Quote from: miln40 on September 16, 2012, 04:39:10 PM

Hello BTC community!

I am a member of the German Pirate Party and am excited about their promotion of the idea of a Basic income guarantee.
You can read about it here, among other places: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee

The idea is that:
1) People are producing more than they need, and with the further development of technology even less people will be needed to produce even more. Since less people will be working to produce, society as a whole would earn less, and therefore the population will not be able to afford to purchase all the goods being produced, eventually leading to bigger and bigger problems.
2) To overcome that, everyone is given a certain sum by the state every month that should provide for the basic amenities of life. Luxury goods will be available to those who can earn more money in the usual way, thus continuing to encourage private initiative.
3) Since the basic amenities will be covered, people will be free to pursue activities not directly related to their survival - like coding for Bitcoin Wink

4) Financing for this whole venture would be obtained by taxes on products purchased and by abolition of unemployment subsidies (among other methods)

Now, this is definitely a big state solution and I suppose that the multi-headed libertarian hydra on this forum will not like it, but I am ready to defend it

Some more arguments already for your critique: the unemployment subsidies + underlying bureaucracy in Germany can be redistributed among the 80 million Germans at the rate of about 12.5k EUR per year. So 1000k EUR of basic income guarantee per month is realistic. This can be further expanded with several different approaches to taxation.

So yeah, I'm curious to see what the community thinks about it.
Thanks for reading,

M

The one show stopper for you, been mentioned already but again now for posterity:

Security. <===

If you can find a way to make a verifiable and uncorruptible per-person payment scheme, please let us know. Until then this will sadly be a joke and thieves as well as your "state regulators" will find a way to get themselves the income of 1000 people by declaring themselves as 1000 individuals. Take a look at how hopelessly corrupt state voting systems are, and put some extra money on the line for individuals in addition to the usual theatrics and you will get some idea what would happen if you tried to implement such a system without getting some kind of basic security in order first.

Some kind of biometrics will be necessary, but it's not obvious to me how exactly this can work. Sure I can add a hash of an iris scan to a database but what guarantees this is a hash of an iris scan and not a number I made up to collect some extra cash? "Honest regulators" is a reasonable answer if you happen to live in fairyland.

Your idea is fantastic, but to implement it you need some way to securely identify unique humans, a nontrivial problem.
Until we have this down, we will be wasting our time.

good luck!!!!!