RE: Proof of stake and basic income
If something is given away, does it have any value?
If something has no intrinsic value and is given away, does it have even less of a value.
If, instead of giving everyone a basic income, what if they were given the actual food and housing to be the basic income. By giving them the basic income, the cost of those items will always continue to increase and therefor the basic income will increase.
The perfect example of this is college. College tuition has outpaced inflation. But, it is now easier to get into college and easier to get loans to pay for college. By giving more people access to college, it didn't lower the cost of college, because colleges didn't have an incentive to do so. Knowing that they would be paid, whether or not the student loan was paid off, colleges increased tuition fees and lowered entrance standards to accept more students. The final end result, we have 40% of current college graduates living at home because they can't find a job with a useless college degree.
I don't believe that a universal basic income would do anything but create slaves to the government. I think that there should be a "safety trampoline" for people. You run into trouble and the government gives you a boost to get back on your feet, not a hammock to make a lifestyle out of.
Old age pensions are "given away". Lots of social programs and public services are "given away" (really, they're paid for via taxes, of course).
I would think it would need to be an already-existing currency that has market value and is bought by the government on the free market. Then, payees would own a part of a larger entity. Say, for example, that Ethereum moves to proof of stake. What if, in 10 years, the government invested in Ethereum and distributed this to its citizens? Ethereum would have value on the open market, so it would not cause it to diminish in value. In fact, it would likely boost the value, if anything.
Public Services aren't "given away" by the people who actually pay the taxes on them. Pensions, while a flawed method of retirement savings, were worked for by the person who received them.
The underlining issue of a basic income is that it doesn't fix the problem. People not encouraged to work and be productive will not be. Competition drives innovation. So, it doesn't matter if they were handing out gold as the basic income, because soon it would devalue gold. Those still being producers would have to work harder to make sure the gold they had still met their needs to keep them above the basic income level.
See, but there will always be those who either can not be productive for one reason or another, or simply won't be productive. The current system does not fix this problem either.
My point is that a basic income would alleviate symptoms of poverty by raising the very bottom to a level closer to sustainability. It would also provide for needs that could then be saved by cutting unnecessary social programs that cost far more because of the fact they need to be operated by a bureaucracy. To provide food for someone in a food program costs much more than the food itself costs because of staffing and documentation. If instead, a basic income was paid out to those users, it would be far, far cheaper for them to just go out and buy the food without all the extra bureaucratic costs.