Kin and Kinit: Universal Basic Income is Already Here
Requirements: United States residence and an iOS or Android device
Disclosure: I am invested in Kin and other cryptocurrency.
I just spent the last week earning 553 Kin using the Kinit app. (Please check out this 5 min read if you’d like a simple explanation of Kin) In the app 553 Kin is worth about $5.53 because I can get a $5 Amazon gift card for 500 Kin, and I can get other gift cards of various values at the same rate. Kinit lets you earn and spend a digital currency called Kin. Feel free to download one or both versions of Kinit: here’s the iOS version and here’s the Android version. You can watch me using the app here:
What does this mean? Can someone live off of $5 per week? In this country that’s a minimal income, and it’s only available in the United States at the moment. You can’t reasonably live off of $5 a week in this country. But in some underdeveloped countries, $5 per week could be a large supplement to someone’s income.
A little update: People have responded to this article saying that Kinit isn’t Universal Basic Income (UBI) because you have to do something to earn Kin in the app. But all you have to do is think a little and tap your phone a few times; I would argue that this might be easier than filling out a government’s UBI application form, and then having to tap your phone each day to receive and use that government UBI income. Update over.
About eight days ago, Kin launched the Kinit beta app. That “beta” part is important. The opportunities to earn and spend Kin are still limited. In time, people may be able to earn tens or hundreds of dollars per day on Kinit if they put in a lot of effort. Right now you can spend within Kinit on gift cards and a coupon: In time these spending opportunities should expand as well. You can even send Kin to a friend.
In my experience using the Kinit app, there has been no mention of the term “cryptocurrency.” This is good because the term cryptocurrency initially turns off a lot of people because it sounds like a crypt burial vault from some horror film. Even though it’s not mentioned in the app, Kin is a cryptocurrency.
What is a cryptocurrency? It’s a digital currency with additional properties that allow it to be controlled by math rather than humans. Bitcoin is the most famous cryptocurrency. There will never be more than 21 million Bitcoins. Bitcoins are protected by that “crypt” part of the word, which stands for cryptography. No one has ever successfully copied a Bitcoin and then spent it. Kin has mathematical properties similar to Bitcoin that control its supply. Because of the foundation laid by Bitcoin, we have many new digital currencies that can’t be printed based on the will of a central bank, but rather the currency is created in a predefined manner that can’t be changed. The price of Bitcoin has skyrocketed, I believe in part because people are excited about the prospect of a currency that can’t be inflated by humans. Inflation decreases the value of the dollar so that our wages are worth less and the stuff we buy costs more.
When you earn Kin in the app, you receive it in about 5 seconds. It comes into the Kin wallet that Kinit creates for you the first time you open the app. Receiving Kin is so seamless and easy-to-use that I doubt someone who’s unfamiliar with cryptocurrency would even guess that this is anything more than spendable in-app points.
Steve Forbes recently wrote an amazing little piece on how technology progresses. It talks about blockchain which is the technical term for the technology that enables Bitcoin, Kin, and many other cryptocurrencies. I hope you’ll read the whole thing. But here’s his conclusion:
Advances in blockchain technology will soon do to the global financial payments system what the Internet did to traditional print media. And advances will be made in creating easy-to-use cryptocurrencies that will be genuine — and better — alternatives to the government fiat currencies we have today.
— Steve Forbes in Forbes Magazine
Mr. Forbes may not know it yet, but Kin is that “easy-to-use” cryptocurrency that we need to take crypto from a niche for the tech-savvy to a mainstream consumer technology. The reason Kin is better than a fiat currency is simple: there will never be more than ten trillion Kin. That limit on Kin is the predefined amount of Kin that will be created, and it’s controlled by math, by computers.
Why are there so many Kin? 10 trillion was chosen so that a dollar’s worth of Kin might one day be equal to 100 Kin, or 10 Kin. But the creators of Kin didn’t want one dollar to equal .0001224387 Kin. If you have 0.0001224387 Bitcoins right now, you have about a dollar’s worth of them. That doesn’t seem consumer friendly, or easy to comprehend, does it?
