In terms of value, tax revenue did grow by 10%; in terms of total money supply, it stayed steady (remember I said that 100% of the money in supply was already active for simplicity's sake). The math is all actually much simpler when dealing with fixed money supply.

Gold is great. It just has a few flaws:

• - Hard to divide below certain amounts. Impractical for micropayments when used directly.
• - Hard to transfer large amounts physically.
• - Hard to secure physically.
• - Supply isn't completely fixed or known due to the limitations of our knowledge of what's available, and potential future asteroid mining.
• - Gold isn't indestructible due to being physical (it's very robust and that's great, but not completely so).

When used indirectly to try to get around these problems, (e.g. gold backed dollars), new problems spring up due to the ridiculous level of trust required in the institutions who are "looking after" the gold:

• - They can lie about reserves and debase the value in secret. This is hard to measure or notice until it's far too late.
• - They can stop electronic transactions they deem as 'undesirable' ("use of money" == "communication of value" therefore "governmental restrictions on use of money" == "governmental intervention in free speech"; something I'm strongly against)
• - There are central points of failure with control over vast amounts of value which are juicy targets for malicious actors (in the modern age of digital use of money vastly outstripping physical, reserve holders for a gold-backed dollar would be the world's most attacked computer systems by a long long stretch).

So, what's needed is a purely non-physical asset with the same positive monetary properties as gold but without the above negative properties that make it impractical in the modern world without resorting to the different set of problems introduced when using proxies like gold backed dollars. That way, you don't need to have a currency "backed" by the asset, but can instead use it directly. For the Happylandians in my silly little story, that's Joycoin. For us here in the real world, it's Bitcoin.

Just for full disclosure of anyone else reading this: I screwed up the inflation maths in my original comment since I did it based on population growth instead of economic growth. It doesn't actually change the result though, just the exact numbers that are there.

And those taxes themselves come from money moving in the economy (i.e. sales tax, income tax, etc), and active money in the economy ultimately comes from debt under most current fiat money systems (follow any chain of money back and at some point it'll be a loan from an entity such as a bank).

Technically true, but in what way it redistributes wealth is obfuscated by too many layers in a system whereby the UBI is paid as a specific number of units (e.g. dollars) but the real value of those units is changing through a process of money creation that isn't spread evenly throughout society. The only way it can be a fair wealth redistribution (side note: I'm far more liberal than libertarian despite agreeing with aspects of both philosophies; and I absolutely do believe that taxes and UBI are good things when implemented correctly) is if the wealth that's being redistributed is a clear representation of a percentage of the total economic activity.

Let's do it as a simplified thought experiment:

• - For a start, say we have a civilisation of one million people. They live in Happyland.
• - The population grows at a rate of around 5% per year due to there being more fun sexytimes in Happyland than deaths.
• - They're a productive bunch and increase their total economic value by around 10% every year (more than population growth because of technology advances and other economic improvements without direct human growth).
• - They have a total monetary supply of a trillion happybucks (symbol: ). It all moves around in active use (like I said, we're keeping it simplified).
• - The government of Happyland takes 10% of all economic activity as taxes.
• - The government of Happyland uses 1% of that (0.1% of all economic activity) as UBI for all citizens.
• - From this, we can see that in Happyland, in the first year, the government collects a hundred billion as taxes. They pay out a total UBI amount to their million citizens of one billion , which is a thousand per person.

In the second year, there are 1050000 people in Happyland. The monetary supply hasn't changed, but happybucks have become 10% more valuable due to the increase in the total economy (this is called deflation, and most economists will tell you it's a bad thing; they're wrong - I'll explain that soon). The government still collects a hundred billion happybucks as taxes and still pay out a billion in UBI. That billion is now only 952.38 per person due to the increase in population, but is actually worth the equivalent of 1047.62 of last years money because of the appreciation in the currency's value.

One day, a man named Keynes comes along and tells everyone that it's bad to be getting less happybucks each year and that they'd stimulate their economy more if people were encouraged to spend their happybucks on stuff they don't really want or need instead of saving them. He explains the best way to do this is through printing more money. Being the overly trusting types that they are (probably because of all the fun sexytimes), the Happylandians agree to let him set up the Federal Reserve Bank of Happyland (not actually a federal institution at all, just a completely private entity that has control over the printing of happybucks).

The "fed" (as it comes to be known) is tasked with printing new happybucks to stay in line with the economic growth and just a "little bit more" to stimulate more economic growth by making people not want to save money anymore and instead spend it on useless crap. Keynes does his job well and prints enough happybucks to have a 2% inflation rate.

The following year, there are 1102500 people living in Happyland. The monetary supply has been increased to 1.071 trillion according to the rules that Keynes defined. The government takes in 107.1 billion in taxes. The UBI pays out 971.43 per person. Due to the 2% inflation that Keynes introduced though, this is now only worth the same as last year's 952.38. The numbers have increased, but the value has stayed the same despite economic growth still outstripping population growth.

Some Happylandians also notice that the cost of goods and services is increasing more than than the 2% inflation set by the fed despite their UBI only paying then 2% more happybucks. What they quickly realise (since they're a clever bunch, despite being overly trusting) is that the money isn't added to the entire economy at once, but instead directly at the fed and filtered out through loans via the local banks. This results in some people having access to new money before others, making the richer - generally those who run production within the economy - feel the inflation before everyone else. The result of this is that goods (especially those with a high cost of production) are hit by inflation before everyone else and the cost of those goods increases disproportionately to the increase in their incomes.

What's worse is that under the old system before the fed came along, a decrease in population or economic output would self-balance. The fixed monetary supply makes tough times a bit more of a struggle since there's no way to ease it through money creation allowing for loans that can be paid back in better times, but since those loans can actually never be paid back in a system where all new money is created as debt, the new system the Happylandians find themselves under actually only makes each successive economic crisis more drastic than the last.

