GoodDollar experiment to research how to reduce wealth inequality using blockchain
GoodDollar is an open source community project
eToro announces $1m in funding and calls for more ‘brains, ambassadors and funders’ to join the experiment
Global, multi-asset, investment platform eToro today announces the launch of the GoodDollar experiment with $1 million in funding from the company. The company is calling on more partners to join the initiative which aims to reduce wealth inequality using new technologies underpinned by blockchain. The experiment will research implementing a cryptocurrency that pays social interest to those who have less, and is continuously distributed to any verified participant for free, creating a global, open, universal basic income (UBI).
Yoni Assia, eToro Co-founder and CEO, said:
“The success of new technologies should not be measured only by their ability to power new industries and disrupt old ones, but also on their ability to affect positive change in the world. Too often the tech world focuses on generating commercial value, rather than societal value. Technology should be used to tackle the great challenges of our time. This is especially true of blockchain, which has been harnessed in many creative ways, but hasn’t yet been used to tackle our really big challenges.”
The GoodDollar experiment is an open invitation for the global community to rethink the existing economic framework. GoodDollar aims to create a non-speculative cryptocurrency that aims to find ways to reduce wealth inequality on a global scale. It is geared towards a global UBI distribution mechanism that is deployed via smart contracts.
Yoni Assia continued:
“Inequality is the crucial economic challenge of our time. In 2017 just 1% of the world’s population owned more than half of the wealth. With the rise of technology unemployment, the tech industry needs to find solutions for those with less to participate in the economy and pursue their purpose.
“We see a growing interest amongst tech entrepreneurs, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who understand the challenge of global wealth distribution and want to create a research framework for how technology can help solve this issue.
“The merging of blockchain technology, growing support for UBI and the realization that wealth inequality must be reduced, may finally converge into a new global economic system that would give all humans the financial freedom to pursue their purpose and happiness.”
eToro Co-founder and CEO Yoni Assia first shared the idea of addressing wealth inequality a decade ago in an article published in November 2008 entitled ‘’. Yoni’s vision is now being made a reality by a team based across Tel Aviv, London, and wherever the right expertise exists.
Yoni Assia added:
“We believe that we can create a mass-market cryptocurrency that is engineered to reduce inequality and provide a universal basic income. Engineers, product designers and economists are currently developing the prototype. Today is just step one on a long, ambitious journey.
“I would like to invite more partners to join this important experiment. We’re looking for experts in the fields of decentralized identity, governance, local and global adoption of financial products, and wealth distribution. We are also on the hunt for ambassadors to help spread the word about the project, and for funders to help us deliver GoodDollar. So if you’re passionate about using technology for social good, please get in touch.”
* Source: Credit Suisse Wealth Report, November 2017. As of October 2018, 0.7% of addresses hold as much as 87% of total bitcoin in supply – source: BitInfoCharts, October 2018.
Further information on GoodDollar, including how you can get involved, can be found .
About GoodDollar
GoodDollar’s aim is to create a new economic framework with a cryptocurrency that is available to everyone. The cryptocurrency will be minted and freely distributed to any person, based on social identity verification on the blockchain. The currency will have a built-in social interest/inflation, which gives more to those who have less.
The project is funded through a $1m donation from eToro and incubated by the business in London and Tel Aviv.
About eToro
empowers people to invest on their own terms. The platform enables people to invest in the assets they want, from stocks and commodities to cryptoassets.
eToro is a global community of more than ten million registered users who share their investment strategies; and anyone can follow the approaches of those who have been the most successful. Due to the simplicity of the platform users can easily buy, hold and sell assets, monitor their portfolio in real time, and transact whenever they want.
eToro is regulated in Europe by Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK.
About Universal Basic Income (UBI)
UBI is a revolutionary economic concept, that’s been discussed by thought leaders for dozens of years. In lieu of complex wealth programmes, which have many shortcomings, it offers a simple, yet powerful alternative: give any person, no matter who they are or what they do, a basic income on a regular basis.
