[JumpCrisscross]

> can, categorically, overthrow it without threatening the integrity of UBI in its territory, it was never actually the government in the first place

Which underlines the ridiculousness of the thought experiment. The solution to wars being destructive is...a blockchain?

[littlestymaar]

there's a civil war ongoing but your income is still at its pre-war level (without any devaluation, meaning you keep your pre-war purchasing power) thanks to the magic of the blockchain.

[ben_w]

> without any devaluation, meaning you keep your pre-war purchasing power

That's not how economics works.

The purchasing power of any currency, for example USD, isn't the same everywhere even at a fixed point in time, because we don't have negligible-cost transportation in war zones (amongst other places).

[__MatrixMan__]

It would come down to devaluation by whom right? If everybody wants the war to end and both sides see you as somebody that is working towards a reasonable plan of ending it, then I expect your tokens would go pretty far.

And even if you're not the magical mediator who ends the war, what matters is not some global market evaluation, what matters is your tokens' evaluation by the people who grow the food that you eat and your evaluation of their tokens as well. Reciprocal exchange and utility, not market value.

[JumpCrisscross]

> devaluation by whom right

This isn't how currencies lose value in wars. If the amount of money doesn't change, but half the factories are bombed, the output of the remaining factories rises in value relative to that currency. (Ceteris paribus.) The only way around this is to backstop production with unbombed factories. Something a blockchain does jack squat about.

[__MatrixMan__]

Sure, but that's somewhat orthogonal to the matter of how you does your accounting or who issues your tokens. That's just scarcity.

I suppose you could burn tokens when the factories are bombed (or you know, when whatever other resources that back them expire), but that seems like a lot of extra bookkeeping just to keep two numbers equal.

[JumpCrisscross]

> that's somewhat orthogonal to the matter of how you does your accounting or who issues your tokens. That's just scarcity.

It's always scarcity. That's economics. The currency will fundamentally, potentially permanently, devalue in purchasing power in that context without external support.

> you could burn tokens when the factories are bombed

How many tokens do you burn for a textile versus semiconductor factory? Keep in mind, you are in a war zone, which means no guarantee of safe imports or exports. (Also, whose tokens?)

Managing an economy on a war footing is old business. There is nothing Worldcoin does to even remotely approach giving a semblance of an indication that anyone on their team has actually thought about this, like, once.

> that seems like a lot of extra bookkeeping just to keep two numbers equal

This is, in a nutshell, the problem with anything that purports to maintain its value over long durations of time. Value keeping takes work. We can't meaningfully convert ancient currencies to modern ones because it makes no sense to ask how many days' labour a Roman peasant would trade for an iPhone. These problems are fundamental to the notions of value. They don't have a technical solution. Value is inherently, fundamentally, subjective.

[__MatrixMan__]

> The currency will fundamentally, potentially permanently, devalue in purchasing power in that context without external support.

Followed by

> Value is inherently, fundamentally, subjective.

Which is it? Does value exist in real terms or is it made up?

If I'll give you a beer for two of your UBI coins, and you'll give me a pound of barley for one of my UBI coins, then it really doesn't matter that there's a war on somewhere, nor does it matter what the "value" of our coins is in terms of some number, so long as they are issued to each of us at the same rate.

You only have to bother with establishing a correspondence with some allegedly valuable thing in the real world (gold, factories, whatever) if you want a globally consistent notion of value. A notion which, as you've explained, is a fiction, and which I'd argue, is a harmful one.

[littlestymaar]

Yes, and not only the factories, but the entierty of the supply chain, combined with war profiteers driving prices artificially even higher.

Contrary to the freshwater meme Inflation is rarely primarily a monetary phenomenon, but it's even less the case during a war.