Slashdot Mirror
Cryptocurrency Based Basic Income Program Started In Finland
jovius writes: Krypto Fin ry, the association behind Fimkrypto cryptocurrency (FIMK), has started to provide each registered Finnish citizen a payment of 1000 FIMK per month in December. 1000 FIMK equals few dimes at the moment, and a bit over 100 people have registered so far. (The registration is free.)
FIMK is based on NXT 2nd generation crypto system; the add-ons and development making it into 2.5G. The roadmap includes payment cards and other technology to enable easier exchange between fiat currencies — FIMK, Bitcoins and others. Krypto Fin ry received 533 BTC in initial donations last Summer. FIMK can be traded for example on DGEX, and it's also a valid payment method in few stores in Finland.
FIMK is based on NXT 2nd generation crypto system; the add-ons and development making it into 2.5G. The roadmap includes payment cards and other technology to enable easier exchange between fiat currencies — FIMK, Bitcoins and others. Krypto Fin ry received 533 BTC in initial donations last Summer. FIMK can be traded for example on DGEX, and it's also a valid payment method in few stores in Finland.
Con artists try to encourage entire nation to fall victim to their con by promising to pay them money every month.
Seriously, if it looks too good to be true (they're paying you for doing nothing), it probably is.
Basic Income is welfare, not something that sounds like it. The difference between it and normal welfare is, everyone gets a basic income whether they want it or not. It's meant to be enough to live off.
The idea of a BI is a very old one. It has nothing to do with cryptocurrency, and I'm not sure what relevance cryptocurrency has (and I say that as a Bitcoin developer, so I'm a fan of CC in general). In theory a society rich enough to afford it would have moved to the oft-fictionalised post work utopia that you sometimes see in things like Star Trek. Because everyone gets it whether they want it or not, unconditionally, the basic income would be supposedly stigma free. Thus if you want to pursue things that are not very profitable but are beneficial to society nonetheless (production of art, charity, etc) then you could do that and not have to worry about being seen as a welfare sponger.
I love the concept in theory, but a society rich enough to afford one is pretty unimaginable in today's world. Western societies are clearly incapable of even providing the current levels of welfare let alone a vastly larger level. I see a BI as a useful goal to inspire people about the future rather than something practical for today.
Well, to be fair to the basic-income schemes people propose, they're supposed to turn the current levels of overall welfare spending into more effective levels of welfare by disintermediating the funds from the millions of government employees who are paid to manage it (and paid reasonably well, at that).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I love the concept in theory, but a society rich enough to afford one is pretty unimaginable in today's world.
The USA is more than rich enough, especially if we stop the whole war-for-profit thing.
Western societies are clearly incapable of even providing the current levels of welfare let alone a vastly larger level.
Unwilling != incapable. Some of them are managing it just fine, in fact.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
by disintermediating the funds from the millions of government employees who are paid to manage it (and paid reasonably well, at that).
There are many welfare programs where the overhead exceeds the benefit. For instance, in America nearly half the cost of the "free lunch" program for low income students in public schools goes to administration. For any school where more than half the kids benefit, it would be more cost effective to just make all the lunches free, and eliminate the overhead. You would could feed twice as many kids for the same money.
America tends to do welfare exceptionally poorly. We have more than 70 government bureaus involved in a least one welfare scheme, spread through most departments, including HHS, Agriculture, DOD, Interior, HUD, Education, Veterans Affairs, and Commerce. Each of these has a strong incentive to defend their turf, and no incentive to improve efficiency, or consider permanent solutions to the underlying social problems.
You can't just give everyone cryptocoins (effectively tokens) and expect them to get value... at the heart, a basic income is welfare, and requires wealth redistribution. The value has to come from somewhere.
I found and copied an article about a possible implementation that solves this issue. It's hidden in discordian bullshit, but I think the theory is sound... if somewhat dangerous.
"Basic income" is already working in one area.
We call them "farm subsidies" - crop price support.
Somehow the nation survived.
To be fair, Obama proposed exactly that (he proposed a government option insurance so that the cost of basic insurance was effectively capped). Just the Republicans shot it down.