The predefined supply of Kin means that in the long run, the value of Kin should not depreciate as long as its usage does not decrease. The usage of Kin should not see a long-term decrease any time soon because Kin has a mechanism that encourages its use. More on that in a bit.
The usage of Kin should not see a long-term decrease any time soon because Kin has a mechanism that encourages its use.
Cryptocurrencies are usually hard to understand, hard to use, and can take hours to be transferred from one person to another. But in Kinit, you get to earn and spend Kin in an app that looks nice and is easy to use. When you earn Kin, it might take five seconds to come into your wallet. The consumer-friendly experience that Kinit provides was previously unheard of in the cryptocurrency world.
By allowing you to earn money in the form of Kin, Kinit has created the beginnings of a sort of Universal Basic Income (UBI) that almost anyone in the United States can tap into if they want to. Kinit in its final form should available in every country and have many more opportunities to earn and spend Kin.
But even Kinit in its final form is still just the tip of the iceberg for Kin.
With icebergs, the portion lying underneath the surface of the water is enormous. I believe this is true for Kin, too. That hard-to-see portion is for us: when we adopt Kin and other currencies, we’ll have a better world where currencies can’t be arbitrarily inflated and devalued.
How can Kin become so popular that we will no longer use dollars? Most people will think that sounds unrealistic. Kinit, as I said, is only the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the iceberg is getting the masses to use Kin in tons of apps and websites that are created by many software developers from all over the world.
The Kin Rewards Engine (KRE)
Kinit alone could not upend the current financial system unless it became the most used app in the world, and that’s unlikely to happen. But what will happen is the Kin Rewards Engine, also known as the KRE.
The KRE is a pool of money that rewards website developers, app developers, and businesses in general to adopt Kin and get their customers spending Kin, earning Kin, or doing both. Remember how I said that the usage of Kin should not readily decrease because Kin has a mechanism that encourages its use? The KRE is that mechanism.
The KRE is a computer-based system that looks at all of the transactions of Kin at the end of every day and the businesses that facilitated those transactions are rewarded from the pool of money — in Kin, roughly based on the value of those transactions and the number of users making those transactions. At the current price of Kin, the apps getting Kin from the KRE would be splitting up tens of thousands of dollars worth of Kin each day. These payouts are given out each day, and the number of Kin given out each day will gradually go down over time.
When a few app creators start receiving tens of thousands of dollars each day from the KRE, other app creators will see the earnings and want to join them. In order for new apps to join in they will need to purchase Kin so that they can create transactions in Kin, which should cause the price of Kin to rise. At this point, more app creators will be interested in the KRE because the payouts will be worth more than they were before. This is because the KRE pays out a specific amount of Kin every day: if the value of Kin rises then the value of the payouts will typically rise. And those additional app creators who are wanting to earn their first KRE rewards will then want to buy Kin, and that will raise the price of Kin, which will draw in even more app creators, which will raise the price of Kin even higher. This is a virtuous cycle, and I don’t know where it will end.
The KRE pays out a specific amount of Kin every day: if the value of Kin rises then the value of the payouts will typically rise.
I’m not sure how high the price of Kin will go because of the virtuous cycle created by the KRE. My guess is that once the cycle kicks into motion, the price of Kin will rise substantially. Then, money will pour into other cryptocurrencies that are trying to copy the success of Kin and its KRE. So the growing price of Kin will meet resistance when a competitor that looks as good or better than Kin emerges.
To be a viable competitor to Kin, a cryptocurrency will need to have a high likelihood of obtaining at least a similar number of valuable partners that are all using their currency. The problem with this is, developing a cryptocurrency, the KRE, and the 5 minute SDK that Kin has created takes time. And getting partners on board is even harder. There will be competitors to Kin, but even if Kin can capture 0.1% of the value of the derivatives in the world, Kin in total would be worth at least $544 billion. Kin is a fierce competitor with a massive head start, so I’m excited to see how high the price of Kin will go.
