It’s quite a mouthy title, to be sure, but the idea in and of itself is actually fairly straightforward. People work best under positive incentive structures, but setting up those structures in such a way as to encourage people to use them without abusing them is tricky. The benefits to cryptocurrency tokens though, is that you can pretty much put any restriction one could imagine on them.
I was considering the problem of roadside trash, and how much of a blight that it is, both aesthetically, but more importantly, ecologically. Part of me just wanted to pull over on the highway, grab a trash bag out of my car, and pick up some of the debris. However, I was presented with a number of reasons why it just wasn’t super feasible, the largest of those being that I did not have a trash bag in my car. Among others though were the sheer inconvenience of trying to pull over to park on the side of a busy, traffic-laden highway, and the one that caught myself off-guard, I had no tangible incentive, other than vague notions that my actions would “help save the environment”. However, that last reason, the lack of tangible incentive, gave me an idea. A cryptocurrency token, distributed to citizens, that had a unique property, it could not be used by the individual who receives it. A bizarre idea, to be sure, but here is the gist of how such a currency token would work.
These “Samaritan” tokens would be connected to contracts on the blockchain, which would be created by citizens. These contracts would include things like roadside trash pickup, park maintenance, or other issues that citizens desire to have taken care of. Citizens could place a “bounty” on the task, which would be searchable by location. Multiple citizens can place bounties on the task, raising the value of the task, until someone accepts the contract, and performs the work. They would then provide proof-of-work in some appropriate form (most likely photos from the contract location), and then the people who placed the bounty (some percentage or numerical threshold) would release the funds to the person who performed the work. With the tokens transferred, the individual would be able to use the tokens for anything the main governmental currency would buy.
So, what would be some of the benefits of such a type of token be? The first is that it facilitates community change from the ground level. People in communities see the needs of their communities most closely. This creates a sort of market for public works, which would be able to be undertaken by an individual, a group of individuals, or an organization, with the greatest needs in the community rising in value, to the point where it would attract the attention of those who could complete the task. The cleanup of a particular street, for example, may raise $20-50 before it becomes worth it for someone to take the contract. An pothole, on the other hand, that a city has neglected, or has been unable to fill, though, because of what it requires to fix, and depending on the severity of people’s annoyance with it, may reach hundreds of dollars before it is taken care of. The other beauty of such a system is that these numbers may be reached through the annoyance of a few people a little bit (hundreds of people putting up small bounties), or by a large annoyance by a few (a handful of people putting up $100 or more bounties).
This model is somewhat a reflection of the flexibility of the gig economy, but with the government as the issuing entity. These contracts could also be applied to privatized tasks, such as providing cleaning service for someone. Each task would be the equivalent of a tax-funded small-scale gofundme campaign. A benefit of this is that tax payers would actually see the benefits of their tax dollars at work, this would also help areas with a lot of general labor that is unused, and would be a boost to the un/under-employed. Another benefit to such a system is that it would highlight areas that need more general laborers, and would also highlight areas that need a lot of work. Areas that need a lot of work, but with little available labor would have contracts that could reach such high bounties that they could attract labor from surrounding areas, or even distant areas, which could help revitalize some communities.
Of course, there are some potential drawbacks to such a system. The first is that tax payers could end up paying more for some services than they would if those services were just performed by government maintenance on some level. This is certainly possible, though the point at which some people will perform those tasks is a lower threshold than others. This would lead one to believe that , so long as the labor efforts were not 100% coordinated, that there would be equilibrium prices that would come about for certain tasks, based on willingness to perform them, the needs of the individual, etc. Since also there would be the ability for anyone to take the contract at some point, it would be difficult for forces to extort money out of the system, unless they had a monopoly on labor. Even then, these projects would include things like, “planting trees in the local park”, or “cleaning up the streets”, “help so-and-so with their lawncare”, “host a local hobbyist group”, or other acts that aren’t necessary to continue running society. There could be some instances of trying to cheat the system that could occur, such as trying to create contracts within a family, to then give the contract to another family member. The problem with such an idea is that this could happen, but since the contract would show up to compete with the entire labor market, the amount would either be small and insignificant, or the project would be snatched up by an outside force. Even in a more complex situation, for example, a group of construction workers/families, who put their tokens into a project to fix a road or sidewalk, and then take that work themselves, yes may get the benefits of their own tokens, but they of course would also need to complete the work (assuming that they were not the only contributors to the contract), meaning that the area would get the benefit of the contract being completed anyways.
Of course, the benefit to attaching the proof-of-work and the contracts to a blockchain is also that it becomes much easier to investigate and suss out fraud in such a system, as pretty much anyone would be able to find that contract, and would be able to verify that the contract had been valid in the first place, then that the work was actually completed as stated. This reduces the amount of fraud and the scale of corruption possible under such a system.
As for how much should be actually given to citizens each month to allocate to these tasks, and what should be done about benefits that are unused over long periods of time, those are problems for a system that is more seriously considering the proposal, and would need to be based on the amount that individuals would receive in other benefits. However, a number around $100/month in current year terms would probably have enough distributive force to allow for this to work on at least small-scale projects, as would be appropriate for the general labor projects that these would likely cover.
What do you think? Would you clean up your streets if your neighbors paid you to? Would you use such a benefit? See anything I missed? Tell me what you think.
/rant 