With all the love in my heart: UBI simply does not work in developed countries.
No matter how many times you try to spin it as a “community currency” or a "cohesive story”, the underlying economic model is fundamentally broken. I analyzed this in technical detail on this forum last September, and the systemic structural flaws I pointed out then remain completely unaddressed (see my full breakdown: Circlesv2 is doomed to fail).
Even the massive, multi-million dollar OpenAI UBI study proved the exact same thing: in developed, highly financialized economies, uncollateralized basic income models fail to generate productive economic loops.
As I highlighted in my post last year, the binary “Web of Trust” model faces an impossible catch-22:
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The Sybil/Airdrop Mirage: On one hand, you get a flood of low-intent users spamming channels just to get “trusted” by whoever is already in the network to unlock the minting faucet. It becomes an artificial, farmable game.
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The Trust Paradox: On the other hand, real users who want to protect themselves from getting drained will only extend trust to people they already deeply know. This naturally keeps the network tiny and completely defeats the purpose of an open, scalable currency.
We can certainly have a separate, long-term philanthropic conversation about developing countries, localized crisis zones, and unbanked communities where alternative survival networks (like traditional Hawala systems) are a necessity. But applying this to Europe as a “sovereign consumer neobank” is a category error.
We have to admit the cold, hard truth: people are greedy.
If you build a system that distributes free value on a transparent ledger, people won’t use it to build a beautiful peer-to-peer utopia. They will treat it as an adversarial extraction game. They will automate it, exploit it, and extract every single cent of value they can.
Changing the UI, rebranding the app from Circles to Metri to Gnosis App, or making the “cookie clicker” pink instead of green doesn’t change the underlying math. It’s still a cookie clicker. And the Gnosis DAO treasury should not be burning 2 - 30 million a year to fund the Ego of the Founding Team.