{"id":37939,"date":"2023-10-30T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-30T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/?p=37939"},"modified":"2025-08-29T23:41:04","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T20:41:04","slug":"what-is-universal-basic-income-and-what-do-cryptocurrencies-have-to-do-with-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/what-is-universal-basic-income-and-what-do-cryptocurrencies-have-to-do-with-it\/","title":{"rendered":"What is universal basic income\u2014and what do cryptocurrencies have to do with it?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

What is universal basic income?<\/h2>\n

Universal basic income (UBI) is a guaranteed minimum payment to every member of society, regardless of an individual\u2019s social standing or status.<\/p>\n

This is what distinguishes it from other social benefits: funds are distributed to all groups without exception and without reference to a citizen\u2019s wealth.<\/p>\n

Scholars typically trace the first mention of the social concept of guaranteed income to the English humanist philosopher Thomas More\u2019s Utopia (1516). In the late 18th century Thomas Paine\u2014one of America\u2019s founding fathers\u2014proposed revisiting the idea.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

How could the idea be implemented?<\/h2>\n

Advocates of broad UBI adoption say guaranteed payments would free people to realise their creative potential. Instead of constantly seeking the means to survive, people could spend time creating intangible value, improving their own lives and developing society as a whole.<\/p>\n

Potential sources of funding include higher taxes, reallocating money from other social programmes such as unemployment benefits, and introducing environmental and land levies. Supporters also propose cutting the cost of maintaining the bureaucracy, and advancing automation and artificial-intelligence technologies.<\/p>\n

The main obstacle is implementation. Fair distribution, record-keeping, analysis and adjustment would require an expensive system of interaction among all participants and components. Large financial costs would also accompany any large-scale rollout of UBI.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Is there interest in universal basic income?<\/h2>\n

Debate around the concept has drawn in not only economists, philosophers and commentators but also major political figures and venture firms. In 2016 US president Barack Obama suggested<\/a> that advances in AI in the coming years would raise UBI\u2019s popularity.<\/p>\n

Andrew Yang, a candidate in the 2020 US presidential election, made<\/a> universal basic income the centrepiece of his campaign. He also founded the Humanity Forward fund, which received<\/a> $5m from Block chief Jack Dorsey.<\/p>\n

In 2016 the Y Combinator business incubator, then led by Sam Altman, cofounder of OpenAI and Worldcoin<\/a>, launched a UBI pilot in Uganda. One hundred families took part.<\/p>\n

The topic became especially salient during the coronavirus pandemic. Governments worldwide had to support citizens with special payments. The execution of these programmes exposed a number of inefficiencies, including corruption, financial costs, inflation and misuse of funds.<\/p>\n

In theory, universal basic income could eliminate all these problems, as well as remove the need for additional cash payments to the population.<\/p>\n

\n

What do cryptocurrencies and other technologies have to do with UBI?<\/h2>\n

There is no consensus yet on questions related to implementing basic income, but two promising trends have emerged: <\/p>\n

Artificial intelligence<\/strong>. Complex computations could be delegated to AI to achieve fair distribution of funds and minimise UBI\u2019s negative impact on the economy. <\/p>\n

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain. <\/strong>They are expected to take on the operational layer. A blockchain\u2019s distributed nature, verifiable history with programmable logic for asset transfers and the absence of financial costs could all help deploy universal basic income.<\/p>\n

One of the main supporters of UBI in crypto is Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency. With his support, ideas and developments on blockchains have begun to produce components of possible mechanics for future implementations.<\/p>\n

As a result, the following avenues for funding public goods have emerged, aimed at reducing economic inequality:<\/p>\n

On-chain identity.<\/strong> The most popular projects in this category are Sam Altman\u2019s Worldcoin, Santiago Siri\u2019s Proof of Humanity, and the Gitcoin donations platform. This also includes NFT projects based on the idea of non-transferable personal tokens created for a single address with no option to move or sell them. Buterin called them soulbound tokens<\/a>. <\/p>\n

City tokens.<\/strong> A notable example<\/a> is CityDAO, which proposes improving existing urban infrastructure and creating entirely new cities based on DAOs<\/a>. The main goal is to foster economic cooperation between a city and its residents.<\/p>\n

Decentralised autonomous organisations. <\/strong>Popular DAOs could occupy a distinct place in advancing the UBI concept. Buterin noted<\/a> the Optimism<\/a> project as an interesting experiment that has committed to funding public goods via retrodrops<\/a>. Its team has already carried out three rounds of funding for active ecosystem participants, totalling hundreds of millions of dollars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Can universal basic income tackle inequality, and what role does the crypto industry play?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37940,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"select":"1","news_style_id":"1","cryptorium_level":"1","_short_excerpt_text":"","creation_source":"","_metatest_mainpost_news_update":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2113],"tags":[286,200,1327],"class_list":["post-37939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptorium","tag-society","tag-vitalik-buterin","tag-worldcoin"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"views":"59","promo_type":"1","layout_type":"1","short_excerpt":"","is_update":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37939"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37939\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37941,"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37939\/revisions\/37941"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}