I try not to become extremely jaded when I read stuff like this, but it's not easy. The fundamental problem I see again and again and again with various crypto schemes is the idea that you can just whitewash away politics and human nature with a techo-utopian solution. And I get especially wary if the intro documentations don't highlight these political/human nature problems as the primary issue that needs to be solved, as opposed to delving into the tech immediately.
Just take the headline, "Philanthropy is missing out on $2860 billion/year." which is so utterly ridiculous it's laughable. Yes, if we channeled all the new money printed by governments and just gave it away equally, look how great a boon to philanthropy this would be. I don't think comments like "Are you fucking serious?" are particularly helpful, but honestly not sure how else to respond.
Reliably verifying the identity of every human on the planet is not something I have any confidence this org will solve. I'm not even sure if its possible to solve for $1/day/identity.
This will get sybil attacked, millions of fake/stolen identities will be used to siphon the value of the system into harder currencies, and it will crumple due to lack of trust.
What is the source of truth for valid eyeball scans? Whoever uploads the eyeball scan data first?
What would prevent someone with a large database of eyeball scan data from embezzling $1/day for each eyeball-identity they control?
If somebody reported that their eyeball-scan-identity was leaked on pastebin and now hundreds of people are trying to use it to claim their money every day, what next? That person can't update their biometric data once compromised.
> We’re launching a new coin, intended to be used for payments just like the dollar or the euro. As adoption grows, we can slowly create additional money and give this away for free, to people directly.
It sounds like the plan is, get people to adopt your money so that its value isn’t zero, then print some more to give away, to everybody on the planet, hoping this doesn’t drive the value to zero.
Global Income Coin is a non-profit. We run entirely on philantropic donations. We won't use created tokens to fund ourselves; no hands in the cookie jar. There’s also no pre-mine, founder/investor allocation, or any other for-profit scheme. We won't sell data.
So if the entire scheme is to hand out donated money why does it require a cryptocurrency?
That sounds pretty much like what give directly already does. But unless there is some kind of trick played with the currency, you haven't created any revenue stream which enables you to do this indefinitely.
Like it feels like you are making some revolutionary promise, but haven't made any revolutionary innovation that actually enables it. It seems like there's just hand waving around "cryptocurrency" and somehow that enables indefinitely handing out money.
Hard to put a finger on but just doesn't add up to me.
On paper it's a great goal. I wish you luck with it.
It sounds obviously pointless when you put it that way, but somehow crypto airdrops keep having non-zero value. In the context of SBF's recent interview https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm... I guess this project is aiming to ponzify the planet.
That's indeed exactly the plan. It's how fiat currencies work, too. Of course, these are already established (and have the added benefit of being the only way to pay taxes). Admittedly it will be very challenging for a new currency to reach a similar status - it's perhaps our hardest problem to solve.
This will very likely be a problem we'll run into if we gain massive adoption, and it will be difficult. But if we prove to be a useful monetary system that benefits the population, then perceptions might change. We are already starting to see countries and cities consider accepting crypto as legal tender and be used to pay taxes.
Just stop. Stop printing shitcoins, they are worthless and cannot be the basis of a UBI system. Why would anyone buy them? They will -> 0 like everything else. It’s all scams.
Have a think about how you can create value, trade that value for sats (a neutral store of value) and distribute sats if you want a UBI system. The tech exists today, but one would need to actually create value rather than minting it out of nothing.
IIRC, it was already tried years ago with Auroracoin. This was given to everyone in Iceland, supposedly initially (nominally) worth $20/coin. Icelanders merely had to opt-in and get their coin. Few did, and most seemed to sell immediately. Last I saw some years ago, there were multiple zeros to the right of the decimal point before the first significant digit of its value in any hard currency.
Not that one try means all others will fail, but any new proposal must at least attempt to discover and overcome the factors of failures like that one. I don't see any such effort in this proposal.
Too bad, because overall, the idea of distributing new currency from the bottom up is vastly superior to any other distribution proposal. Giving directly to the population will create the largest multiplier effect as the velocity of that money will be highest — almost all of it will be spent, and re-spent in a matter of days, whereas going into the banking system it will both be delayed in effect and also have much fewer transactions/currency_unit.
Oh I was there for AUR launch back in the day. I think I even bought some! Not a good purchase in retrospect.
There was another one around then too Mazacoin, distributing to First Nation folks.
