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Comment by jerf

Basic income as proposed at the societal scale is essentially a wealth redistribution scheme, which implies that there is some concrete actual value removed from somebody and given to somebody else. Using a cryptocurrency to provide basic income would manifest simply as the creation of currency, with no actual value being created to correspond to the new currency, so it's just going to be inflationary. I don't see any proposals on the linked page on how to overcome that, links welcome if there are, nor does anything leap to mind to solve this problem in a sensible way.

(This has nothing to do with whether basic income is a good idea or not; the point is that this does not appear to actually be basic income except at an extremely superficial level. Nor is my calling it a "wealth redistribution" scheme intended to be a criticism. I'll admit to being extremely skeptical about basic income, but that is what it is, just like EITC. Whether redistribution is a good idea is a separate discussion I'm not trying to have here.)

parent jerf 11 years ago

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