great initiative! definitely a useful step towards a potential proposal.
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For the Pol.is I think the most important thing right now is adding more statements. I don’t think we have enough breadth yet.
I will wait a little more before posting to Telegram, hoping from a few more statements, *nudge, *nudge.
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I’m new to pol.is… is there a way to see what I have added? Thanks for setting this up by the way! Have wanted to try discourse on pol.is for a while and this is a great fit.
Very new to this tool myself - my experience is setting up this poll:)
I think there is no way to see your own statements by design. The idea being - either the statements (regardless of their origin) map out the problem, or you should add more statements. Once you add the statements, they become anonymous and stripped from the person who submitted it.
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Ok, I will try to summarize the conclusions from the pol.is.
So, we have a majority opinion that
- We must be perceived as dealing fairly
- It is, however, ok, if early adopters are rewarded financially, in fact, this should be the case to encourage growth.
- The price should be expected to be volatile (at least in the beginning).
- There is no need to stop issuance before we come up with something new.
Don’t think we had enough data at all to divide into clear opinion groups.
The most surprising takeaway for me is that we seem to be ok with rewarding early adopters financially.
However, I don’t think the poll was large enough to give any concrete advice/suggestions.
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Interesting. Is there a way for the pol.is responses to be open? I can only find the results of two questions down at the bottom of the page. Seeing a breakdown of all the responses in some way could be helpful to start discussion. I actually thought pol.is had a way to have a follow on discussion built-in, but I might be wrong on this
Ok, I have a tokenomics proposal. I have been swayed by @Justin @Kyle and @armstrys to give up on a fixed issuance. The main problem with fixed issuance is that humans psychologically can’t adjust prices downwards, so a small long-term inflation pressure is desired for a medium of exchange (allowing adjustments in both directions). Fixed issuance may (in the far future) lock the value of one $UBI, not allowing downwards price adjustments of contract denominated in $UBI.
Ok, here goes:
- Issuance will be a percentage of the total supply.
- Issuance is distributed equally among registered humans.
- There is a fixed percentage plus a percentage corresponding to the user growth.
- The fixed percentage could be 2-3 % pr. year as @Kyle suggested, but applied more frequently.
- The variable percentage would correspond to the user growth (averaged over the last month).
Features:
- End state is a stable slowly expanding supply at the fixed percentage, but the expansion is distributed equally.
- Early adoption is financially incentivized since the cumulative issuance will be greater when there is more potential for registry growth.
- We are all financially incentivized to expand the registry - but not overly so.
- Income may vary in the beginning but would stabilize over time.
- Supply will adjust with member growth/contraction.
Potential addition:
- The DAO receives part of the issuance, e.g. 10 %. to fund operation and/or do monetary policy.
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I’ll think about this in detail. It’s interesting you have a proposal on this, @Mads. It would be interesting to see how this modifies the code of $ubi so we can turn it into a HIP.
There is no free lunch. If issuance is focused at start, it makes start adoption easy but end adoption hard. If issuance is evenly distributed, it makes start adoption hard but end adoption easy (or at least easier as long term adoption is hard).
In this, Bitcoin and UBI are two opposites.
Most projects focus on the short term, thus provide lot of emission to newcomers. This makes the 0 to 1 easy. But because they burnt all their fuel, the 1 to 100 is extremely hard.
The current Proof Of Humanity emission has taken the path of a hard start and an easier finish. Changing it now would lead to the worse possible outcome hard start (as we’d already had the hard start) and hard finish.
Also, only a currency with a more or less stable emissions per person can achieve long term stability, thus money status. Systems were emission doesn’t scale with adoption (like Bitcoin), lead to deflation (as the amount of users increases compared to the supply) and high volatility (as people speculate both on user number and value per user).
With UBI in its current emission, the price is expected to stay relatively stable for a non pegged currency. That’s what we’ve seen so far in respect of its age and liquidity.
Now maybe the POH DAO would like another form of coin, not made to be money and which could be speculative. But I think this would be better achieved by making another coin instead of changing the UBI in way where long term adoption as a currency would be totally excluded.
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So your proposal is to keep the current emission model and be patient about building the utility that can burn $UBI to keep the supply in check?
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Exactly.
I think the focus should be on creating more value for UBI. Not on changing the split of cake between early and late adopters.
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I think the optimal tokenomics is if early adoptors are weakly favorized - enough that there is some incentive to get in earlier. And it should gradually lose the favorization on long enogh time-scales.