The idea was good, but shitcoins cannot hold their value.
All these new folks refuse to learn the lessons of the past.
I like the idea of bottom up distribution! Thing is, you need to distribute something that people want, can use, and will hold its value on the long tail.
Blockchain is important for trustlessness between borders, that is all. LN tx don’t need blockchain txs for every spend — it’s state exchanges that can be committed to the chain on settlement.
> Why would anyone buy them? They will -> 0 like everything else.
Agreed that generating token demand is one the main challenges. It's going to be very hard. After reaching a certain level of adoption, token value should become partly self-sustaining, and then newly minted tokens have value - this is how fiat currencies work (which have the benefit of being the only way to pay taxes, which we don't).
But how to get to that critical mass? We have several solution directions, and will probably need a combination of them to work. We'll elaborate this further in the draft whitepaper soon. One of the solution directions that could be key especially in the early stages is a social movement of people that buy (and start using) the token because they agree with the mission of the project and want it to succeed. Adopting GLO is one of the most direct ways for individuals to contribute to a pro-UBI cause. This will only ever be a fraction of the total demand, of course, but can be a solid base to help solve the cold start problem.
But if you had a way to easily create value, why would you give it away? If philanthropy is the answer, why all the fuss about crypto anyways? You can just give away actual useful money instead.
Sats are the easiest, cheapest thing to send to people globally. Lightning network is the only cryptocurrency construction that would permit such global payments.
Launching an erc20 on eth is super dumb. You will destroy most of the value just sending it to folks, and they will need to then buy expensive eth to spend it. Makes no sense.
> Sats are the easiest, cheapest thing to send to people globally
Global Income Coin is an economic model carrying a monetary policy: the bottom-up distribution of newly created money. The economy currently mostly runs on inflationary currencies. This means a massive amount of new money is created each year. Taking that as a fact, we propose to distribute this directly and more fairly; Global Income Coin is the implementation of that idea. Sats can't carry that monetary policy since they're non-inflationary by design. So we can't use sats.
> Lightning network is the only cryptocurrency construction that would permit such global payments
We _could_ use Lightning, and we might indeed in the future if that's the tried and tested best solution. We're not married to any particular platform. We don't need global scale on day one.
We're starting on Polygon (so transaction costs won't destroy all of the value)
That would be direct cash transfers funded by charitable donations, which we think is another great way to alleviate poverty. (If Global Income Coin succeeds it could be the network to carry these transfers.)
What we're aiming to unlock is a donation-independent component in addition to that.
Damn when did hacker news readers end up not reading the article. It literally says at the end it will be a token on Polygon, 1 cent fees for doing token related activity
The white paper said “ERC20 on eth”. The article said polygon.
Regardless, I do like polygon for its cheap fees (today); it is practically better than eth in most ways. However, it is just an eth side chain, and the whole “don’t need to commit tx for all eternity for all every purchases” applies here.
I don’t believe it is possible to scale this anywhere where it needs to be. For this, we need Lightning network style constructions.
Global Income Coin is an economic model carrying a monetary policy (i.e. the bottom-up distribution of newly created money), not a technology. We do not inherently care on what platform we implement it, and will try to use existing technologies rather than developing our own. We do want to get started, so we're choosing technology that works today over technology that works tomorrow.
Lightning is promising. The first tether transaction on lightning was only a month ago, however [1]. So that's not yet a boring enough solution.
Ethereum and Polygon won't (today) scale worldwide, but if we're able to gain traction we'll (a) branch out to every other network if necessary (b) contribute to networks so they can start to get to global scale
'Bitcoin' cannot be used as a form of on-chain payments system and as peer-to-peer electronic cash system as defined in its whitepaper and it is beyond useless as a currency.
Henceforth, Since it has completely failed in El Salvador, why would it succeed anywhere else due to all of the above?
I do not fundamentally understand this. They seem to just jump straight to the outcome: "Everyone get's a dollar a day" without worry about the details.
It seems like the plan of this coin is to print 8 billion a day indefinitely. What's the incentive for anybody to hold it or for vendors to accept it given that it's stated goal is to print itself into oblivion?
Maybe this is like Sam Altman's thing where the real game is to create some kind of global surveilance database for every human buy handing them a dollar? Is this actually that same project?
It's going to be revolutionary when we can sell targeted ads to some tribal person in Kenya or Laos to convince them to spend the $ someone just handed them on some online casino mobile game.
