Besides UBI Universal Basic Income, one thing that happened during the COVID-19 pandemic initial impact on the economy a year ago, was that even if you could move the population to adopt a remote work model, not all of those jobs could be done remotely, forcing companies to shutdown and reduce payroll.
A time-backed future tokens model was brainstormed almost a year ago by me and an anonymous DeFi engineer, where we came up with that idea, which we at first looked insanely crazy. But the next day I asked him he should write a litepaper and that is how it got started.
Of course, back then nobody knew if the virus was going to be the end of it, while he pitch internationally, I pitch to Panamanian lawmakers and influencers, without any success. So instead I forgot it and put effort into what was going to be XDV.
One thing that did happened is that eventually, these ideas where ready to be implemented. Alice (https://ida.alice.si) is potentially similar to time-backed future tokens.
Alice is a decentralised financial protocol for projects that make a verifiable impact. It allows service providers to make promises about impact they want to achieve, and ensures that they are held accountable by only rewarding them if that impact is verified. Unlike a traditional bounty mechanism however, Alice allows future rewards to be transferred to third parties thanks to a new financial primitive called the Impact Delivery Agreement (IDA).
This is quite nice, because you can use both IDA and UBI token to implement advanced DeFi technology to the initial problem of job scarcity, resource allocation and optimization.
Bono Solidario Panama could retrofitted to use all these approaches. The one thing we can’t replicate as a nation is money printing. Panama uses the US Dollar as currency, any “printing” or minting is “governed” by the Feds. If Panama required minting, would have to be through other means or financial vehicles. The most our economic ministries do is to use the “commercial balance”, ie the Panama Canal, Banking Sector and Colon Free Trade Zone as a basket of assets plus any sovereign funds.
Of course, that works if is a traditional economic crisis, we are right now in an uncoventional, economic situation, where Panama has had near to zero resilient. With Fitch and other given bad rates to financial institution, things look rather grim.
But has Bono Solidario Digital worked? Is it effective? And secure and transparent?
- Has it worked? Alleviates people anxiety, but the main thing, to move the economy to full digital, impacts well being, by not leveraging job security.
- Is it effective and secure? It took them a year to implement a two factor authentication, so I’ll guess a good % of those funds were lost.
- And transparent? Now you know what I’ll say, why not decentralize ledgers to registers those transactions?
Because we should not wait weeks to get that data dump in Datos Abiertos Panama. Imagine I got hacked and waited weeks for etherscan to deliver complete logs?
But overall, a government “payment gateway” network dedicated to social and community causes is worth applauding and much needed.
Let’s just use with IDAs, UBIs and time-backed tokens and improve society with DeFi.
— Rogelio