The Bitcoin network incentivized miners to run and secure the network by handing out bitcoins (they’re worth about $8,000 a piece right now). Similarly, the Kin network will incentivize developers, apps, and businesses to get people using Kin by handing out Kin. In other words, Bitcoin is about securing the network by setting up computers, but Kin is about getting everyone to use the Kin token. Securing the network has been commoditized because technology has progressed. Kin’s consumer blockchain is a fork of the Stellar blockchain, so it is fast and costs little money to run. If you haven’t already, feel free to watch the video near the top of this article to see how fast it takes me to get Kin transferred to my wallet: it’s about as fast as a credit card after I’ve inserted the card!
The KRE is the part of the Kin way of doing things that will be causing new apps and businesses to integrate Kin into their businesses, by paying them Kin to do so. Those apps and businesses, in turn, will get their customers to use Kin because that means they’ll earn a greater amount of the KRE rewards.
The Ecosystem
Kin is solving the core problems of digital currencies, and there are two of them. First, Kin algorithmically limits the digital currency so that a finite amount of them can be created. Bitcoin did this as well. But prior digital currencies such as Facebook Coins, Amazon Credits, and even Kik Points failed to do this. This means they aren’t cryptocurrencies and therefore they lack the anti-inflationary value of a cryptocurrency. The revolution of Bitcoin and its limited supply lives on in Kin. Kin is more valuable than those prior digital currencies because it can’t be artificially inflated beyond the strict limits that have already been defined for it.
The revolution of Bitcoin and its limited supply lives on in Kin.
The second problem that Kin solves is the lack of adoption and use of traditional cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin: there aren’t enough people using it to make it mainstream. Kin creates a ton of demand for itself in the best possible way. Bitcoin’s value has always been as a transferable store of value, similar to a digital gold, but there was nothing incentivizing people to use Bitcoin other than its obvious properties: it’s potential growth in value, it’s portability, it’s divisibility, and it’s partial lack of traceability. Kin doesn’t artificially create demand for its token; it organically creates demand. Kin isn’t incentivizing people or individuals to use Kin; it’s incentivizing apps and businesses to get individuals to use Kin. This means that apps can get creative in the ways that they entice users to use Kin, and any app in the world can join the ecosystem that Kin is creating.
The power of this new ecosystem is hard to fathom: by coming together to all use a single token, every app has some incentive for every other app within the Kin ecosystem to succeed. The old saying “a rising tide lifts all boats” seems to apply in this case.
Kin should have hundreds of new or pre-existing apps clamoring to adopt Kin and get their fair share of the KRE rewards. Part of the creativity will be in what those apps do with the KRE rewards. Think about Clash of Clans. If they adopt Kin, and before you could buy Gems in Clash of Clans at a rate of 10 Gems for $1, maybe Clash of Clans would get 30 cents worth of Kin back from the KRE if that $1 of Gems was instead purchased with $1 worth of Kin. So Clash of Clans would be getting $1.30 worth of Kin compared to the $1.00 they got paid when people paid for Gems in cash. Because of this additional revenue, Clash of Clans will want to incentivize payment in Kin instead of cash, so maybe they will discount Gems by 10 or 20% if people buy in Kin instead of cash. And eventually, they might remove the option to buy with cash altogether. Now, imagine a couple hundred apps in the app store all doing a similar thing. The more apps that join, the more convenient it will be for you to own Kin because you can use it in any of those apps.
Things are still early going. Kin has announced Kinit, Kik, IMVU, and a few other partners. Because it’s such new technology, Kin needs to seed its ecosystem with more developers. So the Kin Foundation is paying up to $100,000+ in cash and Kin to as many as 25 developers in its recently announced Developer Program. These developers can create a new app or use an existing app to get their users transacting in Kin.’
The Kin Developer program is very similar to an incubator program: individuals or teams will be given help and support from the Kin team, and they will be given the payouts in cash and Kin at specific times over a multi-month timetable after meeting specific milestones. The only differences between this Developer Program and a traditional startup incubator: 1) the teams don’t have to give up any equity in their companies, 2) after they are done with the program they will have a crucial stake in the KRE rewards payouts earlier than almost every other app and business, and 3) they can work to grow their rewards for the foreseeable future by growing their number of users and their users’ levels of engagement. Those KRE rewards will be a daily payout in Kin. Kin can be used to grow a business’s stake in the KRE reward payouts by holding on to the Kin, the business can sell the Kin on the open market for cash, or they can spend it on any number of goods and services.
