Some cryptocurrency projects that have run UBI experiments are Democracy Earth, Circles, and Encointer; a couple of proof-of-humanity projects that I know are Idena and BrightID. The main problem with UBI in non-government-backed currency is, unsurprisingly, lack of adoption as a unit of account and thus low acceptance in payment.
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Wow I missed this post, just reading it now. This is the first time I have seen you discuss this, really good to hear your insight on this Zooko as I have been wondering what your thoughts were. I was watching ZCON today and saw you guys briefly bring this up but it was not discussed in depth…
Vitalik would disagree with you and believes its a flaw. See my latest post:
What are your thoughts on this?
Personally I agree with you we should prioritize keeping transaction fees low and network scalability-- but at the same time I think we should also prepare for the future. What will happen when the last ZEC is mined? What incentives will validators or miners have to secure the network? How can we ensure that Zcash is here for the next thousand years.
If I am going to use Zcash to store and protect my hard earned wealth I want to be able to pass my ZEC on to my family and loved ones and die knowing it will be secure for generations to come.
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This is very interesting to think about. I did not realize but when you do the math One Bitcoin (BTC) is equivalent to 100 million Satoshis. Therefore, given the maximum supply cap of 21 million Bitcoins, the total number of Satoshis that will ever exist is 2.1 quadrillion, or precisely 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis. Mind blowing to think about that number. Maybe Vitalik is wrong and the supply cap is not a flaw. Im really not sure either way yet…I am glad to see this being discussed here at the very least.
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The risk of a hypothetical multi-national deflationary money (hard-capped cryptocurrencies are the same as deflationary monies in my opinion), like Bitcoin, would be that its relative scarcity may price out its users over time. Making them in affect forced Hodlers who rapidly decrease the exchange of money between goods and services creators and consumers because they deeply conceive that their BTC will be worth radically more in the next year or two. This outcome is what prevents something like BTC from actually being taken seriously as a national or multinational fiat-like money.
I don’t believe that Bitcoin, or Zcash, or any other cryptocurrency will ever rise to prominent use as money (I have never been convinced that becoming fiat is why cryptocurrency is loved. Afterall we are in this for the technology - fiat is explicitly non-technological).
The use of cryptocurrency is primarily as an investment vehicle, and secondarily for novel (rather than everyday and frequent) commercial uses like buying goods & services, exercises DeFi protocols, or conducting multinational fiat-crypto-fiat remittances.
In short, I’m with Vitalik… No, Deflationary money couldn’t work long term.
(And I follow that point by suggesting that Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, or any other are not intended to be money)
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In my view, we should save ourselves the brain damage and time trying to figure out inflationary or deflationary aspects of money as it relates to Zcash. We need privacy ZSAs and stablecoins. Zcash value can then be connected with being used as gas, which will support it as a store of value based on its utility for the ecosystem. And the development teams can focus on how to make digital money more private, and add features to money, not try to replace it. Make it more friendly and less costly to use to people. For example, we pay 3% to Visa to move money around. If we can do it for 2% and add a lot more features to the digital money that is a win. Use the 2% fee to support development and pay ZEC holders for the utility of using ZEC in the ecosystem. Let market forces determine the ultimate transaction fee. But a transaction fee is needed and required to long term sustainability.
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