Recent economic events – such as Britain’s protracted EU Brexit, China’s declining exports, and America’s record-breaking trade deficit – have already begun to fuel fears of a recession in early 2019.
However, those who do not get carried away by the illusion believe that the urgency of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is growing day by day – and technological advances make it possible to turn such a cross-world concept into reality.
Universal Basic Income
The UBI is a revolutionary economic concept that provides each individual with a minimum wage to meet their basic needs. In the face of a global financial crisis, projects that explore distributional mechanisms to support the poorest in society are gaining more and more interest and support.
Such a project is currently being developed by GoodDollar, a blockchain research center. It explores how decentralized cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology can enable UBI-based models to reduce global prosperity inequality.
VideoBourse spoke up
In mid-January, the French crypto website VideoBourse talked in detail to Yoni Assia, co-founder and CEO of eToro, who launched GoodDollar at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon in November 2018.
In an interview with VideoBouse, Assia said that GoodDollar should improve the generation and distribution of money:
“One of the biggest problems in the world is relatively simple: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This leads to a growing disproportion in society and ultimately to very bad things. The way this system works – how the money is distributed and generated creates that inequality. ”
He continues: “Suppose, for example, that the interest rate plus inflation is 10 percent per annum. We know that 10 percent of the world’s population owns 90 percent of its assets. For example, 9 percent of the 10 percent interest rates would be in the richest 10 percent, while the remaining 1 percent would go to the other 90 percent of the population. This is mainly because of how interest rates and inflation work, and that fiat money has never been dealt with via a blockchain. If one could create mechanisms within the cryptocurrency that presumably lead to a better distribution of assets, this could significantly improve inequality. As a result, more and more people could participate in the economy. ”
GoodDollar’s work
At the end of November, GoodDollar helped with several other partners to build an OpenUBI ecosystem. The OpenUBI was created to foster collaboration and discussion around UBI and its technological implementation. There will be an OpenUBI meeting in Berlin at the end of January.
After a positive start, this year will be an exciting year for the GoodDollar project. Assia, who will speak later in January at the Paris Fintech Forum 2019, said that the first large-scale GoodDollar experiment will start in the next six to nine months.
Also published on Medium.