The Fans
Kin has some excited fans. Some people on the Kin team have picked up on these people who care so much about Kin. (I’m one of the excited ones) They might be wondering why someone would put so much effort into something without even getting paid to do so. I’m not sure why others do it, but I know why I do it. This is what I told my friend from the Kin team about why I support Kin so much:
“Why do we care so much? I know that Kin literally has the potential to turn the world upside down in multiple areas and change it for the better. I believe that at least 50% of the high level problems that we get from big institutions such as big corporations and government can be solved with Kin. That’s easily worth many trillions of dollars, and Kin can be worth that someday. That’s why I care. I want to solve those problems, and I want it to be through Kin because I’m invested in Kin: and because I think you guys, the people of Kin, are great.”
The People of Kin
When I got to meet people from the Kin and Kik team (the Kik messaging app launched and supports Kin) in New York City earlier this year, the people on that team were the most impressive thing I saw while there. Not only are they super nice, from Ted Livingston, to Rod McLeod, to Eileen Lyon, to Allison, and to every single person that I met from the Kin and Kik team, but they are also competent yet humble and dedicated to their work of changing the way that money works online.
The details on this interaction are fuzzy, but during the Kin Ambassador meetup, Ted was nice enough to entertain my idea about Kin helping to take care of future unemployment from artificial intelligence and automation. I don’t think there will be more unemployment from these forces because other opportunities will arise for people. I was telling Ted that I think Kin will be creating new income streams for many people: maybe earning Kin will their new employment.
Here we are, just a few months later, and Kin has launched a USA-wide Universal Basic Income (UBI) app called Kinit that’s already starting to do a little of what I was talking about. It’s not technically UBI because you have to think and tap your phone, but it seems pretty close to me because it’s so easy to receive Kin.
Earning Kin
$5 per week isn’t much, but this was earned solely with Kinit while it was in beta. Someday many apps may integrate Kin and create more opportunities to earn.
Traditional digital ads seem to be less acceptable to consumers based on their high use of ad blockers. But rewarded advertising has a bright future. Rewarded ads are ads that pay consumers for those consumers’ attention.
In the Kin family of apps we will hopefully see apps that pay Kin for consumers to do the following: watch movie trailers, watch app demos, see traditional banner ads, download an app and actively use it for a certain amount of time, watch traditional video ads, visit a particular storefront in person or digitally, use a coupon, like or share a post, write an article, read an article, teach a new skill, post a video, or complete demographic surveys to continually give you the earning opportunities that are specifically beneficial to you. Many of these tasks are forms of rewarded ads. The Kinit app has already given me demographic surveys.
Rewarded ads are ads that pay consumers for those consumers’ attention.
The above tasks are things that could be implemented today, but what new tasks might be available once we have a microbusiness economy? A microbusiness economy is where even the smallest hobby or passion can be turned into a viable business.
In a microbusiness economy, there could be payment in Kin for digital art, designs for 2D and 3D printing, recipes, printable food, business plans, and other goods or services. Will we be paying for a 3D printable house design, or for a new artificial intelligence “brain” to play against you in chess or poker?
How about getting paid every time someone likes something you’ve posted? You could get Kin from anonymous donators for a code improvement you submitted for an open source project.
Even business development could be a microbusiness: we might pay personal assistants for each email that they’ve written and sent, all automatically through a workflow automation system.
Spending Kin
There are already plenty of options to spend Kin within the Kinit app. You can get a $5 Amazon gift card for 500 Kin. That card can go towards 488 million product choices in the United States alone. But eventually, Amazon may accept Kin directly to reap some of the KRE rewards. Every business, whether digital or physical, will have an incentive to accept Kin directly to receive a chunk of the KRE rewards each day.
