "basic" income, some of those researchers don't want to work or can't work. The others must pick up the slack and create enough value to cover basic income for them. You haven't explained how enough value is created to solve basic income. Again, basic income is not a "currency" problem. [1]https://www.gradschool.cornell.edu/costs-and-funding/stipend-rates https://www.gradschool.cornell.edu/costs-and-funding/stipend...
        itistoday2 11y ago
        > Where does this $33 million magically come from (and reliably appear every single year)? Let's be serious here. There's no magic about it. Red Hat has 7300 employees (as of 2015) [1] and made $0.024 million per employee in 2014. Multiply by 1000 and you get $24.4 million. Maybe these scientists have a patent that does well and it covers the extra $9 million to get $30k per year. (Sidenote: that seems low for Red Hat. Wiki says Google does $0.25 million/employee, an order of magnitude higher.) Edit: Actually, those figures are based on profit, not revenue... Revenue/employee at Google is ~$1.2 million. Don't confuse basic income with not working. When people don't have to think about survival they are free to think about the flying car. If anything, there should be a net increase in the rate of value creation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat
- derriz 11y ago
  Dude don't be such a cynic. You can use a paper based ledger system as a backup to the paper scraps. Meanwhile all the group members can sell their academiccoin paper scraps for dollars and perform their group dealings using the greenbacks as a sort of proxy. This has the immediate advantage of allowing you to store your currency in bank accounts and buy newspapers and gum. Then when you run out of smokes and beer for example you can just issue some academiccoin2s to yourself and repeat the process.
jerf 11y ago
"If the value represented by AcademicCoin is increasing faster than the issuance of tokens, AcademicCoin becomes deflationary." Yes, but that's tautological, simply the basic definition of "deflationary", not an argument. If the act of issuing tokens is disconnected from the process of bringing value into the given ecosystem, then the act of issuing tokens is merely inflationary. If the act of issuing tokens is directly connected to bringing value ("Bob brought X units of value in, Bob gets X tokens"), then it's not really a basic income. You have to be able to remove value from some people and give it to others to create a basic income. In theory if the system were already bootstrapped inflation might be able to do it, but it would be an awfully blunt instrument, and might well still collapse the system in a standard inflationary spiral. Where basic income may be advantageous at a societal level, where the mechanisms of government can be used to force participation, you've got serious incentive problems in a voluntary system. Why wouldn't someone generating a lot of value simply opt back out of a system that deflates it away on them, when just by stepping away from it they can avoid the problem? Who's going to voluntarily sign up to be the one giving away value to others? The libertarian skeptical about basic income (me) can't help but observe you really need government to make basic income work, if it's going to work at all. In fact, even with a government we can all observe in the real world that those with a lot of "value" (wealth) are often able to wiggle out from underneath their putative obligations even when it's not voluntary.
- itistoday2 11y ago
  > If the act of issuing tokens is disconnected from the process of bringing value into the given ecosystem, then the act of issuing tokens is merely inflationary. If the act of issuing tokens is directly connected to bringing value ("Bob brought X units of value in, Bob gets X tokens"), then it's not really a basic income. True, the process of issuing tokens disconnected from new value is inflationary. But that doesn't imply that the currency as a whole is inflationary. Some members might not be doing anything for some period of time and simply inflating the currency while others are deflating it through value creation. But sooner or later those folks will produce something of new value that deflates the currency while others take a break. It's certainly possible. Universities do this for their tenured professors today and it seems to work out fairly well. See also this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501494

