Join Philip Rosedale's FairShare Discord to Discuss Digital Currency & UBI -- And Start Getting a Basic Income of FairShare Currency!

Philip Rosedale is starting to roll out his FairShare digital currency universal basic income project (read my 2023 interview with him here) with Second Life-based meetings (of course!) and a very active Discord.

The FairShare server is already pretty active and chatty, so Philip recommends new users introduce themselves -- and ask another member to sponsor them to join the currency group. (To do that, enter "/join" in the Intros channel.)

When you're a member of that, you start getting a basic income of FairShare currency -- which is already starting to be used:

"It's really just experimental for now," Philip says, of FairShare currency. "People vote each other in, get an income, trade with other servers, and have driven design of some unique ideas, like being about to give a chunk of money to everyone else in one shot."  

 

But yes, FairShare currently is already being used to purchase goods and services:

 

"There have been a few things bought, like old laptops and consulting time," Philip Rosedale tells me.

 

It's also a place to chat with Philip about the broader economic ideas behind FairShare. As he put it in a recent chat in #General:

 

Attempts to create moneyless societies seem to frequently result in dark markets where money is nevertheless invented and used. I think this is because free markets are still much more efficient at distributing resources than central planning, due to the much greater compute power (everyone) being used in a market-based system.

 

The idea with FairShare is to respect that markets are important, but to counter their rich-get-richer tendency with a recirculating fee/income, as I described in the presentation. I don't think there is any historical example of a large complex resource pool being effectively managed by central planning - is there?

 

I agree that a distributed ledger of some kind is essential to any future form of money, so that there does not emerge a risk of central actors doing harm. However, we also need a distributed means of continuously printing and evenly distributing new currency, which commodity currencies (gold, Bitcoin, Ethereum) do not support. So I am proposing adding that mechanism with Fair Share. I disagree that backing with Bitcoin (or any other commodity) is desirable, since that then blocks the community from creating its own value. Putting it another way - you can't improve inequality by using a reserve currency whose distribution is already unequal.

 

At a very high level, you can first imagine a future where the global reserve currency (which is currently the USD) gets slowly replaced by a fixed-supply digital token like BTC. Then - individuals and communities have to choose whether to directly use the reserve currency (say by trading directly with something like the lightning network), or to create something like a Fair Share currency - where mutual credit and trust between smaller groups is used to pool risk and collectively create a valued currency without needing to borrow the reserve currency to gain trading tokens.

Join the party here. And thanks to longtime virtual world explorer Mal Burns (malburns in Discord) for help getting situated!