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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

The scale issue is a big one. The USA is at once too big and too small at the same time.

The intercoin project was started with the aim of letting communities issue and control their own smart cryto currency, and seamlessly integrate it into apps. Same as Paypal, VISA network, Venmo, FB do. UBI becomes just an app on top of that.

Then community membership becomes a question of the community members or government. Harvard university knows who its students are. Other communities might make decisions via direct democracy (polling not voting).

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Discussing actual production-ready UBI avenues results in downvotes. I'm guessing it's a knee-jerk reaction to crypto currencies doing so well and there being many who are either tired of hearing about it or who feel as if they missed out.

There is a reason they keep getting mentioned.

The downvoters never explain.

My own guess is they hate when someone links to their own project. Every time I put any link to my projects I get a few downvotes no matter HOW good the rest of the comment is.

My concern is the lack of debate beyond two or three comments. Basically someone says something, another replies, there’s a follow up and then nothing. It’s weird that there’s no discussion, just hit pieces. You see the same thing in the media both in articles/reports as well as callers and comments. We’ve lost the capacity to debate as a society. Or at least we now debate in 123 character tweets or memes.

Yep. Each forum has its own flavor.

I have found the factor that earns downvotes is a link to your own project - the downvoters don't engage you fairly after that.

> The USA is at once too big and too small at the same time.

I haven't seen a convincing argument for either half of this, much less the mutually contradictory combination.

Too big because it is out of touch with its citizens, and a UBI would lead to a national ID. Look at China for what can happen from that. Also too large because the cost of living varies from place to place, so no one amount of UBI can fit every citizen.

At the same time it's too small because Americans are already far better off than most of the world, so if anyone really needs UBI it should be the poorer per capita countries, funded by the richest in the world. In other words UBI for Americans only misses the point.

Plenty of countries have national ID systems, and they are not dictatorships. (But the IDs are easy to get for everyone, and we don't have discussions and "rumors" about fake voters, which is also nice.)

On the other hand, I'm fairly sure China had a civil war that established a communist dictatorship before it had an efficient national ID system.

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