The $UBI emission model suffers IMO from being unbalanced - too much in the beginning (or after rapid expansion in users) and too little in the end. It can be balanced by burning, but it would be better if the currency could rest more in itself and rely less on interventions.
I agree with the sentiment expressed by @clesaege of not changing the split between early and late adopters.
Maybe we should find staking mechanisms that help early adopters fund late adopters.
A quick and dirty idea would be: stake UBI to extend PoH expiration.
Use cases that help early users fund new users and align interests.
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I am somewhat more sympathetic to @Mads position here. The current token model heavily favors early adopters in terms of their ability to own a portion of the total supply since time is the biggest factor determining account value. Despite the issuance being fixed, the current model will not lead to a fair supply distribution (in % terms) over time. That’s my main issue with the current model.
I think this is especially important for a token like UBI given that it should be “universal” and favoring early adopters will almost certainly disadvantage certain populations in the long run.
I agree that it’s a major challenge to achieve “money status” with a currency that is guaranteed to devalue over time for holders, but I don’t see how a currency can sustain universal income without doing that. It’s two sides of the same coin.
None of this will work without utility that requires UBI, but then again I don’t totally see why incentivizing early adopters is all that important if that utility gap gets filled and we can actually achieve our goals of building a fair income currency that will be sustained by utility and not only adoption through promises of free money.
If the average value produced by humans increases, the currency value (in term of good and services, not human time) would also increase.
If inflation > productivity gains it decreases and if productivity gains > inflation it increases.
Also the inflation in the long term would probably be lower than the inflation of fiat, so it could be a stablish coin which decreases in value (in term of good and services) but at a lower rate compared to fiat (thus fiat indexed stablecoins too). So it could increase compared to fiat.
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That makes sense. I think you’re right in one of year earlier comments that a drastically different token model is probably better suited for a different token anyway. It wouldn’t be good to have two tokens competing for a POH money layer, but a highly inflationary/redistributive token would be a great basis for something like a social network or voting within a DAO - and could serve as a good testing ground (like litecoin to bitcoin).
Of course the primary goal before creating a new token is making sure we can sustain UBI value in the short/medium term 
Hi all, and thanks Mads for summarizing the points of the poll.
I don’t know much about tokenomics or how to keep the price stable, but what I know is that currently the project is not serving the people that a UBI would truly help, which is people who have issues to make ends meet (at least in my view) and not people ready to risk up to 0.2 ETH for registering (700€ at the time of writing this post).
I have been supporting financially someone since 2012 in Madagascar, and this person earns currently 95€ a month with a bachelors and a masters.
They would have no chance ever to pay the kind of fees we currently are facing (hundreds of dollars) for signing up to this, nor the knowledge on crypto because their needs are at another stage of the pyramid of needs (getting enough to eat) and therefore don’t have time or means to learn how crypto works (or the English knowledge tbh), or even how to get regular access to internet to learn because the process is so complicated currently.
I can not imagine what the reasons are for the voters of the pol.is to hope for rewarding early adopters other than greed, to be honest, since as someone said above, currently we are mostly privileged geeks getting UBI, and not people whose lives could be heavily impacted by (a) UBI.
Sorry I can’t contribute to the tokenomics part as much, but I just wanted to state a point regarding early adopters being rewarded (even more than now).
I think inflation problem can be solved by proof of burn algorithm.
https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/proof-of-burn-9e348725953c
Something like more you burn more chances of getting a reward. 10-5% effective burn and 50-30% of accounts will not get any reward, and that token goes as a reward for winners.
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We should back $UBI with the same system we are trying to equalize. The “unionization” of the retail stock market via PoH DAO owned voting shares of all companies in the S&P 500 / S&P Global 100.
The DAO would have to become legally recognized to do this, but if we can globally concentrate the retail market’s control of the biggest companies in the most powerful capitalist country in the world, we would be on track to restoring the balance of power in the world.
Last year Wyoming signed Bill 38 into law, allowing DAO’s to be classified as LLC’s. https://www.wyoleg.gov/Legislation/2021/SF0038
In the US, an LLC can buy stocks just like any individual.
For example, every time the shares hit 5% (+ inflation rate) growth, the DAO sells those gains off and uses it to buy back and burn $UBI. The DAO will also vote on stockholder voting decisions for these companies.
TLDR: Let’s become the BlackRock of DAO’s
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That’s quite out of the box thinking. But how can a DAO be legalized? Do you know other DAO that have done what you’re proposing?