GoodDollar Newsletter: January 2019
Gaining Early Momentum
A very warm welcome to the first GoodDollar newsletter about our exciting project.
As a reminder, GoodDollar is a research hub that explores how decentralised cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology may enable models based on universal basic income (UBI) with the central aim of reducing global wealth inequality.
At the end of every month, we will post a newsletter that details recent key developments at GoodDollar, as well as highlighting new content — papers, videos, blogs, and so on — around the project. We will also flag up relevant news and breakthroughs in the UBI and blockchain space in the previous month.
With this being the first newsletter, it will be longer than future editions, as there is so much to tell you. We look back at last year — when Yoni Assia, Co-Founder and Chief Executive of eToro, officially launched GoodDollar at Web Summit Lisbon, in early November — and bring to your attention important events and developments.
We encourage you to drop us a line to let us know what you think of the newsletter. Additionally, we plan to showcase various partners’ UBI projects in our growing GoodDollar community; we want to hear your stories, findings, and future plans in this exciting space — and include them in future newsletters. Please contact us at hello@gooddollar.org.
GoodDollar’s Story so Far
We announced the GoodDollar experiment to the world in early November, in a 15-minute presentation at Web Summit in Portugal (see the video here). But where did the idea for the project originate from?
As Yoni wrote, in a Medium blog that coincided with the launch: “The issue of wealth inequality has been at the forefront of my mind for most of my adult life. It is a critical economic challenge of our time. However, I’ve long felt a solution is conceivable when all the elements are aligned. I first wrote about this idea in 2008, in an article entitled The Visible Hand. The original concept has significantly evolved since then.”
It has indeed. GoodDollar has been supported by eToro, with the global multi-asset investment platform initially committing $1 million to the project. In the months leading up to the announcement at Web Summit, a growing team of digital pioneers, economists and builders started experimenting and exploring what might be possible in this space.
The early findings from our experiments, spearheaded by Economics Lead Dr. Nir Yaacobi, are encouraging though there is much more to come. In 2019 we expect to build on the early momentum GoodDollar has generated so far.
In late November, Gilad Barner, GoodDollar’s Community and Operations Lead, was part of the launch of an OpenUBI ecosystem, at a special day-long conference in Berlin, to foster collaboration and discussion around universal basic income (UBI) and its technological implementation. Anyone who wishes to take part in the discussion about the future of the evolution of economics is welcome to join this decentralised community (see here).
“The OpenUBI movement is just starting, and I wish to see this sort of activity happening in every city in the world,” Gilad wrote in his Medium blog reviewing the event in the German capital.
A few weeks later, on December 13, in an event, titled The Social Evolution of Wealth, at The Next Web’s Hard Fork summit in London, Ira Ryk-Lakhman, GoodDollar’s Legal Lead, spoke passionately about how innovations in blockchain technology should be used more widely to help solve global humanitarian challenges (and wrote about it here, too).
What 2019 Has in Store for GoodDollar
There is so much to come from GoodDollar this year. We want to scale our research. We will encourage more meet-ups and hackathons, engaging and collaborating with like-minded people, with the common aim of using blockchain to reduce global wealth inequality.
In truth, we have been overwhelmed by requests to join the GoodDollar project since the official launch — and that is great, but we are currently in the process of determining a way to proceed with all the applications. It’s a good problem to have.
Ultimately, we are well aware that delivering decentralised UBI on a large scale requires much input from the whole ecosystem — we cannot do this alone. Together, with your help, and as a community, we can achieve this goal. The rationale is to start off centralised, and slowly open a great number of governance features to the community, to make it more of a community-led project.
Rest assured that GoodDollar has a number of interesting projects planned in 2019, and we are working hard to deliver them as quickly as we can. For example, we will be launching a pilot UBI project and will reveal more details on that in the coming months. Also, our website will soon be revamped.
Please stay tuned. You can keep abreast of GoodDollar’s progress through the newsletters in the coming months or by following us on our social media channels (see below).
Must-View GoodDollar Content
– Welcome to the GoodDollar Experiment (Yoni Assia blog on Medium, November 2018)
– GoodDollar’s official launch (video from Web Summit, November 2018)
– GoodDollar positioning paper (written by Yoni Assia and Omri Ross, November 2018)
– Universal Basic Income: Realising its Great Potential in the 21st Century? (Medium, November 2018)
– Launching the OpenUBI Ecosystem (Gilad Barner blog on Medium, December 2018)
– Blockchain Innovation Key to Solving Global Humanitarian Challenges (Ira Ryk-Lakham guest column on Cointelligence, January 2019)
– Widening Global Wealth Inequality Gap Can Be Narrowed By Universal Basic Income (Nir Yaacobi blog on Medium, January 2019)
Related News From Elsewhere
– Cities could be where universal basic income takes root (Fast Company blog on Medium, December 2018)
– Thomas Piketty presents bold economic blueprint for a ‘fairer Europe’ (Guardian, December 2018)
– Universal basic income — a review of 2018 (MIT Technology Review, December 2018)
– Why 2019 Should Be The Year of Universal Basic Income (Vetze, December 2018)
– The first basic income experiment in Germany will start in 2019 (Bien, December 2018)
– NHS Scotland backs Citizen’s Basic Income scheme to save thousands of lives (The National, December 2018)
– Basic income is back on the policy agenda in North America (Science Blog, January 2019)
– How a basic income can battle the 8 giants of a faltering economy (Guy Standing, World Economic Forum, January 2019)
Do you have the skills to help the GoodDollar project? We need builders, scientists and experts in identity, privacy, and financial governance, as well as philanthropists and ambassadors. Contact us at hello@gooddollar.org, via our social media channels (Twitter and Telegram), join the OpenUBI movement, or visit our GitHub page.