jasode 11y ago

Your FAQ says: >Provide others with a token that represents the group's value and potential as human beings. That is already non-zero (researchers are very valuable!). If that's the logic, you can do that today without any cryptocurrency. Take a blank sheet of paper and write, "the bearer of this note acknowledges my value & potential as a human being." Go and take that paper out on the street and see if you can trade it for other pieces of paper such as Euros, US Dollars, or real goods such as hamburgers. If your experiment works, everyone can have "basic income" just by writing affirmations on sheets of paper and trading them. I'm not being flippant with my example. Warren Buffet can take a piece of paper and write, "the bearer of this note is entitled to a 1 hour lunch with me." Someone could take that note and sell it on ebay for over $1000. (A similar type of transaction happens everyday with celebrity autographs.) There's a reason why Warren Buffet's piece of paper (scrip, IOU, whatever) is more valuable than your piece of paper or my piece of paper. Cryptocurrency doesn't solve that. Basic income is also not something that can be solved by cryptocurrency.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- Eliezer 11y ago
  If you understand jasode's objection, it is not apparent from this reply.
  - itistoday2 11y ago
    Let me try again. The underlying concern seems to be (correct me if I'm mistaken): "How can a group currency provide a basic income?" By definition. For a cryptocurrency to qualify as a group currency, it must provide its members with a basic income. This basic income is backed by the value that the group creates (whatever it may be). In other words, profits go to paying back members for their existence. To be accepted into a group it's assumed that you will be providing some kind of value, but the group understands you might face hard times and so it provides you with a basic income. The wider community in turn, has faith in the group's future, and that results in an appropriate price for the group's currency, which is being minted by group members. It's certainly possible that a group could fail to provide a basic income to its members, but the point is that it tries. Otherwise it doesn't fit the definition.
- jasode 11y ago
  >I don't think we disagree. Both your FAQ and your reply to me is focused on the mediums of exchange: the paper scrip (and its flaws) and the cryptocurrencies (and its benefits). Your FAQ and reply still have not addressed where __REAL VALUE__ comes from.
  - itistoday2 11y ago
    > Your FAQ and reply still have not addressed where __REAL VALUE__ comes from. Here's an excerpt: In the future, the AcademicCoin is very valuable. It represents 1000+ respected researchers who accept it as payment for their time, early access to research results, papers, etc. Some examples of value are clearly listed there, so I'm not sure what the confusion is. I also wrote a followup reply to another comment that might clear things up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501494
    - jasode 11y ago
      >Some examples of value are clearly listed there, so I'm not sure what the confusion is. Some of your cites for basic income mention $30k a year as a target. Therefore, your 1000 respected researchers would have to generate value of $33 million just to provide themselves the bare minimum of basic income. Where does this $33 million magically come from (and reliably appear every single year)? Ask graduate students how hard it is to win grants for modest amounts of $250000. In the real world today, if 1,000 researchers are mostly grad students on stipends, would the sum of their incomes[1] exceed $33 million? Also to keep in the spirit of "basic" income, some of those researchers don't want to work or can't work. The others must pick up the slack and create enough value to cover basic income for them. You haven't explained how enough value is created to solve basic income. Again, basic income is not a "currency" problem. [1]https://www.gradschool.cornell.edu/costs-and-funding/stipend-rates https://www.gradschool.cornell.edu/costs-and-funding/stipend...
      - itistoday2 11y ago
        > Where does this $33 million magically come from (and reliably appear every single year)? Let's be serious here. There's no magic about it. Red Hat has 7300 employees (as of 2015) [1] and made $0.024 million per employee in 2014. Multiply by 1000 and you get $24.4 million. Maybe these scientists have a patent that does well and it covers the extra $9 million to get $30k per year. (Sidenote: that seems low for Red Hat. Wiki says Google does $0.25 million/employee, an order of magnitude higher.) Edit: Actually, those figures are based on profit, not revenue... Revenue/employee at Google is ~$1.2 million. Don't confuse basic income with not working. When people don't have to think about survival they are free to think about the flying car. If anything, there should be a net increase in the rate of value creation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat
derriz 11y ago
Dude don't be such a cynic. You can use a paper based ledger system as a backup to the paper scraps. Meanwhile all the group members can sell their academiccoin paper scraps for dollars and perform their group dealings using the greenbacks as a sort of proxy. This has the immediate advantage of allowing you to store your currency in bank accounts and buy newspapers and gum. Then when you run out of smokes and beer for example you can just issue some academiccoin2s to yourself and repeat the process.

jerf 11y ago

"If the value represented by AcademicCoin is increasing faster than the issuance of tokens, AcademicCoin becomes deflationary." Yes, but that's tautological, simply the basic definition of "deflationary", not an argument. If the act of issuing tokens is disconnected from the process of bringing value into the given ecosystem, then the act of issuing tokens is merely inflationary. If the act of issuing tokens is directly connected to bringing value ("Bob brought X units of value in, Bob gets X tokens"), then it's not really a basic income. You have to be able to remove value from some people and give it to others to create a basic income. In theory if the system were already bootstrapped inflation might be able to do it, but it would be an awfully blunt instrument, and might well still collapse the system in a standard inflationary spiral. Where basic income may be advantageous at a societal level, where the mechanisms of government can be used to force participation, you've got serious incentive problems in a voluntary system. Why wouldn't someone generating a lot of value simply opt back out of a system that deflates it away on them, when just by stepping away from it they can avoid the problem? Who's going to voluntarily sign up to be the one giving away value to others? The libertarian skeptical about basic income (me) can't help but observe you really need government to make basic income work, if it's going to work at all. In fact, even with a government we can all observe in the real world that those with a lot of "value" (wealth) are often able to wiggle out from underneath their putative obligations even when it's not voluntary.

itistoday2 11y ago
> If the act of issuing tokens is disconnected from the process of bringing value into the given ecosystem, then the act of issuing tokens is merely inflationary. If the act of issuing tokens is directly connected to bringing value ("Bob brought X units of value in, Bob gets X tokens"), then it's not really a basic income. True, the process of issuing tokens disconnected from new value is inflationary. But that doesn't imply that the currency as a whole is inflationary. Some members might not be doing anything for some period of time and simply inflating the currency while others are deflating it through value creation. But sooner or later those folks will produce something of new value that deflates the currency while others take a break. It's certainly possible. Universities do this for their tenured professors today and it seems to work out fairly well. See also this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501494