[Cryptography] Review of UBIC

Phillip Hallam-Baker phill at hallambaker.com
Fri Apr 27 09:47:52 EDT 2018


On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 12:03 PM, Ubicorn via cryptography <
cryptography at metzdowd.com> wrote:

> I posted some weeks ago regarding my Universal Basic Income Cryptocurrency
> project and I just finished a Whitepaper draft that can be seen here:
> https://github.com/UBIC-repo/Whitepaper
> If someone has a suggestions he or she is free to open a pull request or
> send me an email.


​UBI is something that anyone serious about tech needs to be thinking about
because our current capitalist economy is based on the assumption that
labor is a scarce resource and is structured to allocate it efficiently (by
some measure).

As Karl Marx pointed out, the system will fall when automation reaches the
point that labor is no longer a constraint. The reason that we have avoided
that situation and its consequences is that we have dramatically increased
consumption. On the positive side, we increased production of food (two of
Marx's children died of malnutrition and they were middle class) and of
health care. On the negative side, vast sums were and are spent on building
military machines whose size and power makes a state of near-constant war
necessary to justify them.

As with Malthus, the reason Marx was wrong is that he underestimated our
ability to adapt to circumstances. But that does not mean that the
fundamental issue can be ignored. We have to continue to adapt.

​The argument about finite resources entirely misses the point. Labor is no
longer a finite resource. We can build any amount of machinery. We have
already deskilled and automated primary and secondary industry and Web
services are about to do the same to tertiary.​

​Fifty years from now, some means of recycling the wealth will become
essential as work of any type becomes scarce and meaningful work becomes a
luxury. Most people who are serious about the effects of technology on the
economy get that fact. What has not been examined is how to get from where
we are now to where we need to be.

One of the major maladaptions of our current society is the Protestant work
ethic.​ This is particularly bad in the US where Puritans fleeing religious
persecution in Europe came to set up a new society based on slave labour
and to seek the opportunity to visit intolerance on others. It is always
the folk who live of the sweat of others that are keenest on the moral
virtues of manual labor. The UK is currently in the grip of a similar
faction led by the moral imbecile Theresa May whose explicit goal is to
make life as unpleasant as possible for those less fortunate than herself.

We don't have the economic resources to implement UBI at present and the
transition from the labor based economy to the automated economy is going
to be difficult and likely unpleasant. But what we can surely do is to
repudiate policies based on the notion that forcing sick people and mothers
of infants to work for their living is helping them.

We cannot afford UBI today but we can afford universal healthcare and we
can afford to eliminate workfare programs for the disabled and sick and to
dismantle all the infrastructure of that type of politics.

​There are certainly challenges to be faced here but they are exclusively
social and political. This is not a problem that can be solved by
technology, it is technology that has created it! More specifically, the
idea that merely changing the way that value is exchanged addresses the
fundamental issues is flawed and plain wrong.​
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