This would help weak populations, who are constantly busy struggling for survival, in maintaining a normal living – allowing them more freedom to pursue productive and self-fulfilling occupations. Researchers argue that UBI programmes drastically limit extreme poverty, reduce benefit fraud, encourage greater economic participation and reduce wealth inequality.
Existing UBI programme pilots, which are being run around the world, rely on government funding a basic income being provided through taxation. However, harnessing the power of blockchain for distributing UBI requires no government involvement, is not limited by national borders, and relies on constantly issuing cryptocurrency to verified individuals, using coding mechanisms that can be effectively protected from fraud.
The GoodDollar’s social interest rate mechanism represents a unique, economically efficient approach to creating a UBI.
On Oct. 8, a new application was introduced to the bitcoin Cash (BCH) community called Craft.cash, a BCH-powered onchain platform that’s similar to the popular block building game Minecraft. According to the development team called Blockparty, the Craft.cash game allows anyone to encode colorful voxel data into the three-dimensional world using op-return outputs stemming from BCH transactions.
Also read:
Craft.cash: An Artistic Voxel Block World Stored Within the bitcoin Cash Blockchain
There’s a new voxel-playground available for bitcoin Cash users called that allows people to create an “immutable decentralized voxel world,” according to the creators. Essentially the platform is a virtual world where users can build environments using different color blocks and onchain transactions. When you first enter the website the platform gives you a Blockparty wallet mnemonic phrase and a text file that also contains the private key.
The application does not work for mobile phones, so users have to play with Craft.cash using a desktop browser. In order to build an immutable pattern of blocks in the world, you need to deposit funds into the wallet. The developers say that every transaction costs roughly 1,000 satoshis for network fees and there’s a maximum of 51 voxels (blocks) per transaction.
“This encodes voxel data in a binary format using op-return outputs of bitcoin transactions. With this design we can then look back into time to construct a world up until any bitcoin block,” explained the Blockparty developer on Reddit.
Meet – a “Minecraft on the blockchain”, stored 100% on bitcoin Cash blockchain and served with Bitdb and Bitsocket.
Created by a developer named “Jt” (He’s not on social media but you can find him in our telegram chatroom)
— _unwriter (@_unwriter)
Bright, Colorful, and Possibly ‘Four Dimensional’
It takes some time to get used to the controls that allow you to travel around the virtual world and view the onchain art space without spending any money. A lot of BCH users have been using the application since it was launched and there are various structures, bitcoin cash symbols, and messages written throughout the landscape. There is a large number of colors available to choose from when designing various patterns and structures with the blocks. The creator has said there is no “pure black and white” in Craft.cash and everything in the world has a bit of color.
“This was done to give more room for color scales at expense of missing some things — Perhaps in future, I’ll do something to add more, but for now it’s bright and colorful,” Blockparty detailed. The creator emphasized he is open to ideas and pull requests concerning adding voxel shadows. “I’d like to actually make it possible to have a little graphics config to enable/disable different things at some point,” the creator adds.
Even with all the current participants playing around and decorating the Craft.cash world, there is still lots of room to design and participate. Moreover, it is possible to delete the blocks that others have built by paying to remove them, the developer has explained. The well-known BCH developer also enjoyed the fact the application uses and . When BCH proponents discussed the project on Reddit forums, many people complimented it for creating a 3D block placement system. Unwriter responded to the project’s announcement on Reddit and explained that Craft.cash is actually four-dimensional as opposed to three.
“[It’s] even cooler, actually it’s 4D — With an additional axis of “time” — Because everything is stored on the blockchain, they are all time-stamped by block so you can display a snapshot of the universe at a specific point in time,” the developer explained.
What do you think about Craft.cash? Let us know what you think about this voxel universe powered by bitcoin cash in the comments section below.
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