whitepaper VS whitepapers

Does Circles UBI count?

Have you come across this project yet? https://joincircles.net/

Nick Land's book Crypto-Current: Bitcoin & Philosophy is interesting. He would probably say that crypto is self-critiquing. We are arguably seeing this self-critiquing nature of crypto actually playing out in the competition to write new "ethical white papers". So you might also try researching some post-bitcoin white papers, as these critique bitcoin and try to improve upon it. Two specific examples are the Circles Whitepaper, which I like and think makes a convincing case for the atomic base case of default trustlessness (and I like their idea that we all have to actively choose what money system we use, if we want to change from the default—but Circles also makes no sense in terms of scarcity economics, it could only be adopted voluntarily); and the Ethereum Improvement Proposals or EIPs, which trace the self-critique of the Ethereum blockchain.

I think instead of an objective solution, we can have a subjective solution where each person builds a web of trust by starting with a few known individuals. Circles has a model sort of like this for getting on the network and for linking together individuals who don't know each other.

I think Circles is interesting. It's a global, fair, voluntary system that seems to truly start at the theoretical grassroots level. If we all opted to use Circles, it would fix a lot of things. Maybe the idea can be improved upon.

Actually, that is pretty similar to how Circles UBI works, so maybe that would be a good place to start! Circles gives everyone who has a wallet the same constant income forever, and it starts when you get three vouches from existing users and create your wallet. (So it incentivizes early adoption of the UBI system, but is increasingly fair over the long-term the longer everyone has been in the system.) Circles starts with nobody being connected and Circles being non-fungible, and then peer-to-peer connections are explicitly approved that allow tokens to be fungible only insofar as p2p links are approved.

With crypto we can actively imagine and design our own social relations and then make that into a protocol anyone can use. It doesn't have to be about numbers and money. It can be any rules or actions that you can imagine and articulate. That's why it's so interesting. Have you read the Circles UBI white paper? That's one of the better post-Ethereum white papers I have seen. It doesn't oversell the potential and it's a pretty grounded discussion of the requirements for something like this to take off (i.e., people would have to electively choose to accept the initially worthless currency to bootstrap the community/market). Circles has issues but it is inspiring and thought-provoking to read, at least.

Central banks use PID controllers to control stability [1]. Stable coin systems can use PID controller systems too [2]. Stable coins are as volatile as their fiat counterparts.

Crypto currencies are run by people as much as central banks are. People can have opinions and values. People forked of Ethereum into Ethereum Classic because they had an issue with the main chain's policy. ETC community is alive.

Building crypto currencies is all about optimizing for legitimacy [3]. We can build what we want, we just need to want it in the first place.

- 1: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11403-014-0127-3

- 2: https://github.com/reflexer-labs/whitepapers/blob/master/Eng...

- 3: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html