Basic income (was) Re: noscript is 10 years!

Tue May 26 03:41:23 PDT 2015

Well, we're imagining systems set up deliberately to be beneficient. If 
someone wants to create an awful orwellian thing instead, they can do 
so; with enough guns they'll get everyone to register to anything.

So, leaving aside the non-technical question of "what if the creators 
are assholes with guns", let's get back to the core question; how to 
implement a fairly OK "Basic Income On Blockchain".

Firstly, basic income is the sort of system that you can likely only do 
with an external registrar for person:key correspondance, because we've 
never cracked the sock-puppet/sybil problem and might never do.

This registrar need not actually be able to *track* these people once 
registered, though; that's the whole idea behind blind signatures for 
voting, for example. The registrar could be asked by a person to sign 
their basic income allowance to any (evenly divisive of the income) 
number of sub-addresses, which would be blinded from the registrar, and 
the funds could then be redeemed zerocoin-style as income by the 
registrant. The registrar "knows" that someone's just claimed their 
income, but not to what addresses, and can therefore prevent 
double-claims. The registrant gets their income to one or many bitcoin 
addresses and can then generate new receiving addresses as usual for the 
change.

Of course, this might all be meaningless if you just used zerocoin 
instead, because with zerocoin you could just collect your coins openly 
in your own name, launder them trivially, and move on.

On 26/05/15 07:10, Nadine Earnshaw wrote:
> the one thing I always come back to when thinking about the blockchain
> and how it could be used against the masses is
>
> if a savy government simply makes it a legal requirement to register
> whichever addresses you use for business purposes or
>
> personal tax reasons
>
>   this means that you  now find yourself only a Blockchain script away
> from an annual audit and if you do transactions with non registered
> addresses then what?
>
> follow that rabbit down the hole and you find yourself very much in the
> Orwellian land of 1984
>
> if your starting point in life meant all the money you have ever had was
> tracked how would you even get around that?
>
> blackmarket gold? but how do you buy it in the first place. start buying
> jewellery I guess that just gets lost
>
>
>
>
>
>     ----- Original Message -----
>     From:
>     "Cathal (Phone)" <cathalgarvey at cathalgarvey.me>
>
>     To:
>     "Troy Benjegerdes" <hozer at hozed.org>, "grarpamp" <grarpamp at gmail.com>
>     Cc:
>     <cypherpunks at cpunks.org>
>     Sent:
>     Mon, 25 May 2015 18:11:03 +0100
>     Subject:
>     Re: Basic income (was) Re: noscript is 10 years!
>
>
>     Blind signature scheme to guarantee person:income-key correspondence
>     without breaking the privacy of who each represents? However, you'd
>     need to give each person as many signed private keys as transactions
>     they're likely to use each income-cycle to avoid
>     spending-correlation deanonymysation.
>
>     On 25 May 2015 17:46:22 GMT+01:00, Troy Benjegerdes
>     <hozer at hozed.org> wrote:
>
>         On Sun, May 17, 2015 at 03:55:23PM -0400, grarpamp wrote:
>
>             On Sun, May 17, 2015 at 1:37 PM, John Young
>             <jya at pipeline.com> wrote:
>
>                 NYT today has book review on gradual replacement of humans
>                 by robots, a beloved investment of those at the top, so
>                 John Deere
>
>
>             Shame no one properly broke the last 3-5 messages off into a
>             separate thread when it went off noscript
>
>             What will happen to the 7000000000 unpaid system redundancies?
>
>
>         We don't need the money, the money needs us, and I expect
>         something like
>         6,999,999,900 redundancies will suddenly find themselves with
>         various forms
>         of basic income guarantees once the money finally figures ou! t
>         it's automating
>         itself out of job, and realizes it needs to start giving the HCF
>         (human
>         confinement farms) money or humans are going to stop spending
>         it, and this,
>         my friends, would be the end of money.
>
>         What's important for this cypherpunk is to figure out how to
>         make sure we have
>         alternatives and free choice to leave the HCFs and choose among
>         many basic
>         income systems, or make the choice to not use money at all.
>
>         Are blockchains a reasonable thing to build a basic income
>         system on? How do
>         you ensure a blockchain private key is held or controlled by
>         only one person,
>         so that one cannot simply create many anonymous IDs and collect
>         several hundred
>         basic income guarantees?
>
>         It seems there must be a human factor, and something that looks
>         a lot like a
>         government, but I can't quite wrap my head around how to make
>         sure each of
>         those 7e9 redunancies can only create 7e9 basic income
>         generating accounts, anddo a moderately good job of identifying
>         and stopping those that try to collect,
>         via force, coercion, or deceit, more than their share of basic
>         income.
>
>
>     --
>     Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
>

-- 
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