Every society that is currently stable is rich enough to guarantee income good enough to live by to all its members (because otherwise they're starving and the society is about to collapse). The reason they typically won't do so is because it would free people to live as they please. Wealth disparity makes the majority of people dependent on the whims of those with wealth, which is just peachy with the wealthy. But of course that can't be openly admitted, thus it's put in terms of "incentivizing".
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
"Unwilling != incapable"
This.
We throw away ~half the food we produce in this country. We burn it or bury it, but god forbid we give it away.
Likewise, we happily pay to incarcerate a larger percentage of our population than any other country in the world, but we'll be *damned* if we will let people have a little apartment - which would be cheaper.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
No. From each according to ability and willingness to work, to each enough to live. Most civilized countries have "according to need" under welfare and medical care though.
There were proposals to do this in the UK instead of the current mess of universal benefit or whatever it was.
They took the current budgets for all non-work incomes, benefits, welfare, pension, everything, re-arranged it across every person in Britain and it seemed to work out.
Some people even got more than what they are getting presently on benefits and/or pensions.
Adults got a certain amount, teens and younger got a little lower, and pensioners got a bit higher.
And all the values seemed to be pretty reasonable to live off of as well. I'd get more than what I get due to the Crohns and IBS craptastrophe that my body is.
My life as it is now is worrying whether or not the Department of Work and Pensions is going to decide to fuck me over this month or next.
If basic income was guaranteed, I could actually Get Things Done instead of half-dying every month from stress. If it was 5 years ago, I'd maybe actually even be independent now since I have been slowly working towards doing webdev, general programming, game dev, art & design work and a few other small things that I was doing before I ended up crapping it. (quite literally at that)
My friend who was out of work for a couple years got screwed over constantly by the job center because they said he never "done enough work to find jobs", this guy was literally searching all the time to find a solid job, but he was always turned down. And I will be totally honest here, he suffered acne problems to the extreme, he also has an odour problem, and he has a squint. So you can imagine many dickish HR types would turn him down for that alone, even non-interacting jobs with anyone outside the company, like IT or inventory or something like that. Noped the hell out.
He managed to get a temp job over the holidays there.
But sooner or later, he is going to be getting screwed over by them again. Fuck the Job Center, worst place ever, it doesn't help for shit.
I had one of the staff straight up insult me once before, and threaten me. Absolute pricks with no oversight, that is what has happened to the system.
Not only that, I've had a "doctor" straight up lie about my Work Capability assessments. Notice the S there. Twice. Record everything, no matter how innocent and honest it may look, record every single thing.
People have died because of stress due to being taken off while under long term treatment for severe illnesses that I couldn't even begin to imagine how awful they were. Cancer too. Chemo is a god-awful treatment at best, na, totally capable, you could run a marathon. Little pale are we, go get a sun-tan, stop with the laziness.
Just imagine how many people would actually be able to get things done instead of the constant worry of these people attacking them and accusing them of lies and laziness.
Not only that, all of those pricks would be out of the job as well and be put on basic income too, saving even more of the tax payers money being wasted. The DWP itself is such a stupid money-sink as it is, and they also screwed over that French company ATOS by restricting them and forcing them in to ambiguous questions to try get as many people to FAIL their tests so they'd need to appeal. (which cost MORE money to the tax payer! All so these supposed doctors could get a bonus!)
Support basic income today, down with means-testing, down with lies, down with corruption, yay for Getting Shit Done.
When did it become stupid to prioritize your own best interests over those of society at large?
It's in your best interest to live in a nation of healthy people.
Socialized medicine provides no incentive to my doctor to prioritize my care over the common good.
Yes, it does, but that's not what this is. This is a half-assed version of socialized medicine designed to force us to give our money to insurance companies.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't know the exact details of what the threshold is
According to this page, the threshold is 75%. The school has to requalify once every four years.
... easier exchange between fiat currencies — FIMK, Bitcoins and others."
I think you don't understand the meaning of "Fiat". By definition, these are non-fiat currencies. Fiat currencies are those created by government decree (a.k.a. a fiat).
