A new decentralized app,or ‘DApp’, is aiming to challenge the idea that we need government taxation and welfare to take care of the poorest and most needy members of society – through an ambitious project to provide a basic income for anyone who needs it.
The Basic Income project was announced this week by so-called ‘Governance 2.0’ service Bitnation, and is being developed in partnership with Johan Nygrenm of Reslience.Me. The idea behind the project is simple – to provide welfare support to people who need a little extra help during the tough times in their life, funded through voluntary payments (in the form of optional transaction fees) rather than compulsory taxation, and to offer this to anybody who chooses to join the ‘Bitnation’ no matter where in the world they happen to live.
This will be the first announcement from Bitnation, a ‘decentralized government’ initiative which seeks to provide a borderless and voluntary alternative to traditional government built on block chain technology, since a high profile disagreement at the start of the project’s crowd-funding campaign which saw several resignations from developers worried that CEO Susanne Tarkowski Templeholf was rushing to market in the face of significant legal dangers. Ultimately Bitnation aims to offer a wide range of services traditionally provided by governments, including passports, marriage, contract enforcement, company incorporation, land and property deeds, social services, diplomacy and more – all on a voluntary basis and secured by decentralized technologies.
Leading the Basic Income project will be Johan Nygrenm, a Swedish student who has previously been working on the concept under the title of ‘P2P dividend protocols’, using the Ripple protocol technology, from his website Resiliance.Me. Nygrenm’s aim, according to his website, is to create the “killer app for social resilience :)”
