Universal Basic Income (UBI) + EOS = Mass Adoption
No, UBI is not “Communism.” UBI is getting the customer of your currency hooked for life. It’s the ultimate airdrop, and the ultimate form of marketing.
People have a really hard time understanding that a blockchain isn’t real life, but a game that is played inside of real life and that does have consequences in real life. But that it isn’t real life itself.
For example, the “EOS Constitution” is not a “real” constitution because it does not regulate real-life bodies in a real-life society. It influences the society of bodies indirectly, so it is metaphorically a constitution. You can totally use the same word, provided you can see the difference.
UBI is the same thing. A crypto UBI is not a real-life UBI. A real-life UBI, just like a real-life Constitution, affects everyone. A real-life UBI is usually paid for by a non-voluntary government by way of non-voluntary taxation. Real-life UBIs are an excellent idea, but that’s not the point of this essay.
Even if you are against a real-life UBI (which is dumb), you should not ever be against an UBI in your favorite blockchain. Because an UBI in your blockchain is the most potent, most ubiquitous way to gain mass adoption. Nothing else compares to it.
But is it Communism!!!
Real-life UBIs are not “Communism,” because that is obvious for anyone who is minimally educated on both UBI and Communism — it’s that not-at-all-common “common sense.” Blockchain UBIs are especially not “Communism,” because “Communism,” just like Constitutions and UBIs, are terms coined to describe processes and policies for the politics of real human lives in the real world.
There is no problem of real systemic dispossession and real social injustice in a blockchain, which is a community getting together to operate a free-floating IOU simulation game known as a “cryptocurrency” (sometimes with currencies that double as voting tokens and resource reservation shares…). When a blockchain boots up, nobody gets poorer as it does not consume any significant amount of real-world resources (with the notable exception of Bitcoin and its transactions that cost 1 MWh or $100 each). A blockchain is a private currency simulation game — a virtual world — that can be replicated an unlimited number of times in an unlimited number of servers. Virtual worlds spawn their own space, and thus do not need to “conquer” existing space to express themselves.
Therefore, when a blockchain pays an UBI for the unique human identities it can ascertain, it is not paying those UBIs from a treasury that was provisioned through non-voluntary, real-life, taxed currency systems that people cannot opt-out of. It is doing so because its shareholders voluntarily decided it is good business. (And they decided it is good business because they read this very essay, lol.)
Real-life society — the place where “governments” and “governance” live — is a forced, convoluted always-legacy consensus process that directly reflects the average level of awareness among an entire population that is within a physical reach bubble (e.g. a physical planet). In contrast, blockchains are nimble, fully opt-in consensus mechanisms (if you don’t like the “mob rule” of all other stakeholders then just dump your shares and go away). And thus all blockchains (games, simulations, virtual worlds) by definition lack the power to oppress its participants.
Blockchains are anarchic (or “libertarian,” if you prefer) “businesses” with voting “shareholders,” and the voting shareholders are those who hold the “coins.” And the first blockchain business with a majority of voters that can understand that a virtual, crypto UBI is the best “mass adoption” mechanism that any currency can hope for will win the next decade of the “crypto wars.”
Crypto Crack
EOS already has Basic Income: it is the token airdrop. Since every EOS project is now socially obligated (informally, at least) to use the token airdrop model, airdrops can be understood as taxed ICOs, where the tax is the airdrop part of the ICO, which works very similarly to many proposed real-life Basic Income policies (e.g. Helicopter Money QE). And since airdrops in EOS will probably never cease, they as a collective are already implementing an UBI policy.
However, right now we are using a crude ID system, which is stake (i.e. EOS tokens). We know every EOS token is held by a person, but we don’t know how many tokens are owned by the same person, and we don’t know how many accounts a person holds. Many airdrops are retroactively filtering the genesis snapshot and e.g. capping rewards at 40,000 EOS. That is because the genesis snapshot is a state snapshot that is guaranteed to have a minimum of “airdrop engineering” — you can’t go back in time and retroactively guess how airdrops would work, and thus split all your ERC-20 EOS tokens in independent, unrelated accounts with 1,000 EOS each. Some smart alecks probably did that, but the genesis snapshot is the earliest point in time that is guaranteed to have minimized such practices.
Going forward, Block.one is going to revolutionize airdrops: it is going to provide a free identification mechanism for the EOS mainnet. What that means is that now you can reward human customers directly, instead of having to throw your ICO tokens at a capital distribution and hope they will reach a significant number of customers that justifies the value you just dropped.
Marketing works by reaching the most humans. People who are already rich will not get “extra interest” in your project just because you make them even richer faster. Airdropping to stake works, but by itself it is not optimal.
Airdrops are crypto crack. You want to give just a little bit to the largest number of persons you can reach. Not too little you will offend them, but just enough so they can feel like trying out your project with the starter participation token amount you gave them. And if your project is any good, they will take a position in your token economy to enhance their participation. If you also want to keep airdropping to stake, that is also a valid strategy that has its own extra benefits (that’s another topic).
UBI is the Endless Airdrop for society
An one-off airdrop attracts interest. An endless airdrop, which is what an UBI system is, attracts devoted, principled loyalty for life.
Many years ago, a guy wrote an e-book called Ideavirus. In it, he explained that viral ideas only really spread when you have a base of genuinely devoted followers.