No. Well...maybe. Actually, yes. It really just depends.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Also, tell that to senior citizens in the USA who almost all get a what is essentially a basic income from Social Security. Most seniors have *not* paid full value into that relative to what they expect to get out of it, so it is not like a retirement investment plan (even if people pay a tax that goes towards it when they work for wages). Social Security in the USA is essentially an income redistribution system, originally based on ten young workers to one elderly person (original recipients had not paid into the system) and now at about three young workers per elderly person. Personally, I feel it is unfair that the elderly in the USA get Medicare and Social Security when everyone else does not and these days reflects age discrimination backed by the political power of the elderly in the USA. Many young parents, for example, have a very hard lot, often caught between caring for their young children and their own elderly parents, while also needing to hold down a full-time job with increasingly worse benefits. A basic income would make it possible for more young parents to spend more time with their own young children while also caring for their own parents. I feel the resolution to the age discrimination issue there is to make the two programs of Medicare and Social Security available to every US citizen without discrimination based on age. We can then talk about eventually expanding those programs to all residents, legal or not, and then looking at doing it globally.
Arguments for a basic income include that, because governments have privatized almost all land, citizens have some right to the fruits of the land. Also, citizens have a claim to some of the fruits of the common inheritance of ideas and so on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...
http://www.usbig.net/
http://www.livableincome.org/
See also my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi... ..."
"One may ask, why should millionaires support a basic income as depicted in Marshall Brain's Australia Project fictional example in "Manna", but, say, right now in the USA, of US$2000 a month per person (with some deducted for universal health insurance), or $24K per year? With about 300 million residents in the USA, this would require about seven trillion US dollars a year, or half the current US GDP. Surely such a proposal would be a disaster for millionaires in terms of crushing taxes? Or would it?
Anyway, even while I'm not especially a fan of crypto currencies (good currencies need to be backed by a social constitution controlling their production IMHO), I applaud the experiment in this direction.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
To be clear, my comment is more directed to the implication from the poster's point that a "basic income" itself is a "con" (assuming that was part of what was intended). There could indeed be any number of specific problems with this specific cryptocurrency proposal, including privacy or identity theft issues as raised by other posters. Building in a basic income aspect is an interesting way to get publicity for a cryptocurrency, but as I said, a good currency is backed by a community constitution, which is going to imply checks and balances and various safeguards. If those are not in place here, like to prevent identity theft, than that could be a big problem.
However, as another comparison, LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems) systems have helped a lot of communities, and may treat LETS currency more as a lose account of favors owed than more what we think of as hard currency. ... just as they would from family and friends. But rather than do all this helping without any recording at all, keeping LETS accounts allows the group to keep track of the members' activities so they can balance their trading activities fairly, knowing that once their accounts are back to zero, they have given to the group just as much as they have received. Basically, it's just a matter of keeping score and nothing more."
http://www.lets-linkup.com/
"Let me start by saying that the generally accepted view by all LETS people is that a LETS point is not cash, or federal currency, and I agree. However, I do not feel comfortable viewing LETS points as an alternative currency with an equivalent value in cash. I prefer to interpret LETS points as being like LETS favours. That has always made trading more enjoyable for me. I love doing favours for members and they show genuine appreciation for the favour - in LETS points. It doesn't get any better than that! I view LETS more like a voluntary self-help group where like-minded people in a local community give their time and experience to help their fellow members and feel welcomed to ask for the same in return
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"a society rich enough to afford one is pretty unimaginable in today's world."
Have you in fact tried to imagine it?
Let's try a thought experiment on a simplified economy. Poverty level is $25k per "household" vs. median household income of $50k. 15% of household are below the poverty level, and we'll flatten out the income distribution by saying every household below the poverty level has no income and every household above the poverty level brings in ~$59k.
For a household below the poverty level to receive a basic income that after taxes gets them back to the poverty level would cost the households above the poverty level 7.5% in BI taxes.
BUT
"Western societies are clearly incapable of even providing the current levels of welfare let alone a vastly larger level."
Once you have basic income you can start eliminating other programs which have been made redundant and their taxes. For example, Social Security "payroll taxes" alone are 6.2%. We already have order-of-magnitude agreement between basic income and the redundant costs, so there will be no "vastly larger level".