> Your FAQ and reply still have not addressed where __REAL VALUE__ comes from.
Here's an excerpt:
In the future, the AcademicCoin is very valuable. It represents 1000+ respected researchers who accept it as payment for their time, early access to research results, papers, etc.
Some examples of value are clearly listed there, so I'm not sure what the confusion is.
I also wrote a followup reply to another comment that might clear things up:
>Some examples of value are clearly listed there, so I'm not sure what the confusion is.
Some of your cites for basic income mention $30k a year as a target. Therefore, your 1000 respected researchers would have to generate value of $33 million just to provide themselves the bare minimum of basic income. Where does this $33 million magically come from (and reliably appear every single year)? Ask graduate students how hard it is to win grants for modest amounts of $250000.
In the real world today, if 1,000 researchers are mostly grad students on stipends, would the sum of their incomes[1] exceed $33 million? Also to keep in the spirit of "basic" income, some of those researchers don't want to work or can't work. The others must pick up the slack and create enough value to cover basic income for them.
You haven't explained how enough value is created to solve basic income. Again, basic income is not a "currency" problem.
> Where does this $33 million magically come from (and reliably appear every single year)?
Let's be serious here. There's no magic about it.
Red Hat has 7300 employees (as of 2015) [1] and made $0.024 million per employee in 2014. Multiply by 1000 and you get $24.4 million. Maybe these scientists have a patent that does well and it covers the extra $9 million to get $30k per year. (Sidenote: that seems low for Red Hat. Wiki says Google does $0.25 million/employee, an order of magnitude higher.)
Edit: Actually, those figures are based on profit, not revenue... Revenue/employee at Google is ~$1.2 million.
Don't confuse basic income with not working.
When people don't have to think about survival they are free to think about the flying car. If anything, there should be a net increase in the rate of value creation.
>Maybe these scientists have a patent that does well and it covers the extra $9 million to get $30k per year.
Ok, I think I'm getting a better understanding of what your proposal is.
The confusion happened because your webpage says, "group currency is a cryptocurrency that __provides__ its identified members with a basic income"
I interpreted that as the currency itself was the source of the wealth and therefore able to "provide" an income to members. Your later comments to others acknowledged that wealth generation comes from people and not the currency. Therefore, the cryptocurrency isn't really "solving" basic income insomuch as it's acting as a convenient bookkeeping (ledger) for distributing it.
The real puzzle and difficulty of enabling basic income for groups is still the ability for members to generate real value. The cryptocurrency is the easy part; the value creation is the hard part. The emphasis on cryptocurrencies on your web page makes it seem like digital money is the key when it really isn't.
For example, a "group" of computer programmers or airline pilots can come together and possibly "provide" a basic income for their members. (Their high salaries of $80k to $200k might provide $33k to others.) However, a group of nail salon manicurists cannot.[1] Filing down customers' fingernails doesn't generate enough value to provide their members a $33k basic income. If manicurists join together to create a "manicure-cryptocoin", the existence of that new digital currency still isn't going to provide any basic income.
So the trick is to get enough high-value wealth generators into your "group". For example, if you create a "Coca-Cola soda drinkers group" and convince fellow soda drinker Warren Buffet to join, you might have the prerequisite wealth to provide the members a basic income. If your web essay was based on that instead of cryptocurrency, it would make more sense to me.
> However, a group of nail salon manicurists cannot.
So, this is true today, but I think it's missing the bigger picture of a world where UBI actually exists.
Basic Income leads to Universal Basic Income (UBI).
One of the reasons why there are so many nail salon manicurists today is because we have made higher education very expensive, among other reasons.
Do you really think most of the people working as manicurists today would be doing that if they didn't have to in order to pay the bills and higher education were free (or very cheap)?
No. They would not. That's not to say there's anything wrong with being a manicurist. Indeed some may do it because that's what they want to do. But I do know that most people, including most software developers, wouldn't be doing what they are doing right now if the basics were guaranteed for them.
The future is a world where most of today's jobs are automated away. It's very different from the one we live in right now, so it makes little sense to think only in terms of today's world when talking about BI / UBI.
This is necessary preparation for the future. You've got "Star Trek" on one side [1][2], and "Dawn of the Dead" on the other. You're going to have to choose somewhere along that spectrum.
I think your motivation makes (some) sense. But there are real issues with getting from here to there, and I'm not sure you are addressing them.
How do nail manicurest take part in a system they can't afford?
Traditional welfare systems do this by redistribution. In the US that seems to be a dirty word, but I think it's a perfectly valuable approach.
Another possibility is the Union-retirement-plan model, where a group of workers has sufficient market power to force employers to subsidise the welfare of group members who aren't working.
Neither of these seem to be your approach.
So how does it work? The key question is how do you stop non group members joining your group?
> The key question is how do you stop non group members joining your group?
This is up to the group to decide. To join a group the group must approve you to join.
The more groups there are, the more choice people have. It's healthy competition as per usual free market capitalism, but with some decency and wisdom thrown in.
In other words, everyone ends up better off. Standard of living improves for everyone involved because workers have more freedom to work on complex tasks since their brains are not per-occupied by the mundane and they are happy.
Both your FAQ and your reply to me is focused on the mediums of exchange: the paper scrip (and its flaws) and the cryptocurrencies (and its benefits).
Your FAQ and reply still have not addressed where __REAL VALUE__ comes from.