Path UBI

Sun Sep 10 2023

tags: private exploration draft

The case for PATH

Vision: to bring value into the world. Mission: to give every creator a basic income of $1,000 a month so they can create without concern.

Imagine a toy economy where taxes accrue to the treasury and are used to fund a UBI of sorts.

  1. There is a token2022 called PATH.
  2. Each transaction involving PATH pays a 0.1% transfer tax, which accrues to the treasury.
  3. The treasury gives out PATH daily equally to all verified human accounts (leave the proof-of-personhood aside for now), capped at X PATH/person/day.

Note we couldn't do this with USDC or any other currency that we do not control, as USDC does not allow for a tax-on-transfer. The challenge then is to incentivise the velocity of PATH, by creating an ecosystem (like the real economy) of goods and services.

Tons of ideas of how we do that were expressed above, but at a 0.1% transfer rate, the total velocity of money has to be 1000x the amount distributed per day. If you want to give out 1,000 PATH per day, you need 1M PATH moving in and out of the system.

The pie-in-the-sky case is that there's a 10M, 100M PATH of volume moving around everyday worth of goods and services transacted. 10M == 10,000 PATH per day, 100M == 100,000 PATH per day.

Sources and sinks

For this to work the treasury must either keep growing or be revenue neutral.

Inflows:

  • Investment or business income
  • 0.1% transfer tax

Outflows:

  • Basic income

Inflows >= outflows.

Suggestions for inflows:

  • Anyone can suggest an business idea to the Pathfinder treasury DAO

    • e.g. "ChatGPT on Telegram" -- get a grant on completion and in return revenue share with the Pathfinders DAO
    • e.g. "SUPERHOT wallet on Telegram" -- a superhot wallet that's 1-of-2 custodial (although ideally making it noncustodial would be amazing), that comes with quick shortcuts e.g. "/transfer 1 SOL to 0xfp.sol", "/swap 1 SOL to USDC", "/withdraw all to 0xfp.sol". The use case would be to reduce the friction of onboarding all my friends from Telegram (can start sending our employees PATH!)
      • literally a tiplink-esque thing would be nice, /send @celineli 1 PATH
      • Which Pathfinder/Pathfinder creature is best for wallet? "Elio" for ChatGPT, "X" for Wallet?
      • FYI: Bots are now able to use collectible usernames — including links without the -bot suffix.
    • I think this alone is a huge idea Stripe Crypto onramp from Telegram maybe..

  • But to receive a basic income one has to:

    • be a real person;
    • be a Pathfinder;
    • be near-unanimously voted in by the other Pathfinders (which means they must have demonstrated a track record of value)

  • Number of Pathfinders is (for now) hard capped at 10,000, but obviously Editions 2, 3, 4 etc. are possible. I would keep it as small as possible though at the start.

Synergy with Pathfinders

Strategy: Use the Pathfinders NFT project to bootstrap the Pathfinders economy. Build goods and services that can be purchased at a discount (or exclusively) with PATH.

As the economy grows and the treasury accumulates, each Pathfinder NFT will be worth more and more money because they hold the keys to the kingdom: only Pathfinder NFT holders are eligible to receive a basic income.

We bootstrap the economy by paying all contributors to the Pathfinder project with PATH. True believers can buy PATH and start buying goods and services (e.g. art, compute, GPT-time, plushies, stickers...) with PATH.

The goal for us is to make stuff that people want to pay for and take PATH as payment. One example is to convert the mint proceeds from SOL to PATH, and to charge people PATH for any future live-service content.

Pathfinders is an IP (universe), a community, and now an economy. There's a reason for the community to stick together and consume goods and services from one another: we get richer together.

In the future businesses will be incentivised to "hook in" to the Pathfinders community (ergo accept PATH) to benefit from the goodwill, the free marketing, and also they might be able to charge a slight premium because believers want to use PATH (??? questionable)

PATH Visa card? LOL -- how would this work

Things to look out for

At the beginning we must avoid at all costs people who sign up to get the UBI and contribute nothing to the economy. This is the problem with all past UBI projects: they didn't think about the sinks, only the sources. Onboarding people too fast is a death knell.

In the future if the economy is sufficiently closed (you can buy everything you need to eat, rent a Pathfinders capsule hotel), or if we become "post-scarcity" (we make so much money from our Pathfinders businesses that we can give that surplus away), then this would be no problem, but that's still a long ways away.

I would position it not as a universal basic income (because there are 8 billion people out there), but a global collective of creators (not creatives -- programmers, farmers, restauranteurs) supporting one another.

Closing thoughts

I will say that if we give 10,000 people $1,000 a month, that's an outflow of $10M/month. That's an incredible amount. Can the treasury really make it back? That defies expectations. Literally incredible. They should feel like the luckiest 10,000 people on Earth. Lol.