Editor's Note: This article comes fromHay's theoryEditor's Note: This article comes from

Hay's theory

, Author: Heifeng Li, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

Circles UBI is a hot blockchain project recently. It was born with the concept of UBI + social trust map. A few days ago, after receiving the attention and support of V God, the founder of Uniswap and other big Vs, it swept the entire currency circle, making it The official website server has been in a state of congestion for a long time. This article will start with UBI, discuss the product logic of the Circles UBI project, and interpret the meaning behind the "human-based" currency.

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1. UBI in the real world

Before understanding Circles, you must first understand what UBI is. The full name of UBI is Universal Basic Income, which is translated as "Unconditional Basic Income". . UBI is different from private charity and common welfare policies. The latter two provide different amounts of financial subsidies for certain "people in need", and are often based on families. The difference between UBI is that it does not make any divisions into groups of people. , with the individual at the center, everyone gets the same amount of money for free.

To give a recent example, during the epidemic, the United States tried to distribute a subsidy of US$1,200 to all taxpayers indiscriminately during the unemployment crisis. This behavior can be counted as the application of UBI. In the currency circle, the indiscriminate airdrop of the ENU (avocado) project in the early years can also be counted as UBI.

Here is a brief description of some of the advantages of UBI.

1. Provide basic security for the people

UBI can allow people to have basic living security, which can not only eliminate poverty, but also indirectly enable everyone to have the right to choose independently about their work, life and even their entire life.

2. Improve purchasing power and trigger a series of benign effects

3. Improving the liquidity of financial markets

When the public has the backing of UBI, they will be more willing to participate in financial market investment, wealth management and other operations, so that the liquidity of the currency and the entire financial market will be improved.

UBI seems to be beautiful, and even has the shadow of communism, but there are several problems: the government needs to bear higher costs, nationality restrictions cannot achieve globalization, and it is easy to encourage the atmosphere of getting something for nothing.

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2. What is Circles UBI?

Circles UBI was established by Martin Köppelmann, the founder of Gnosis. It tries to use the blockchain and social trust graph to build a UBI distribution network and economic credit system. Let me talk about the usage method and product logic of Circles UBI.

Everyone can join Circles and get UBI. First of all, you need to register on the official website (https://circles.garden/), which is not much different from traditional website registration, just submit the user ID and email address, but the password verification is reflected in the form of mnemonic words.

After registration, you will get a link containing the wallet address, which requires a small amount of xDai to activate. You can get 0.01 xDai for free on the faucet website (https://xdai-faucet.top/), just copy the wallet address in the link to the web page to get it. You can also purchase xDai yourself and transfer it to the address.

After completing the transfer, you need to invite 3 friends to authenticate and grant credit to your user ID, which is equivalent to confirming your credit. After confirmation, you can create an account and get 50 Circles UBI currency.

It should be noted that the currency obtained by each person is different. For example, the UBI obtained by user A is A Coin, and the UBI obtained by user B is B Coin. The same point is that each user can continue to obtain UBI currency at the same rate in Circles, which is 8 coins per day, and the subsequent annual inflation is 7%.

So how do these different personal currencies created out of thin air reflect their value? The answer is credit.

This means that in the real world, credit can only be used to borrow money, but in Circles UBI, your credit can be directly used to create money.

Due to the transitivity of social networks, the usability of personal currency will increase with the continuous expansion of the economic circle. For example, user A trusts B, and B trusts C, but A does not trust C. When C wants to use C Coin to buy goods from A , you can trade with B first, exchange C Coin for B Coin, and then use B Coin to trade with A.

When everyone in the world gathers in this network, referring to the theory of six degrees of separation, you can use your own UBI currency to reach a transaction with anyone, without national boundaries and racial restrictions, then this will no longer be a simple social network, It is an upgraded version of Facebook that carries UBI casting and issuance, personal currency transactions, and credit value transfer.

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3. The characteristics of Circles UBI

1. UBI plans without government intervention

Circles UBI does not require the government to bear financial pressure, nor does it need to be carried out at the cost of printing money and inflation, but directly issues different credit currencies with individuals as the main body. The issuance and distribution of currencies are controlled by smart contracts on the chain, and there is no center globalized intervenors and the "invisible hand".

2. Credit-based personal currency

After the legal currency is separated from the gold standard, the essence of money is government credit. The emergence of Circles is equivalent to shifting from printing money on government credit to printing money on personal credit. It is like using "sesame credits" to cast your own currency. These currencies themselves have no value. When the credit of the minter can be recognized by others currency has value. This set of trust mechanism will not let people have the idea of ​​getting something for nothing, but can stimulate everyone to realize their potential and make their currency have value.

3. Human-centered economic model

Putting it on a longer timeline, the amount of currency in Circles is measured by the lifespan of a person. When a person lives, the currency exists, and when the person dies, the currency dies. Since currency represents personal credit, it is impossible to achieve UBI inheritance, let alone the situation of one person with multiple accounts—unless you have relatively independent multiple personalities and identities, and each identity can be recognized by others.