This would have been a sad end for Happylandia, doomed to enter a death spiral of hyperinflation like so many other countries before it, were it not for an anonymous Happylandian going only by the moniker Satoshi, who was able to introduce a digital currency called Joycoin with a fixed supply that couldn't be artificially inflated due to being backed by the provable use of energy instead of trust in a central institution. Joycoin was adopted more and more as Happybucks spiraled in to hyperinflation and became worthless. Those who switched to Joycoin in its early years became extremely wealthy compared to those who came later, but this inequality was nothing compared to the catastrophic destruction of the economy that would have occurred without it. Furthermore, it was also only temporary, as being back on a fixed supply, those who actively contribute to the economy were again able to take a known and true fraction of the total economy for their labour (or as UBI) and those who did not contribute gradually spread their wealth out amongst the population of those who do.

I'll agree that UBI doesn't work... but only when viewed in the context of our current financial system. When you have a financial system that is based on Keynesian principles of debt and inflation, any implementation of UBI simply becomes a drain on everyone by adding even more money in to the economy and ending up as a burden that pushes closer to hyperinflation (whether it pushes over the edge or not depends on a million other factors)

Under some other models such as most Austrian systems, I'd argue that UBI isn't actually even necessary.

Under my preferred system - which is roughly Austrian based but nevertheless eschews libertarianism for a more balanced liberal view (definitely no time for a full explanation in a slashdot comment; but feel free to ask and maybe I can write more later) - there's a fixed monetary supply and a simplified tax system for funding public goods. In order for those unable to productively work and to encourage those who are unable to produce immediate income but want to work on longer projects that will eventually produce good income and strengthen the economy, a UBI does indeed make sense.

Strange... I literally do all three of those things with bitcoin.

Until I moved to a new city about half a year back, I paid my electricity bill with bitcoin. I still buy pizza and coke with it (and many other things).

Where I live now, I can't pay my electricity bill in bitcoin unfortunately, but on the plus side, I do now pay my rent with it.

And this is why Electron is able to take hold.

Good apps have a lot of different ways to interact with each other. Many operating systems even provide OS level scripting specifically for app to app interaction (I cut my teeth on the Amiga's Rexx implementation ARexx and these days would hate to use a Mac without AppleScript).

While I agree that stories about bitcoin market movements aren't appropriate for slashdot, real news about bitcoin (the technology) always should be.

If you disagree, tell me how "a game theory based system for ensuring trust by writing entries to a global decentralised ledger built around a proof of work system that can be modelled more effectively using equations more at home with a physicist than an economist or computer scientist (specifically those regarding entropy and information transmission/density)" isn't "news for nerds".

Or just lives somewhere different to you.

I've been places where $20 of crap junk food would still leave you hungry, and I've been other places where I doubt you could even get through $20 worth of high quality chef-prepared food.

Where I live at the moment for example, I'd expect around €25 per person for a "normal" restaurant (including a beer or wine with the meal) and up to €100 per person for a really high-quality place.

I could also however jump in my car, and in less than two hours be somewhere where the prices are quite literally 3 to 5 times as much.

A couple of former work colleagues of mine - a German and a Finn were famous in our company for the following conversation:

• German: So, what do you do in Finland for fun?
• Finn: Summer or winter?
• German (confused): Ummm... summer.
• Finn: Fishing and fucking.
• German (taken aback): Oh! And winter?
• Finn: Less fishing.

Honestly, I don't think Finland can be summed up much better than that.

Not entirely true.

Cows eat feed that is often produced using fertiliser. Fertiliser is mass produced using the Haber-Bosch process, which involves fossil fuel usage. Many pesticides and herbicides that are used in the process also involve significant fossil fuel usage.

So while I agree the cow-fart argument is much weaker than most people think, it's also true that cow farming is nowhere near carbon-neutral and a reduction in cows (and pretty much most other mass farmed animals) would result in a net improvement on carbon emissions.

Not the above AC nor do I really get the point they were trying to make; but here's a translation:

Do you more easily hate a collective or a particular person and do you prefer to hate alone or in a collective?

While I do think this guy is a nutcase in general, there's nothing inherently wrong with the concept of soylent. I've been living off the European "Joylent" for nearly a year now and have never felt in better health.

As long as the body is getting everything it needs in a form that it can correctly process, it will be healthy. The biggest concerns are "is there anything missing that the body needs that wasn't accounted for?" and "are the ratios/quantities really correct?". Of course, these are also valid concerns from any normal food intake if you don't vary your food a lot, which is - in the modern day and age - an increasingly common situation.

It's important to remember that it's not a "supplement", but a "food replacement". Supplements are - as the word suggests - something to supplement an existing intake giving you the things you might be missing. A food replacement on the other hand is designed to give you everything you need. Whether or not it meets that goal is a matter of debate, but there are actual food scientists researching that actively at all the major suppliers of these 'soylent' products.

(to note: the common wording amongst consumers of these products and in this reply here uses "Soylent" (upper case S) to refer to the specific brand, and "soylent" (lower case s) to refer to the type of food in general. Soylent is a soylent; Joylent is a soylent; Joylent is not Soylent)

As a European socialist, let me be the first to say that the government can keep their goddamn noses out of my private affairs.

Socialism is about making some individual sacrifices for the good of society as a whole (because in the bigger picture, that also benefits each individual); not mindlessly letting the government have complete control over my life.

True, the EU isn't a country. It's a union of European states... just as the USA is a union of American states.

There is a difference of course, in that the USA has a much stronger and more influential central government, with much less power afforded to its member states than in the EU; but in essence, the concept is entirely the same.