Circles - basic income on the blockchain

BASIC INCOME ON THE BLOCKCHAINBrussels - May 2016Basic Income Meetup

About me

Martin Köppelmann @koeppelmann

• Co-Founder of Gnosis (Ethereum based prediction market - with ConsenSys

• Working full time and doing research on blockchain topics since >3 years

• Long time basic income proponent • Trying to understand “money” since 2008

REPLACE

What is money

„Money can be defined as an agreement, within a community, to use something as a medium of exchange. As an agreement, money lives in the

same space as other social constructs like marriage or lease agreements.

These constructs are real, even if they only exist in people’s minds. The money agreement can be made formally or informally, freely or by

coercion, consciously or unconsciously.“

„Our money and monetary system are, therefore, not de facto realities like air or water, but are choices, like social contracts or business agreements.“

Prof. Bernard Lietaer

What is money

“Money can’t buy you an apple - money can only make a human

surrender on an apple” Randy Steve Waldman

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What is Circles

Instead of building something on top of our monetary system we put the UBI into it

Implement the UBI

Circles run on the Ethereum blockchain. This guarantees transparency and tamper proof operation while being fully decentralized,

Blockchain technology

Circles is a path towards the basic income we can start going today!

Ready to go

Circles combines the resilience of small local currencies with the efficiency of single global currency.

The global local currency

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Circles is a complementary currency that provides a path towards a basic income. It can be used today in parallel to current money within groups that decide so. As it gets more widespread it will

grow the basic income bottom up into society.

The rules

…any time -create a blockchain account -and will get constantly new (personal) Cirlces - 1000 per week.

Anyone can join..

The issuance rate will increase by 5% per year to stabilise the ratio between existing and new money,

Inflation as demurrage fee

To prevent fraud people only accept Circles from people they trust or with a trust path (an algorithm will find)

Web of Trust

In addition to the web of trust groups can form to certify identities

Groups

The rules are implemented in a Ethereum smart contract and can therefore are guaranteed to be executed without a central entity.

INTERNALS - TRANSITIVE TRANSACTIONS

INTERNALS - TRANSITIVE TRANSACTIONS

Money of A is the bottle neck for the Sybils - A does not get an advantage

THE SYBIL ATTACK

SIMILAR PROJECT: “BASICINCOMEPROJECT.ORG”

View it as a peer to peer credit system

We could call the average amount “zero” and your basic income is just your credit line.

What to call “zero”?

Instead of giving relaying on banks whom to grant credit this system is purely p2p and simplified with the BI rules.

Credit approval p2p

And in addition no mechanism to enforce pay back of debt. On the other hand debt can’t default.

No interest on debt

More resilience of the system since it is not a forced “debt union” the Euro.

No forced debt union

Circles can be seen as a combination of Ripple and a basic income. Ripple describes the web of trust but instead of setting individual credit lines the basic income is you credit line.

In practice users will use a mobile wallet to manage Circles. The functionality will include sending Circles, adding new trusted people and joining groups.

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Mobile WalletCircles in practice

“The café”

“CAFÉ GRUNDEINKOMMEN”

We will open a café in Berlin as a place to live the idea of a basic income. This café will accept Circles and should be a center around the discussion about basic income in general.

Would you give 10% of your economic value to an basic income?

THE PLEDGE

Pledge to hold at least 10% of money in Circles, do 10% of your work for Cirlces, sell 10% of your products for Cirlces.

Lets to a crowdfunding campaign to buy one good for Euros and enable selling one more for Circles.

ONE FOR ONE

www.aboutcircles.com

@aboutcircles