
Basic Income and Blockchain Courts - kgwgk
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-05-05/basic-income-and-blockchain-courts
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etjossem
I don't know what cohesive point this article is trying to make. The writing
is all over the place, jumping from one pop-finance idea to the next without
exploring any of them in the depth they deserve. I've seen plenty of great
pieces on both blockchain and basic income, but this isn't one of them.

The direction of the article deteriorates over time. The last section is an
incoherent, unfocused mass of linkspam to Buzzfeed-quality stories. While I'm
sure there are some great SEO reasons for Bloomberg View to do it this way, I
think we're worse off as readers for it.

No upvote. Levine's work is arguably off-topic, and certainly not the quality
I expect on HN.

~~~
timmaxw
It's not trying to make a cohesive point; it's a collection of short,
unrelated posts bundled together. Many of Matt Levine's posts [0] are in this
style, including his most recent post [1].

[0]
[http://www.bloomberg.com/view/contributors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matth...](http://www.bloomberg.com/view/contributors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-
s-levine) [1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-06/hedge-
fund...](http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-06/hedge-funds-and-
trump-treasuries)

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MichaelBurge
Instead of a basic income, we could have Universal Jobs where anyone could
make $X an hour in a government jobs center computing hashes by hand for a
welfare cryptocurrency.

Roll the dice, use your government-approved paper to calculate the hash, and
claim your prize if you're the first winner. Prizes and difficulty are
designed to statistically provide a target $/hour.

~~~
hellbanner
Why do that when a computer could?

~~~
MichaelBurge
Because then rich capital-holders could buy up all the computing power and
take control of all the welfare money. Chinese millionaires would end up
taking money from needy Americans.

Using this system, we ensure that no single capital-holder controls too much
mining power over the currency. Every working man is judged on his merits,
using a system that is hard for any one actor to parallelize or scale. So many
many distinct actors work to secure the underlying currency, and it is safer
against large banks or governments.

~~~
hellbanner
Except that if I tell you I have "a million people" in my secret facility
manually hashing and in reality there's a single GPU crunching, I'd still make
more. How would you audit this?

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spectrum1234
Basic income is okay but it's missing non monetary rewards and education.
Basic income needs to be tied to a system where users learn more about their
natural behaviors and become incentivized to self improve in the ABSENCE of
the government.

This can be done with libertarian paternalism/nudge theory concepts.

~~~
jcoffland
Why not pay a basic income to students for passing tests?

~~~
xiaoma
It would result in funneling government resources through gullible or cynical
citizens into the test prep industry. Only a depressingly small portion would
go towards actual education.

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TylerE
Is blockchain doing anything other than keeping hacky fintech "journalists"
employed?

