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Comment by yungchin | Hacker News Reader

How do you prevent members from only enjoying the upside?

Example: say we're a group of musicians, starting a MusicianCoin group. I happen to be a fairly shameless participant, so I enjoy the basic income while I'm still bootstrapping my career, but one day I hit it big, and now my concerts are all sold out for the next year (and of course, tickets are sold in exchange for MusicianCoins).

Do I give back to the group? If I want to do that, that's easy: I just sit on my newly earned pile of MusicianCoins, and wait for the steady rate of minting to dissipate the value away to other members of the group. But what if I just exit my position immediately? By trading my MusicianCoins for dollars (thereby putting downward pressure on the value of MusicianCoin), I'm avoiding giving back any of the value I created, I think?

I think this is what makes it fundamentally different than a tax-based basic income: you can't (legally) opt out of taxes.

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I'm not sure it's that simple. Think of it in terms of shares in a company. When Apple does well does any executive sell their shares? Maybe, maybe not.

Nothing is preventing this musician from selling their MusicianCoins. If there are enough coins and enough musicians it won't do much to the price if the market knows how to value the coin properly. The musician might simply end up losing out on a profit by this action. Depending on the situation, maybe they might end up annoying the group and getting kicked out, who knows. It shouldn't be an issue though, just as it's not an issue with company shares.

But there's a difference: Apple shareholders don't see their shares redistributed at a steady pace - Apple shares don't have a built-in basic income.

The reason why I think even a single exit might do a lot to the price of MusicianCoins, is that financial success (not only in the music industry) seems to follow some sort of power law: a very small number of members amass a large part of the wealth [1].

Do people behave like this in real life (ie abandon their group when they strike success)? Well certainly not most people - men like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates haven't taken up citizenship in some tax haven to opt out of US taxes - but IIRC one of the Facebook founders did.

There are at least two reasons why it may be a bigger problem for MusicianCoin than it is for the USA: 1) the group size is bound to be smaller, so a single such event would cause a bigger shock, and 2) it's a much easier decision to sell your crypto-coins than it is to move country.

Of course this is all arm-chair economics on my part, and I actually hope you're right that in practice it's not such an issue - I love the idea and would love to see it work well.

[1]: see these sort of numbers, where the top 1% pay 23% of taxes: https://www.vox.com/2015/4/14/8406445/tax-state-local-distri... - and I reckon what would have been really interesting is if they had broken it down to how much of that 23% is carried by the top 0.1%

http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/dividend-history

I'm not sure what you mean? If I hold more shares, I get more dividends. That's not redistributive, unlike what groupcurrency proposes.

Edit: ah wait, I think I know what you mean. When I wrote they have "no built-in basic income", I meant "no built-in Basic Income" - as per the context of this thread.

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