> Maybe this is like Sam Altman's thing...Is this actually that same project?
No, that project is called Worldcoin. We share the goal of trying to create a UBI, but have a different approach. For starters, we're a non-profit and our token has no pre-mine. We believe that that is the correct model for a project like this (for various reasons, see draft whitepaper [1]).
Second, as far as we currently know Worldcoin doesn't aim for their token to be stable/slightly inflationary in value like GLO. We think a continuous, weekly income that won't go up in value per token is a better fit for a UBI that tries to alleviate poverty. Poorer people have a more urgent need to spend, so they can't hodl.
Third, Worldcoin is tech. We are an economic model carrying a monetary policy, which could be implemented on any (or multiple) networks / blockchains. We're looking to develop as little tech as possible ourselves.
More extensive comparison between Worldcoin and Global Income Coin in the whitepaper:
> Self-hosting wallets are impractical so while GLO can be self-hosted we should expect the vast majority of wallets to be hosted by exchanges.
this has always been the endgame btw. Replace the banks with worse-banks (exchanges) that don't even pretend to be fair to their customers and screw them over in every possible way.
The coin itself is nothing novel. Money printing to do UBI. Stablecoin with questionable reserves (a la Tether). Exchanges do the KYC (because the global poor all have a Binance account). It's actually much worse than Worldcoin in terms of privacy. It is also unclear what prevents the exchanges from simply inventing a lot of people.
You're probably aware HN titles have a char limit. I hope you read the website and find more positive things! Some examples:
- We're a non-profit, which we believe is the better organizational model to make a project like this work (for multiple reasons, see draft whitepaper [1])
- UBI requires two things: 1) money to send 2) a way to send it. We have a solution for both: 1) seigniorage 2) the network we're building by incentivizing exchanges to add humans to the network
There are difficult open problems, too. Generating token demand, dampening volatility, sufficiently fraud-resistant identity verification, scaling, etc. Those are active areas of work; the draft whitepaper [1] details the current solution directions we're working on.
> Verifying the identity of billions of people is too much work for a single organization. We'll delegate that to crypto exchanges instead. If they take care of KYC and offer a custodial GLO wallet for humans they've verified, we send the weekly GLO to these. The exchange is allowed to take a fee for this service, creating a new revenue stream.
So you're incentivizing exchanges to create fake accounts?
Your notion of verification seems rather backward.
Every user of GLO should be able to verify that no-one, not even the GLO creators or someone running a scammy exchange, is able to receive more than 1 GLO per day. Asking users to trust your organization or to trust arbitrary exchanges is completely misplaced.
TLDR: This is a worse version of WorldCoin 2.0. Nothing new and totally not a ponzi scheme. /s
Long version: This is a scam. Why? This crap has been tried before. [0][1]
> Later this year we’re launching GLO, an ethereum-based cryptocurrency.
Here we go again...
> Once we're live, every human can verify their identity by going through a KYC process. Verified humans get a weekly airdrop of GLO for free: that's the basic income.
WorldCoin 2.0 reheated, repackaged and rebranded.
> If people and businesses adopt GLO as a means of payment, the fact that they're using GLO as money sustains the value of the coin.
Given that Ethereum is totally expensive and sluggish for payments it doesn't stand a chance at being a new means of 'payment'. And No. Side-chains like Polygon are duck-taped contraptions that add more complexity to the user using it.
Regardless, It is still using Ethereum PoW.
> If GLO replaces all government created money...
> GLO users form an economy that generates money “out of thin air”—money that complements any existing, donation-driven poverty reduction initiatives. The higher our GDP, the more we generate.
OK. Stop right there and get the fuck out.
Quick question: Why does such blatant obvious nonsense get posted here? This is admitting that it's another ponzi WorldCoin clone. Perhaps it's due to the association with the GitLab CEO which really is somewhat strange. Do we need to repeat once again many times that Ethereum is enabling the scams and ponzi scheme running rampant on it?
Instead of propagating this garbage why not look at this interesting post (BGP on Blockchain) [2].
Just take the headline, "Philanthropy is missing out on $2860 billion/year." which is so utterly ridiculous it's laughable. Yes, if we channeled all the new money printed by governments and just gave it away equally, look how great a boon to philanthropy this would be. I don't think comments like "Are you fucking serious?" are particularly helpful, but honestly not sure how else to respond.