Your proposal is equivalent to a basic income funded by printing money. Where would this money derive its intrinsic value from?
Old commodity currencies were backed by gold or silver. Modern fiat currencies derive their intrinsic value from a tax system. (For example, a the US government demands taxes in dollars.)
Currency derives its “intrinsic value” from being able to buy things you want (and its currency-like properties from lots of people feeling the same way). If I dropped you off on a deserted island with a ton of gold, it would be practically useless to you because there would be nobody to exchange it with.
So I guess your question becomes “How would you convince people to buy and sell goods for UBI-coin?”
A currency’s exchange value is pegged by a gold reserve, a silver reserve, the tax system or something similar. Convincing people to buy goods with UBI-coin is trivial because the default value of an invented currency is zero. My question thus becomes how does MikkW incentivize people to sell goods and services in exchange for UBI-coin?
Pegging to a commodity is not different from convincing people to sell things in exchange for the currency, though. If I start a new currency pegged to gold, what I’m doing is saying “I promise to sell you gold for this currency.” This promise is never of infinite strength, and so it can be evaluated with the same logic as the promise my supermarket makes to sell me milk in exchange for dollars.
If the promises of the supermarket are strong, there is no need for you to promise that you’ll sell me gold for dollars.
So, how could I get my supermarket to accept UBI-coin, in addition to dollars? Well, what if I promised to pay them some dollars to do this as a promotional thing, and also promised that I would be going to other local businesses and giving them the same deal, so that the decision-makers of the supermarket would be able to spend their UBI-coin on local goods and services? If people took this deal, this would allow for UBI-coin to function as a currency without a need for me to make a “central” promise that I would sell gold for UBI-coin.
One idea, inspired by Scott Alexander’s fictional, “sorta perfect” society Raikoth: In Raikoth, the wealthiest denizens often flaunt their wealth using symbolic beads (which all denizens use to signal different attributes), some of which have a distinctive design that indicates that the wearer has (voluntarily) donated at least a certain amount to the central government that year. Inspired by this, there could be IRL symbolic beads that indicate how much wealth a person has kept in the currency in the past year (adjusted of course for how long they’ve had the currency, so they can’t just buy a lot, hold on to it for a day, then sell it again), using distinctive, tasteful trademarks to prevent counterfeiting
Your proposal is equivalent to a basic income funded by printing money. Where would this money derive its intrinsic value from?
Old commodity currencies were backed by gold or silver. Modern fiat currencies derive their intrinsic value from a tax system. (For example, a the US government demands taxes in dollars.)
Currency derives its “intrinsic value” from being able to buy things you want (and its currency-like properties from lots of people feeling the same way). If I dropped you off on a deserted island with a ton of gold, it would be practically useless to you because there would be nobody to exchange it with.
So I guess your question becomes “How would you convince people to buy and sell goods for UBI-coin?”
A currency’s exchange value is pegged by a gold reserve, a silver reserve, the tax system or something similar. Convincing people to buy goods with UBI-coin is trivial because the default value of an invented currency is zero. My question thus becomes how does MikkW incentivize people to sell goods and services in exchange for UBI-coin?
Pegging to a commodity is not different from convincing people to sell things in exchange for the currency, though. If I start a new currency pegged to gold, what I’m doing is saying “I promise to sell you gold for this currency.” This promise is never of infinite strength, and so it can be evaluated with the same logic as the promise my supermarket makes to sell me milk in exchange for dollars.
If the promises of the supermarket are strong, there is no need for you to promise that you’ll sell me gold for dollars.
So, how could I get my supermarket to accept UBI-coin, in addition to dollars? Well, what if I promised to pay them some dollars to do this as a promotional thing, and also promised that I would be going to other local businesses and giving them the same deal, so that the decision-makers of the supermarket would be able to spend their UBI-coin on local goods and services? If people took this deal, this would allow for UBI-coin to function as a currency without a need for me to make a “central” promise that I would sell gold for UBI-coin.
One idea, inspired by Scott Alexander’s fictional, “sorta perfect” society Raikoth: In Raikoth, the wealthiest denizens often flaunt their wealth using symbolic beads (which all denizens use to signal different attributes), some of which have a distinctive design that indicates that the wearer has (voluntarily) donated at least a certain amount to the central government that year. Inspired by this, there could be IRL symbolic beads that indicate how much wealth a person has kept in the currency in the past year (adjusted of course for how long they’ve had the currency, so they can’t just buy a lot, hold on to it for a day, then sell it again), using distinctive, tasteful trademarks to prevent counterfeiting