Bootstrapping a Crypto UBI Coin with an IP Licensing Digital Autonomous Entity

General Technical
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There’s been quite a bit discussion in both the basic income and cryptocurrency communities for a while (plus, some discussion within the party) about the potential relationship between the two concepts, principally: using a cryptocurrency as a means of distributing universal basic income in a transparent & equitable fashion.

On this topic, I stumbled upon an intriguing post on r/BasicIncome a while back, where the author proposes an novel (donation of intellectual property) funding model for a basic income. To quote said user’s summary (the linked post goes into far greater detail):

Create a new cryptocurrency, where all freshly minted coins are distributed as a UBI, and then create a Digital Autonomous Entity that people can donate IP rights to, which turns around and sells licenses to that IP, but only accepts the UBI cryptocurrency for payment, forcing businesses that want to use the IP to buy into the currency/buy it from the people using the UBI, bootstrapping the value of the currency until its adoption (hopefully) becomes a self-sustaining process.

Given that all three of these topics; basic income, intellectual property & cryptocurrencies have all individually been discussed quite extensively within the party, I figured this particular synthesis of the three would, if nothing else, foster an interesting discussion.

What are your thoughts on this concept?

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Seems cool to me. In a futurist utopia what we think of as ‘tax’ could just be fees charged for the right to claim land, or extract mineral resources, or pollute, or claim IP rights. Anything which imposes a cost on the shared environment, or the collective commons, or which restricts other people, would have a fee attached. And from that pool everyone is paid UBI, which then becomes a kind of universal compensation. The more you want to restrict people or extract from the commons, the more you pay, but as the totality of restrictions binds everyone in equal measure, the UBI payments will be equal for all.

It would be simple to set the fee payments and UBI compensation to work with cryptocurrency, and the quantity of money movement and currency holders would stabilise the currency value.

If we did it right now we could fund a UBI of 6-7K per year. Obviously we will have to wait until food-printing and home power generation and other technologies make it cheaper to live. But some day…