Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: Creating a guaranteed minimum income through crypto-coins
by
TCraver
on 25/02/2014, 18:28:28 UTC
What are you guys waiting for?

The point of this discussion is not to evaluate whether a "minimum income" altcoin is desirable, but rather how it could best be made functional.  If you don't agree that it is desirable, I would ask that you consider creating a separate discussion thread to debate that.

There is a technical issue with implementing a minimum income scheme using TheCoin, which has a potential solution at the "strategic" level, but which needs to be examined at a more tactical level.  Namely, how to prevent rampant use of multiple false identities for extra distributions. 

The strategic level solution to that, which a few have agreed sounds right, is to require a pledge to do (very light) work validating identity of other claimants, as a condition of accepting a coin distribution   (If you can think of a better approach, that would also be welcome.  Do keep in mind that this is intended to work world-wide, without government intervention.) 

The tactical element, of course, is "How would validation be done?"  with particular focus on keeping down the complexity.  And that's not a trivial problem.  As soon as one proposes some obvious method of validating identity of claimants, one also exposes fairly obvious ways to cheat that method.   

For example:  suppose the validation method was to have a randomly assigned person who lives near a claimant, go visit the latter, check that that person lives under the claimed name at the claimed address, take a photo of the person.  But if the latter is a crook, what if he offers the 'inspector' half of his weekly take under the false name?   Now there are some obvious counter moves to that - say always having two random persons check on a claim, and penalizing someone who falsely makes multiple coins or deliberately validates a false identity.  But THAT adds the complex question of how to determine whether someone merely made a mistake, or intentionally validated a false identity.  And what if the validation agent who says the identity is false, happened to know and hate the person they were asked to validate?  Take the thing to a conventional court?  What if this is in a country with a poor legal system?  Do we then add some sort of "coin court" with judges and juries and that whole mess?   Sent three random validation agents and if 1 of them says the claim is false, send another three?

I hope that illustrates the sort of problems that still need to be solved.   You are welcome to make creative suggestions for validating claimants.  Or maybe a way to avoid that requirement altogether.

Note that even once workable methods are conceived, there would still be a technical implementation effort required.

I hope that answers your question.