Risks/Rewards under a Basic Income System Discussion

This discussion started with the following:

  1. If funders can “invest” into participants, projects, and the network itself, there are presumably returns on that investment (otherwise it wouldn’t be an investment)

  2. If there are returns associated with the work of participants, projects, and the network, and if we want a fair system, then everyone who invests in those buckets should be entitled to the returns – with the distribution based on the theoretical value of those contributions.

  3. Contributions can include time (fair market-value – GHRR formula), cash (4x multiplier – harder to save than it is to earn), ideas (negotiated royalties on future revenues), connections/relationships (2x multiplier on unpaid commissions), resources + physical goods (reimbursed)

(because there is no way to accurately estimate the true value of those contributions in a speculative venture)

Slides from Slicing Pie about theoretical value and how it’s calculated in that model:











  1. What returns are funders and participants entitled to?

  2. In the slicing pie model, if a contributor is being paid their fair market value, then they are given no stake in the rewards – because they are already being paid their fair market value. (The stake in future rewards is used to compensate the risk that contributors take when they accept less than their fair market value.)

  3. In an abundant system, if everybody is paid to cover all of their basic needs, what is fair market value based on?

  • It can definitely be based on time.

  • For example, the fair market value of a task could be based on time – you can choose to spend 3 hr/day babysitting kids, or 1 hr/day scrubbing toilets. Likewise, the fair market value of a participant can also be based on time.

  • Likewise, the fair market value of a “participant” can be based on time. The time of a trained expert (Nobel-prize winning physicist) is more valuable to a project/community than an amateur (high school science student)

  • Can it be based on anything else?

  • For example, can you choose to use less personal resources (e.g. food, utilities, transportation) one month, and “contribute” those resources to a peer/project/community?

  • In that case, what is the fair market value of that contribution? What rewards are the contributor entitled to?

Additional notes:

Potentially one step further to everyone in the network?

Valid line of thought. Perhaps points 2&3 can be combined, I wonder what that would look like?

I believe so, uncertain about second order effects. Would people starve themselves to contribute to projects that generate a return? How do we avoid speculation in this regard?

This feels like “saving” which could possibly fall under the same category of cash contributions. Thoughts? (@letourpowerscombine)

Thanks for doing this research yesterday :slight_smile:

How does this relate to basic income? Asking because it’s in the title…

I have been working on a similar system of which only a very early old disfunctional prototype exists.

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There’s probably missing back story/context here to be honest. We were discussing “transitional basic income” where in the current paradigm people want/need money due to resource illiquidity and to make the leap they need some sort of safety net/way to get what they need outside the system.

With this in mind we were discussing the world of pre funding startups and figuring out how to apply fair principals. Interestingly enough, the above formulas are somewhat like the p2p foundations discussion on capped returns for freehold impact ventures as well.

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Transvestment
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Capped_Returns

Theres a fair bit of information here as well FYI. Please feel welcome to augment the graph as well, but to do so I need an email (I just really needed an associative outliner so had to settle for a closed source beta).

The idea is to map out a requisite amount of actors to make the system viable. That requires aligning all kinds of incentives, which is tricky as hell…

Anyway to answer your question the above probably doesn’t apply to UBI as it was more geared to TBI… maybe @letourpowerscombine can remember the context of the conversation more accurately and speak to your question better?

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If we loosen our definition of “returns” to mean “actual goods and services” instead of just more tokens, I think we can begin crack this problem.

But we also need to secure the property required for that production.

So if we can attract potential consumers to pre-pay you for the goods and services we will produce (essentially rewards-based crowdfunding) we can use that money to buy the property and then swap promises amongst ourselves to accomplish that future work.

Think of it as a sort of direct form of insurance where are you add value (either work or money) into the system because the returns you want are the actual outputs of that system.

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Hmm, we can perhaps simplify our language around this as hinted above: “promises and returns”? It’s kinda like JS then… Provided we think of the return as “fulfill” or “fill”… Maybe one of those words instead of “return”? Like “gift”? Just thinking out loud, how do we phrase things simply to be MECE (mutually exclusive collectivly exhaustive)?