4. Crypto-Native thinking

In the real world, the economic foundation and social relationships make up a huge human society, and life is a process of accumulating social relationships, credit, and wealth. Circles has opened up a utopia for people outside the real world, connecting social, credit and economy with personalized cryptocurrency to form a virtual, borderless p2p network, and every individual who settles in it is the encryption of this utopia aborigines.

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4. Thoughts on Circles UBI

1. A paradigm shift in the concept of currency issuance

Paradigm refers to the world view and behavior that a certain group obeys. Paradigm shift is to break the original rules and force people to make fundamental revisions to some basic cognitions, such as from earth-centered theory to heliocentric theory, from flat earth theory to round earth theory.

The paradigm shift of Circles is that it has changed the public’s long-standing perception that “currency must be issued by the government”, shattered what the public thinks should be taken for granted, and delivered the coinage right to the individual, and everyone’s credit can be issued Currency, personal currency is equivalent to Work Token, everyone no longer works hard to earn legal currency, but to show the value of personal currency.

The economic base determines the superstructure. If the vision of Circles can be realized, then everyone can establish a "small government" through the economic circle, and even make it an independent national unit. This redistributes value and gives everyone Individuals create opportunities for their own country, and can derive targeted common governance solutions to attract consensus, and achieve survival of the fittest through consensus. Everyone is willing to settle in an economic circle with broad consensus to achieve sustainable development of the economic circle.

This change is extremely subversive to people's existing values ​​and world outlook. Although the blueprint for the future society constructed by Circles has advantages, it is currently unacceptable to most people. Just like two thousand years ago, people didn't feel wrong to trade shells, but giving them gold would be at a loss.

2. The Birth of Circles: Following the "First Principles" of Currency

The birth of Circles has no precedents to refer to, and it can be regarded as a project launched under the guidance of "first principles" to explore the essence of currency.

First principles was first proposed by Aristotle as a philosophical concept, Jobs, Musk and other business innovators are all loyal supporters. The connotation of the first principle is to trace the source, that is, to peel off the appearance of things, explore the essence of things, and then rethink the evolution direction of things. Jobs killed the mobile phone keyboard and introduced capacitive screens, Musk created a recyclable rocket, and Circles issued a person-based currency. These are all "re-inventions" of the original things based on first-principle thinking.

The first principle can be regarded as a manifestation of the deductive method. In contrast to the inductive method, the former derives the final conclusion continuously from one or more laws, while the latter derives the law from historical experience and known data.

Taking Circles as an example, under the inductive method of thinking, it is known that most currencies are issued by the government, and there is no successful precedent for individual currency issuance, so this project is not established. Under the deductive method or first principles thinking, the essence of currency is credit, which is a law. The government’s credit can issue currency, but there will be problems such as the gap between the rich and the poor → it can be solved with UBI, which has financial burdens, inflation, etc. Problem → can be solved by issuing currency outside the legal currency system, UBI will encourage the atmosphere of getting something for nothing → issue personal credit currency, when all the conclusions are combined, Circles is born.

3. The ending of Circles: Too far ahead equals failure

First of all, the current commercial society is supported by the legal currency system, and the thinking habit of "the government is responsible for issuing currency" has been deeply rooted. On this basis, even the UBI policy is difficult to spread and apply, and the implementation of personal credit currency issuance is even more difficult. It is an unattainable utopian concept. The emergence of Circles is like the sudden establishment of the Federal Reserve in a primitive society that is still conducting barter transactions. The current cognitive ability of the public is obviously not enough to support its development.

Secondly, the current on-chain business is still very primitive. Even Bitcoin and Ethereum do not have many application scenarios. The large number of personal currencies issued by Circles are even less likely to be of any use. In the end, they can only become a bunch of names. Different air coins with a uniform value of zero.

In addition, the public does not have much recognition for the concept of Circles UBI. This project has been online for several months, and no one cares about it before. The main reason for the recent explosion is V God’s retweet and its own fission effect. That is to say, the reason why Circles can become the current hot spot is not because of everyone's yearning for the Circles blueprint, but simply because of the obsession with zero prostitution and the desire for wealth codes. When the hot spot fades and everything returns to zero, this The project is gone.

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5. Circles UBI is just a social experiment

When we discussed Bitcoin in the early years, we often called it a "social experiment". As a decentralized currency without borders and free competition, it subverted the tradition of centralized government-issued currency. The emergence of Circles UBI is a combination of decentralization and centralization, decentralized issuance and inflation, and a currency transaction graph composed of centralized personal credit, presenting a new currency system and economic ecology. Compared with Bitcoin, Circles UBI is a bolder social experiment. It directly escapes the framework of the entire modern society and creates a "future-oriented" product.

But the future of Circles UBI is also its fatal shortcoming. Changes have always been gradual. One step forward can change the world, and ten steps forward is useless innovation. Circles UBI’s dimension upgrade behavior is obviously not accepted by the real society. The era when it can truly realize its vision is still very far away. I think the following basic prerequisites must be met before this.

1. Material level: It is necessary to achieve a substantial increase in production efficiency, so that the material is highly developed, the overall supply of the society exceeds the demand, and the people do not have to worry about basic living needs, so as to turn to the pursuit of individual value;

2. Spiritual level: Everyone can act as an independent and mature economy, achieve a high degree of trust and cooperation with others, and self-supervise and restrict each other in the process;