Blockchain Zen

I was having a conversation with someone about a potential Universal Basic Income distributed ledger implementation and he brought up an interesting point.

He basically said, "if you're going to have UBI on the blockchain, you need to make sure everyone is equal so you have to check their identity in order to give them an address on the network and stuff."

I didn't like this. Do you? Does that feel like the future to you? Bureaucratic, administrative, functionary, authoritative? Good, God! Gross! No, no, no. There's a better way.

Now I'm not saying bureaucracies don't have their place, but when there are ways to avoid it, lets!

And how do we avoid it? Mmmm, now we have to get creative. But let's find a context for our creativity, say... the UBI coin concept from my example above. How might we solve that particular problem without falling headfirst into an Orwellian administrative hell?

Maybe it's simple. Maybe we don't have to make it perfectly distributed and always equal. Perhaps instead we could bake into the UBI design itself some forces that tend toward equality but never actually get there.

Think about computers. You're going along, everything working perfectly in its proper place, and there's a problem: 1 bit gets changed on the hard drive from a 0 to 1 where it's not supposed to be, and guess what - EVERYTHING CRASHES!

The brain is so powerful because shit happens all the time and it's all good, honey badger don't care. This ability to be robust in the face of problems is in part a direct result of a system that has relinquished control and can 'go with the flow' as it were.

That's what is needed in situations like this; the UBI coin needs to be designed in such a way that we humans can make up the difference. Here's what I said in my conversation with this guy:

For instance, let’s say we limit the number of UBI coins to say… 20 billion coins that cannot be divided.

Then we say if you have at least 1 UBI coin in your address then you can spend the coinage... So, just by making the coin atomic you provide a force to the economy to equally distribute it among the population. Would you rather let someone starve to death or give them one of your 10 UBI coins? How about one of your 2 UBI coins? I’d give it away.

This may be my inner anarchist shining through, but we don’t need to check papers and verify identity and all that government shit. Let’s not force it, just engineer it to let it happen. Its what I call “Blockchain Zen” the design itself is the elegant first mover. Let our humanity shine through the technology, don’t try to guarantee it.

That's what Blockchain Zen is to me - the expression of our humanity through technology. The cessation of desire to control everything down to the bit. In order to build a future worth living in we need to let our technology help us grow in charity and goodwill towards each other.

Let it facilitate our improvement as well as our comfort by simply letting go of our heretofore incessant need to control everything and just let it happen.