About Project of UBI, there are lots of discussions from Chinese EOS Alliance group. The following are some brilliant comments from Guangshu who opposes to UBI.
Except a few sporadic experiments, the project UBI has never been proved right. The aim of UBI is too ambitious to satisfy the appetite of the Left-leaning, even though the history has fully proved unsuccessful for many times. The same is true for the UBI, it will be meaningless if the scale is too small and it is too risky if it’s a large-scale.
UBI is an extremely Left-leaning ideal, which is identical to the view of wealth behind Keynesian economic policies, the only difference is the way and the target of giving money. Keynesianism believes that the State can avoid economic cycles by the adjustment of monetary and fiscal policies, and this logic is questionable. Eventually it turns out that it is only benefit for the wealthy to protect their wealth those who can anticipate the consequences of policies and implement them. Then UBI wants to give money to the poor directly. Such attempts is contrary to the free market economy which I believe will ultimately hurt the whole system. Perhaps low-cost, small-scale implementation with good institutional design, can minimize this harm, but because of the reasons described in 1, I don't think UBI can be tried on EOS now.
if UBI is the EOS system level policy, there will be a real technical problem: how to carry out KYC. If the KYC on the chain doesn’t achieve such level, Before the blockchain becomes a necessity for people's life, KYC on the mature chain is almost impossible.
Can we make KYC under the chain? Neither, there will be many questions, here I don’t expatiate on it.
There is another question: does EOS need real-name voters? "Don't look at my vote" is the fundamental freedom that voters struggle to obtain and is the core foundation for representative societies not to degenerate into another kind of autocracy. How should UBI do this?
It is true that giving money to the poor (or anyone) may not necessarily be beneficial to anyone in the long term. If a unit of account (money) does not represent useful work performed in a system then it's likely to have little value over time. It is my experience that an economic system accounts for "money without work" with raised prices. However I believe we need to get all relevant information on the proposal before dismissing it. Whilst we should learn the lessons of the past, it's come to a time in history to use specific (and in context) explanations rather than use terms such as "left" that have different connotations with different people. Thanks for the post. Your points are very valid.
I think it would be good to make a distinction between UBI as an app on EOS and a UBI as a core feature of EOS.
Nobody should oppose a smartcontract which distributes its own tokens as a UBI for its users. That would be great because it would bring a lot of new users to the EOS ecosystem. Nobody would be forced to participate in it.
But UBI as a core feature of EOS is very different. It would create new EOS tokens (inflation) and distribute them to all individuals. I'm opposed to it, too, at this point. It would bring new users, so in that way it would be beneficial to EOS, but using so much resources to just one app would be very dangerous.