GoodDollar Newsletter: February 2019
UBI: Global Hot Topic
Happy end-of-February from GoodDollar headquarters, and a warm welcome to you for the second monthly newsletter about our project (you can read the first newsletter here).
It has been an exciting month for GoodDollar, our pioneering 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. (And March will be great, too, given that we are hosting our first Hackinequality event — see below for more details.)
UBI has certainly been a hot topic around the globe in recent weeks. At the end of January, news of the world’s biggest UBI scheme in history was announced in India. The Indian state of Sikkim aims to guarantee every single one of its 611,000 residents a basic salary under a scheme, which is due to be implemented by 2022 and will dramatically raise living standards in the Himalayan region, its proponents believe.
“It will … represent the world’s largest ever experiment with the economic concept, which has high-profile champions including Richard Branson, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla CEO Elon Musk”, reported the Daily Telegraph.
The idea of UBI is certainly gaining popularity across India. Indeed, at the end of January the country’s main opposition Congress party announced it plans to implement UBI targeted at the poor, if it wins the national election, due to be held between April and May.
“We have decided that every poor person in India would be guaranteed a minimum income after the Congress forms the government in 2019,” said Rahul Gandhi, leader of the Indian National Congress, at a rally in Chhattisgarh, according to the Guardian. “No one will go hungry in India, no one will remain poor.”
Then, on February 8, the preliminary results from a two-year long Finnish UBI project from were released. From January 2017 until December 2018, some 2,000 randomly selected Finns — all without a job — received a monthly payment of €560 (£490; $634), instead of their unemployment benefit. Participants revealed that because of the scheme they felt happier and less stressed.
Less than a week later, American presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who is hoping to storm the White House in 2020, underlined his desire, if he gains office, to hand every adult in the country $1,000 per month.
“The big trap that America is in right now is that as artificial intelligence and autonomous cars and trucks take off, we’re going to see more and more work disappear and we’re not going to have new revenue to account for it,” he told TIME.
“The big winners are going to be the biggest tech companies like Amazon and Google and Facebook who are great at not paying a lot of taxes. So the way we pay for a universal basic income is by passing a value added tax which would get the American public a slice of every Amazon transaction and Google search.”
Closer to Home
For the GoodDollar team, the headline-generating UBI news from Asia, America, Europe and elsewhere was hugely encouraging and served to further fuel our efforts.
At the end of January, Gilad Barner, our Community and Operations Lead, took centre stage to discuss GoodDollar at the second OpenUBI event in Berlin. (Read Gilad’s Berlin OpenUBI review here.)
“I was delighted to see more projects answering the call to come and tell their stories. Some organisations travelled to Berlin from around the globe, such as from France, America and India.
“For GoodDollar, it was especially important to see how the OpenUBI ecosystem we have helped to facilitate is growing; already it has a life of its own, and that is great.”
Next Steps: Collaboration Key
There is a great willingness to collaborate within the OpenUBI community. GoodDollar wants to lead by example, and by facilitating the OpenUBI ecosystem and gathering together like-minded individuals and projects we have tried to help to raise awareness and triggered dialogue between parties.
Now — together — we need to determine a platform or system to exchange ideas, particularly around identity and governance of UBI projects. Additionally, we must scale the OpenUBI activity, and would like meetups to happen all over the world on a regular basis.
GoodDollar is scheduled to activate a pilot later this year. Once a greater number of organisations have launched test projects then hopefully we will see more technical collaboration between projects, and partnerships. The next step is delivering UBI solutions for recipients. If we all work together, pool our resources and share learnings, we could limit duplication and overlap, making the whole much greater than the sum of its OpenUBI parts.
So we are happy to announce our first hackathon, which is another call for collaboration — this time in Israel.
Hackinequality on March 14
The mission of Hackinequality, hosted by GoodDollar, is to explore how cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology may be used to reduce global inequality. Prizes will amount to almost US$50,00, and there is still space to join the fun (register here).
Topic suggestions include the following:
– Digital identity-Related Solution — centred around identity itself as a goal
– Social Impact — a project that promotes social causes and fairness
– Social Identity for UBI — build a distributed identity system without a central database, to prevent users from opening multiple accounts per user, while maintaining privacy, efficiency, accessibility and decentralisation
– Social Interest (Economy) — how to design a sustainable token economy of a UBI-based currency using smart contracts
– Direct Giving — how to design an efficient donation system for transferring money to those in need
– Decentralised Governance — design a community-led system, whose economy and rules are managed decentrally by smart contract code on the blockchain
Hackinequality takes place at eToro’s offices (Champion Tower, 33rd Floor, Sheshet HaYamim 30, Bnei Brak, Israel) from 18:00 on March 14 and ends the following day, at 13.30. However, applicants are encouraged to attend a preparation meet-up event that is happening on March 5, at the same venue.
For more information please consult the Hackinequality website here.
Must-View GoodDollar Content
– Second Berlin OpenUBI Event Review (Gilad Barner blog on Medium, February 2019)
– Widening Global Wealth Inequality Gap Can Be Narrowed By Universal Basic Income (Nir Yaacobi blog on Medium, January 2019)
– GoodDollar’s official launch (video from Web Summit, November 2018)
– GoodDollar positioning paper (written by Yoni Assia and Omri Ross, November 2018)
– Welcome to the GoodDollar Experiment (Yoni Assia blog on Medium, November 2018)
Related News from Elsewhere
– UBI can be a game changer (DownToEarth, February 2019)
– Free money wouldn’t make people lazy — but it could revolutionise work (Anna Dent column in Guardian, February 2019)
– Presidential candidate Andrew Yang wants to give every adult $1,000 a month (TIME, February 2019)
– Universal basic income: the idea that shows no sign of abating (New Statesman, February 2019)
– The basic income experiment 2017–2018 in Finland — preliminary results (Finnish government, February 2019)
– Indian state to implement universal basic income by 2022 (Telegraph, January 2018)
– India’s main opposition promises universal basic income for poor (Guardian, 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.