What people who oppose a real-life, government-funded UBI don’t understand is that a real-life UBI is a way for citizens to feel engaged and part of their own society and emergent “governance” process, instead of victims of it. UBIs transform communities at a very primal, bodily, human level. UBIs heal real human bonds, and that’s been extensively studied and proven. UBIs will organically and perpetually generate the “engaged employee” of our trade-based worldwide society, and that’s how UBIs (be them in real or virtual worlds) pay for their own budgets many times over.
The lack of an UBI is why more than two-thirds of people hate their day jobs. That’s not natural and certainly not inevitable, yet we act as it is, as would be the case in a society that is still in the Dark Ages of economics. The people who oppose the enlightenment of UBI are those who benefit from a disengaged society of robotic wage slaves, plus a hefty share of those “robots” that were propagandized by them and are vigorously fighting to keep those sweet chains around their and everybody else’s necks.
Once the freedom, the experience of receiving an UBI is tasted, a society cannot ever go back. Ask the Ontario, CA community who had its UBI cut. UBIs give people the basic means for them to act on their social responsibilities. It is a little bit of freedom that supplies the needs of an immense amount of responsibilities to be fulfilled. Without it, people do not feel they truly belong, truly own a society, and thus they can only feebly, hopelessly participate in it, checking in periodically with just the bare minimum that doesn’t threaten their future prospects of survival in a fundamentally antisocial society that doesn’t even care about the basic sustenance of their bodies, and thus of their dignity.
Crypto UBI and the Last Blockchain
Once people taste the UBI of your blockchain, they will never go back to another blockchain that does not have UBI. But that’s not because blockchains have “real human bonds” to be healed. Remember, blockchains are not literal countries with literal human communities. If there are bonds, they are Reddit-mediated bonds.
Instead, UBI blockchains will experience a frenzy of mainstream user adoption for two reasons. One, perpetual airdrops in the native currency of the network targeted directly to the human customer is marketing genius. Just try it out and see. And two, a perpetual airdrop provides an emulation of human belonging, a sense of the Internet kind of belonging. It tells a story. And blockchains are all about their communities, which are held in place by shared Internet stories, shared values, shared hopes and dreams for the real world.
As the UBI movement gains in popularity, everyone who hopes for an UBI in the real-world will join EOS to get a taste for what an UBI feels like when played out. It offers a revolutionary experience, literally — being part of something that can leapfrog society into a much brighter future. It offers the “crypto holder” the opportunity to virtually belong with others, and see what that feels like — and immediately want to share that feeling to all other people they know, hence “mass adoption” and “virality.”
Contrary to “UBI pilots” in the real world, which have nothing left to “pilot” in something that has been proven many times over, and are now indistinguishable from a real UBI implementation, a Crypto UBI is literally an UBI pilot, as a cryptocurrency virtual world like EOS is an economic and monetary pilot of how economics could work in our “real-world” (i.e. mandatory-consensus) governments.
And then, once popular, $100-fee blockchains will become the tiny refuge of a handful of essentialists. Everyone else will move to EOS to act out this next monetary paradigm that everyone is talking about. That will cost X, and pay out Y, where Y is many, many times over X.
The UBI blockchain is the Last Blockchain — at least for the foreseeable future.
UBI in the EOS mainnet
Let’s talk about UBI in EOS, specifically. EOS tokenomics works by inflating the supply under a capped, conservative inflation threshold (historically, that’s anything at or under 5%, which is what works for real-world countries). The proceeds from conservative inflation supports BPs, the WPS and the ECAF, and now it will support a permanent viral marketing campaign that will be branded as an UBI, as a metaphor to the real-world UBI ideal.
UBI is a huge worldwide movement that is currently experiencing parabolic growth. If EOS pays an UBI, it is going to become the first major global currency to do so. It will gain immediate exposure and relevance. It will be the first blockchain to exit the realm of nerdy tech speculation and into the real world.
And what will be the cost of that marketing campaign, that Endless Airdrop that will be branded as an UBI? The truth is, you can start with any budget, since it is symbolic. EOS does not have to actually feed anyone like a real-world UBI has to.
EOS can start with a 0.1% inflation budget to pay for its UBI program. Like airdrops, it cannot be too little or it will be considered offensive or laughable. Other than that? Use any budget, and it will work the exact same magic. How do I know that? I know that because it is competing with the UBI budget of ZERO from every other major blockchain.
Nobody can argue against a 0.1% inflation budget for a perpetual airdrop precisely targeted at individual people. It’s just a genius move.
Afterwards, the EOS mainnet can discuss increasing the UBI budget. That’s what referendums are for. The “mob rule” of direct, real-time on-line democracy will reach a consensus on what the UBI inflation will end up being.
Thus, UBI on EOS will happen. If it doesn’t, the EOS community will shoot itself in the foot, and EOS will be overtaken by the first competitor that does implement it.
EOS is poised to dominate as a cryptocurrency. It will have an ID service and free accounts for everyone. It offers the most advanced Smart Contract platform, the best Quality of Service and it will quickly and cheaply scale to meet any demand the world can throw at it. Now, all that is left is a way for EOS to be the first world-wide taste of a working economic social contract, unprecedented in human history — and thus capture all of the novelty and the magic for itself, which is good business, but also featuring immense synergy with the UBI movement as a whole.
