RE: Hi Steemit! Scott Santens here. If you've ever googled "basic income", you may have read something I've written.
Great work, great article, great idea. I think it is the future, or the possibility for a nondystopian future.
What do you think crypto currencys role would be? I don't really like the idea of a fed coin.
The basic income trials have been to created bank accounts to verified people. Crypto/digital cash makes the accounts and accounting a lot easier, but how do you see the verification working? It would be fairly simple in the United States, through social security numbers and accounts.
Perhaps the basic income payments could just be paid to social security accounts and withdrawn if the citizen chose to, of just save it there, and gain interest somehow, incentivising some people to work and save.
The problems I see with this are
Reliance on government, ideally the basic income system would be separate from the government, like a grassroots federal reserve.
And the ID verification system, used to track citizens and their spending, if the data could be anonymized so ecnomists/businesses/customers could have more data to make better decisions while the individuals information could be secure.
If there's only one thing the government is good at, it's cutting checks. Through the Social Security system, everyone in the system reliably gets their income, the overhead is about 0.7%, and the amount of fraudulent payments is about 0.4%.
I'm just not worried about this perceived "reliance on government" problem. I think the most empowered citizens in the US are seniors receiving Social Security. They vote in huge numbers and because of that, government works for them,not the other way around. I think the Alaska dividend shows another example of this, with people turning out in large numbers to vote when anything dividend related is on the ballot.
I think the role of cryptocurrency is two-fold. Because it can be immediately implemented without government in some form for sub-groups, it can function as a way of building support for the idea of basic income at the national level, and immediately make a difference in people's lives. And after UBI is implemented, crytocurrencies with UBI somehow implemented as part of them or using them will function as another layer on top of the basic income, to increase total incomes, and building stronger foundations for people on which to build.
Personally, I'd like to see citizens take back control of their currencies in the form of seigniorage reform, where private banks are no longer allowed to create and expand money supplies in the form of debt, and instead money is created debt-free directly in the hands of citizens. Perhaps the blockchain could be part of that. I don't know.
I'm going to start taking notes on all of this. It's all so interesting and eye-opening !
Indeed it is. All of us are generally smarter, and certainly more informed, than just one of us.
With upcoming finger/iris sensor on smartphone, personal data can be encrypted and processed in anonymized way through machine learning or AI. Then ecnomists/businesses/customers can have abstract/meta data to make better decisions and conduct research.