But what about new spending opportunities that don’t already exist within Kinit? No one wants to pay for every image or article or status update that we appreciate online: it’s too much effort. But what if, in order to stop seeing ads (or as many ads), we were willing to pay tips to other users for their updates, pictures, and posts on Facebook or Twitter. The KRE rewards from the transactions created through tipping would go to Facebook or Twitter so that they would no longer need ad revenue. The way things used to be, no one would want to take the time to pull out their credit card to do something like that. But tipping like this could be done automatically every time you like, share, or retweet something. Most people who have smartphones have done at least one of those two things. And we’re already conditioned to do so.
Let’s take Twitter as an example. Let’s call it Kinnified Twitter: You like a Tweet, but in your Twitter settings, you have things set so that you automatically give out 10 Kin per liked tweet. Let’s say that’s the level at which Twitter will no longer show you any ads as long as you like at least one tweet per day on average. You could set it to 1 Kin per like (or higher than 10 Kin per like, it’s up to you), and in this 1 Kin case you would need to like more tweets per day or see a few more ads compared to the 10 Kin per liked tweet option (but you’d still see fewer ads than if you paid no Kin per liked tweet). All of the Kin given for liked tweets would go to the person who posted the tweet, directly into their wallet. Twitter would lose a lot of ad revenue, but they would make up for it by pocketing the KRE rewards.
Let’s call it Kinnified Twitter.
With a Kinnified Twitter, our habits don’t change… or do they? Perhaps the Twitter experience will become better because we have an incentive to post and like good tweets because we want the best people to get paid.
Twitter could end spam by charging a specific amount to post a tweet, maybe it’s 5 Kin, or maybe it’s a certain amount of Kin per follower, like .001 Kin per follower. By charging us to tweet, we’ll be less likely to post something unless we think it can earn us at least as much as the cost of tweeting. Retweets could be done similarly, or they could be paid out in a multi-level marketing fashion.
Kinnified Twitter might be better than current Twitter, and some of us might make a living by tweeting valuable things to others on Twitter. This seems like the future to me. It would be the start of an economy where everyone who provides valuable content gets paid for that content. Kinnifying various apps like Twitter could change the internet in a very fundamental way. The internet becomes a place that can be easily monetized by almost anyone, not just the big tech companies and their competitors.
Will Kin be the “Internet’s Native Currency?”
Maybe Kin will be the “Internet’s Native Currency,” I say to you, Jack Dorsey (Twitter’s CEO). Every social app can be Kinnified in this way.
Basic Income that’s a Living Wage
Imagine 1,000 apps that each have one dollar worth of Kin earning opportunities every day. I think this could happen once the KRE’s virtuous cycle ramps up. Somebody taking advantage of every one of these 1,000 opportunities could earn $1,000 per day.
Imagine 1,000 apps that each have one dollar worth of Kin earning opportunities every day.
Similarly, hundreds of apps in less developed countries can do a similar thing for the people of their country. For people in those countries, there might be 1,000 apps that each have 5 cents worth of earning opportunities per day. This might seem small, but if every opportunity was earned by a very diligent individual, that $50 per day in Kin could be a lot of money in their country.
The Kinit app has created a sort of Universal Basic Income that’s available right now for the people of the United States: anyone with an iOS or Android device can tap into it. Kin is seeking to create diverse income and spending opportunities for everyone with a connection to the internet. To help achieve this, the Kin Foundation is seeding the Kin Ecosystem with about $3 million worth of cash and Kin through its Developer Program. Then, the Kin Foundation will try to grow the number of businesses in its ecosystem through the KRE. The KRE will potentially pay out many millions of dollars worth of Kin over the next couple of decades.
If you’re excited about the potential of Kin, please consider doing one or more of the following things:
For the regular Joe like me: Grab the Kinit app and make some money. You will be helping to kickstart the ecosystem and the Kin cryptocurrency.
For the developers of the world: You’re the superheroes of today and tomorrow because you can wield the power of a computer processor to do what you want, and it’s an incredible power. Applications to Kin’s Developer Program are no longer being accepted, and 40 developers/teams have been accepted into the program; however, you can still put Kin into your app to start getting Kin Rewards Engine (KRE) payouts once they begin. To learn more about incorporating Kin into your development please check out the Kin documentation pages and feel free to email info@kinecosystem.com. Thanks!
