Merit Capitalism - tokens for public goods beyond UBI

Basic Income
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Merit Capitalism takes the idea of creating tokens/money further - not only every person created its own money - also projects can be funded with newly generated tokens. Lets take the canonical example of a lighthouse as a public good. Instead of funding it with existing money just 1,000,000 lighthouse tokens could be generated and distributed to the builders. People who are interested in getting the lighthouse builded pledge to accept this tokens/currencies for the goods they are offering.

The idea could easily be added to Circles. All you would need are custom accounts that can set their own rules of issuing tokens. Lighthouse: once it is build 1,000,000 tokens and than 10,000 tokens per year for maintenance. Now people still could “trust” this lighthouse account and therefore setting the values of the lighthouse tokens equal to their personal tokens.

I think it is important to note that a 1:1 (or at least a fixed) exchange rate is really what gives new tokens value. Allowing different exchanges rates than 1:1 makes it extremely difficult to find stable equilibria.

Some ideas from the concept I do not understand:

Pollution of the Environment, Our Politics, and Our Minds
Today’s tools for preventing bad behavior are weak: boycotts, carbon taxes, campaign finance regulations, ad blockers, etc. We can just turn their money off instead.

Lets say a Oil company would do big environmental pollution. How can the system (http://meritcapitalism.com) help? Since the company never produced a public good it is unlikely that the created a money that is accepted by “the people”. Instead they just would have sold oil for the money of regular people or public goods.

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Why the number has to be finite?

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[quote=“zysman, post:2, topic:43, full:true”]
Why the number has to be finite?
[/quote] What number do you mean?

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It helps because all money has its history attached. Instead of rewarding someone because they have proof they did work for someone else, you reward them because they have proof they did work for someone in good standing with you. If an oil company took risky actions and polluted the environment as a result, why should the people who took those risky actions be rewarded for it? You can decide not to reward them for it by looking at the history of the money you accept, and not selling to people who were rewarded for the undesirable action, or to people who were rewarded for rewarding those people.

You effectively turn their money off. Everyone knows they can’t get rewarded by you for rewarding the bad actor, so they have less of an incentive to reward the bad actor. As a result, bad actors don’t get rewarded.

This works even with traditional tokens. You can track the history of ether. It’d be even easier to track with Bitcoin-style unspent transaction outputs, which we can create on Ethereum with a contract.

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