Category: Research
How to Distribute a World Basic Income By Collateralizing P2P Credit
We already have the tools to build a distribution system for an emergency world basic income. In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, a world basic income is more necessary than ever.
Printing money cures the “COVID-19” crash
What the soft-currency theory of the business cycle tells us about the current crisis and how to escape it.
Introduction to Consumer Monetary Theory
Consumer Monetary Theory (CMT) is a framework for understanding the role of money in giving consumers access to the economy’s output.
Universal Basic Income Fixes the Housing Market
In cities like New York, San Francisco, and Boston, housing prices and rents are high and rising.
Decentralized unique identity via graph-based Sybil-detection on a peer-to-peer credit network
It should be possible to analyze the connectivity of members in a p2p credit network, and from this to determine which members are real and which are Sybils (fake or duplicate accounts).
The Unofficial Freedom Dividend FAQ
I tend to see the same questions come up again and again regarding Andrew Yang’s $1,000 per month Freedom Dividend universal basic income…
Bottom-Up Money: Fair, stable, resilient — envisioning a free market in supplier-issued basic income currencies.
We propose a decentralized system of monetary governance formed from an ecosystem of freely-formed coexisting UBI (universal basic income) currencies, each backed and governed by its own network of suppliers. The scheme creates an incentive for suppliers to issue the quantity of currency that maximizes profits while keeping their currency value stable. Since new money would be created solely through UBI, all seigniorage goes to the UBI recipients, thus removing perverse incentives for the issuing body and optimizing the money supply according to Pareto efficiency. Distribution of new money via a global UBI additionally ensures a minimum level of liquidity in currency exchange markets. Furthermore, optional features such as a demurrage rate may be set in the currencies, tailored by each issuing body as a stabilizing mechanism or determined by global consensus as a tool for taxation.
Proposal for a Decentralized Unique Identity Seeding Protocol
This proposal is based on the assumption that it is easy to fake a person, but hard to fake a city. It describes a tiered Web of Trust based on clusters formed from offline “pseudonym parties.” It produces a temporary proof of personhood (i.e. unique identity) for participants who physically attend these parties. Successful participants are known as “seeds.” This system is designed to make it as easy as possible for anyone to become a seed. Seeds are not necessarily honest, but they are unique, and thus can provide a valuable data anchor for a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) system that uses a social graph analysis to detect Sybils (duplicate identity attackers).
The Relative Theory of Money in Detail
The aim of this text is to present Stéphane Laborde’s relative theory of money (RTM or TRM in French) in an accessible way, without compromising on completeness and rigour. The mathematical part is written as to be accessible to secondary school students. The text starts with a general introduction to the notion of value and presents some basic economic arguments in order to prepare the reader to the concepts developed in the RTM. The theory is then presented in section 3, which makes up the core of the text.