
Show HN: Swift Demand – A Basic Income Experiment - zaguios
https://www.swiftdemand.com/
======
masukomi
Why "Legal First Name" and "Legal Last Name" for me this threw up warning
flags. Why do you need to know that?

What's to prevent me from lying? Also, with no "work" (cpu or human) required
to get coins there's no incentive to NOT lie and just make a ton of accounts
to multiply your effective daily income.

Basic income is a great concept, but the cash isn't magically created. The
govt's don't just print new cash. if they do they cause inflation which
devalues the current cash that's in circulation. every day you put more
"money" into circulation you're devaluing the money that's already there. This
just seems to violate fundamental economic concepts. I don't see why anyone
would want to take this in exchange for goods or work.

~~~
zaguios
For Swift Demand to work your account will need to be completely tied to your
true identity. Initially the methods of verification aren't very strong to
prevent any unneeded friction for early adopters of the service. Once Swift
Coins start having real value I will be placing much stricter rules and
requirements for identity verification. Starting with extremely strict
regulations is both hard to enforce at the start and will harm the ability for
Swift Demand to succeed.

Adding more money into the economy will constantly devalue it, you are
correct. As I mentioned in another comment in order for this to work there
needs to be speculation that the currency eventually will become more valuable
and people start to buy it as a form in investment in a similar style to how
bitcoin started. Once value has been established and new coins are created at
a constant pace the hope is that it will be usable in the same fashion as any
other form of currency.

Government due indeed print new cash, it is what causes the constant inflation
that is present for all major currencies. All of your arguments appear like
they would be the same for other real world currencies that do indeed function
normally. There's a decent chance that it will fail, but I believe it's worth
it to try.

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hxta98596
This looks really interesting. I _think_ I get what you are trying to do. Just
want to give a bit of feedback:

Even after clicking through "Learn More" and your FAQ, I still wasn't sure
what this is or how it works. I am familiar with online currencies and basic
income, so I would imagine a visitor to the site less familiar with this stuff
would be even more confused.

I get it's an "experiment" and TNSTAAFL and it's still very new. But maybe a
sample explanation of how a new user might sign up, receive coins and then use
them somewhere would help clarify things.

~~~
zaguios
Thanks for the feedback! I really appreciated it.

Is there anything in particular that you would suggest to add to the landing
page to clarify it? I was hoping the graphics would give users a basic idea on
how exactly it worked. I would like to focus on making the intent as clear as
possible so I'm all ears as far as suggestions go.

I would like to make the process more clear with an example, I think this will
be much easier to accomplish once I can get a few vendors to agree to use the
service for some small items. The site was just released today which is why
it's difficult for me to implement this currently. I do agree that having
instant feedback of being able to sign up and immediately use coins is crucial
for people less familiar with Basic Income to grasp the idea quickly so I will
make this a focus of mine.

~~~
hxta98596
I understand this is very new. As more people visit the site hopefully a lot
of feedback will stream in for you. I'm just one person so I can't really
suggest what you should add, only where I found things wanting. If you
aggregate feedback from visitors and do your A/B testing or whatever system
you use, that should point to the right places to make changes.

For example: Your landing page says "You can do whatever you want with them".
Imagine a person not familiar with any of this stuff, I could imagine such a
person asking themselves, "what can I do with them?" and "what's the catch?"

For someone familiar with online currencies and/or basic income, I could
imagine such a person clicking around and finding no info or evidence of a
back-end infrastructure that would support this idea. Nor is there any
explanation how you expect to give away something every day and have users or
vendors want to accept such a thing for something they do know the value of.
Play all product launch games you want, but you are asking for people's real
first and last name and their email, I don't see experienced early-adopters
giving this up without more proof of concept and knowing more about you guys
and your plans.

I wish you a lot of success, just wanted to point out two groups of users who
might be more apprehensive to sign up and why.

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Arqu
Be warned, this is a very very elaborate scheme to phish peoples cc data. If
you dig around, you will see that there is a ton of fake blog posts to give it
some fake credibility citing the same thing with fake timestamps and such.
Once you look into the coin itself, its linked to a bunch of super shady sites
and if you want to "cash out" theres only one super shady site that requires
you to enter your cc number cvv and expiration date. Wonder why they need that
:)

~~~
zaguios
This is complete nonsense. There are no blog posts about SwiftDemand nor is
there any place where you have to enter in sensitive data. If you want to make
claims like this please cite sources instead of being an "online detective".

Edit: I just did some digging myself, it appears that there is another
currency called Swiftcoin out there that is based on the blockchain that I was
not aware of. Please be aware that this Swiftcoin is in no way related to
Swift Demand. I may need to change the name of Swift Demand's currency to
avoid people accidentally assuming these are related.

Second Edit: I have updated the website and removed all references to the term
Swiftcoin. The website will continue to be SwiftDemand, but the currency will
simply be called coins.

~~~
Arqu
Sorry for the accusation, but the two sure seemed very similar in terms of
naming. One thing I did notice is that your execution of the website was
leagues away from the rest of the guys but I just assumed they uped their
game. I'll play along with the project since if it is legit is, it is
interesting to me and would provide value.

Good luck with the project. Also if you need extra input feel free to ask.

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foopod
Happy to write anyone a poem at the rate of 100 Swiftcoin per Haiku. Simply
respond to this post with a subject for the poem and transfer the 100 to
#Poetry.

~~~
zaguios
This is awesome, I'll take you up on that offer. Can you write a poem/haiku
about Swift Demand itself? Coins have been sent.

~~~
foopod
Sweet deal. First customer buy one get one free bonus. Is it easy to see I am
not a poet?

    
    
      Swift demand oh boy!
      Writing poems for a money,
      It gives me such joy.
    
      It's ideas like these 
      that inspire hope for us yet.
      We won't stop growing.
    

Poems can also be requested via...
[http://swiftpoetry.club/](http://swiftpoetry.club/)

Hoping to open it up to other types of poems in the near future.

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cyborgx7
While I disagree with some of the details with your approach, I think this is
a great Idea. It really has gotten my mind racing with different solutions for
the problems such a system presents. I signed up and will definitely keep an
eye on it.

Is there an rss-feed I can add to my rss reader to keep me updatet on new
developments?

~~~
zaguios
I would love to discuss your disagreements, I've thought a great deal about my
implementation, but there may very well be several ways I could improve my
approach. Feel free to shoot me an email at zaguios@gmail.com if you would
like to talk more.

I don't have anything set up yet to update people on new developments, but it
is something that I'm looking at implementing soon as I continue development.
I'll let you know once I set something up.

------
foopod
Free stuff! Great!

But I imagine one barrier to this gaining traction is trust. Cryptocurrencies
are open source and peer to peer, everyone can see everything that goes on. Do
you have any plans on open sourcing the current implementation or perhaps
moving to a blockchainlike implementation after the initial experiment?

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sharemywin
The big problem I see is the 3%. why wouldn't I just use paypal if I wanted to
lose 3% per transaction.

~~~
zaguios
The 3% is there due to the fact that Swift Demand is trying to be more than
just another currency. It's also supposed to be able to act as a way to
perform normal day to day commerce. This 3% fee is needed to provide buyer and
seller protections as well as support the development of new features for
Swift Demand. I'm assuming you are asking why you want to use this over Paypal
from a vendors point of view and there are several reasons.

The first one being that Paypal isn't known to very trustable and often
freezes funds. The second is that I intend to eventually make a very developer
friendly API that lets vendors add Swift Demand to their websites very easily.
Early merchant adopters will also have the potential to set it up by allowing
people to essentially sign up for their service for free by letting people set
up a Swift Demand account and automatically transferring Swift Coins to the
vendor for a subscription based service (This means merchants can sell their
products without ever requiring a user to break out a credit card which could
be a potential large source of extra revenue).

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hackathonguy
Signed up. Would be hard pressed to actually supply any products/services in
return for Swift coins though. Cool experiment!

~~~
zaguios
Yea, it will be very difficult at the beginning to convince people to actually
accept Swiftcoin for services. In order for this to occur there will need to
be speculation that coins will be worth a certain amount in the future.

I.E. if a person is willing to make the bet that Swift Coins will become
valuable in the future they might try to buy a large amount now for a
discounted price so in the future they can turn a profit. Once this begins to
occur it will likely become a self-fulfilling prophecy since more users will
want to sign up since the coins will have value due to people buying them as
an investment. Once the price stabilizes at a reasonable number it can then
proceed to be used as a normal currency.

------
TheHeadMaster
send me monies #Shravan

