Steem Basic Income - Interview with @f3nix
Steem Basic Income
Steem Basic Income is a social experiment to bring a basic income to as many Steemians as possible. Members join by sponsoring others into the program. Steem Basic Income is delivered through providing regular upvotes to member content.
Welcome to @steembasicincome's second member interview!
To provide more interaction within Steem Basic Income (SBI), we are continuing our interviews with prominent members of SBI!
We hope to bring a greater sense of community, get to know our members, and gain a better understanding of why Steemians are choosing to be a part of SBI.
F3nix is a professional problem fixer (no, he’s not a hitman, just a manager) and writer. Creating imaginary worlds with his pen is a deeply rooted passion for him, dating back to his infancy and enhanced by the fact that he’s a bookworm. Recently, this passion was discovered to be the perfect antidote to his technical “dry” writing when he works.
He loves staying open minded and being curious. His non-steemian passion is martial arts, in fact he’s a black belt Wado-Ryu karateka (see his personal banner, but seriously not a hitman). Thanks to this passion he has lived several adventures, looking for great masters’ teachings around the world. Recently he wanted to try a punch on his belly from the founder of a martial art school and he almost vomited on the sensei’s karategi. His friends were laughing at the show, staring at him from the border of the tatami.
Some other adventures took him recently to live far from Mrs. F3nix, his wife. This hasn't been ideal or enjoyable and he’s trying to rejoin her as soon as possible and build a family. How do they say? When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. F3nix's lemonade is Steem, dedicating himself to his writing contest and to helping other minnows grow.
This interview was conducted by @thedarkhorse. @thedarkhorse is a business owner who decided to use Steem as a way to help fund his kids' futures. While here, he realized the need for a way for new members of Steem to gain exposure. He created the Pay It Forward Curation Contest, in which at least 14 @steembasicincome shares are awarded each week for helping spotlight great original content by newer members of the Steem community.
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| @thedarkhorse | What do you think about Steem? |
|---|---|
| @f3nix | I think that the Steem blockchain has been able to interpret a trend in today’s liquid society; a trend of high-speed interactions and instant creation of content. This is the first platform that deeply embeds social interaction with an immediately quantifiable economic value: time will tell how our “homo socialis” brain is going to cope with this. |
| @thedarkhorse | What do you think about Universal Basic Income? |
|---|---|
| @f3nix | In my life, unfortunately, I passed through a hard experience regarding how much wealth in this world is shifting more and more into the hands of a privileged elite. There is something deeply wrong with the roots of this society and I will do everything I can to support the cause of those who aim to create equity and shared wealth for everyone. |
| @thedarkhorse | How did you learn about & join Steem Basic Income? |
|---|---|
| @f3nix | I think that my first SBI share was through the freewrite community, a place where solidarity and sincere care for each other have always been the main driver. |
| @thedarkhorse | What do you think about Steem Basic Income? |
|---|---|
| @f3nix | I think that it’s a project with a disruptive potential and I’m enthusiastic to be part of this from the beginning. This project gives a new meaning to the whole Steem ecosystem and underlines a whole vision of the world, which is the Universal Basic Income. That idea dates back to the 18th century, theorizing the possibility of defeating poverty and social exclusion. I came closer to Steem due to my investments in crypto and I invested in crypto mainly because I don’t believe in this social order in which we live and I want to be part of the change, along with my wife. These ideas are all there when I look at the Steem Basic Income: I don’t think that a basic income will stifle the creation of quality content, on the contrary it will make us free from the anxiety and merciless social dynamics where, if you’re not at a certain “level” let’s say, your content is considered worthless, no matter its quality. |
| @thedarkhorse | How do you see SBI evolution? |
|---|---|
| @f3nix | People will understand that the @steembasicincome is not only a mere matter of return on interest and math calculations. This can be a lively, sparking community, where solidarity and the best human values can find their home. There’s a utopia behind this that can become reality. |
| @thedarkhorse | Do you participate in or organize SBI contests? |
|---|---|
| @f3nix | I both participate in them and organize one. My Finish the Fiction Story Contest is my flagship. So far, through my contest, I have distributed 45 SBI shares + the SBD pay-outs and I am at the 15th weekly edition. Being an SBI enthusiast, at a certain point I felt the need to find an entertaining way to distribute the shares, with a focus on newbies. You’re all welcome to my contest/workshop: a place where we create amazing fiction stories, sustain each other, and where everyone is special! |
| @thedarkhorse | What other Steem programs are you involved in? |
|---|---|
| @f3nix | Recently, I’m involved with the Steemit Greeters Guild, in which I participate as a scout/greeter of new Steemians and advisor of @terminallyill, who is the founder and a special person with a great heart. The Steemit Greeters Guild recently launched its new literary project, called “The Writer’s Guild”. A space for promoting newbies and quality writers. This has my full endorsement and I’m excited to see how this efficiently organised initiative and community will grow. I also support the Dynamic Steemians of @dynamicgreentk. Together with the @greetersguild, this is an awesome community with a noble purpose and ideals. I strongly suggest everyone join their many initiatives. In general, I see a new wave of great crowd movements, that want to give importance to good content and to the people beyond the account. It’s amazing. Moreover, I started to participate in contests like the Pay It Forward Curation Contest by @thedarkhorse (sounds familiar?) and will surely participate again. Everything that takes balance to the platform by giving due attention to newbies with good content deserves my full support. |
| @thedarkhorse | What Country are you from and what is your native language? |
|---|---|
| @f3nix | I’m from north Italy and Italian speaking... This is sometimes a mess for me, especially when I have to translate my poems and haiku in English! |
| @thedarkhorse | Where do you see Steemit in 3 years? |
|---|---|
| @f3nix | Obviously, a new world order will be established, and everyone will worship the Bananafish. All hail the Bananafish! Jokes apart, I can tell you where I would like to see it: I would like to see a platform where the values of decentralization, inclusion, and freedom reign. I would like to see newbies encouraged and awarded for their good content. I would not like to see masonic-alike connections, the same old ways of thinking, circle voting groups and people that exploit the reward pool notwithstanding their poor content just because of their “power”. I would like a place where beauty can be born every day. |
| @thedarkhorse | Would you ever want to become a full time blogger? |
|---|---|
| @f3nix | My dream is to write a book more than blogging. In my freewriting and short story writing I kind of specialised in “good beginnings”. It would be nice to give them a development and an ending too! There are many ideas roaming around my empty head, just looking for a pen. |
Having the chance to learn a little more about another steemian who lives on the other side of the world was pretty exciting for me and I hope that you have enjoyed it also. From conversations with @f3nix it's very apparent that he wants to see Steem, Steem Basic Income, and the smaller members of the Steem community all have great success. Maybe more important, he is willing to pitch in and do his part to help make this happen. I've found a new person to follow and even plan to give his contest a shot just for the fun of it.
Enrollment
If you want to get involved in Steem Basic Income, or to increase the share of basic income that you receive, enrollment is pretty straightforward:
Just send 1 STEEM to @steembasicincome. Include the name of a Steemian to sponsor in the transaction memo (preceded by @). You and the person you sponsor will each receive 1 share in the program. You can sponsor any active Steemian, it does not have to be a current member.
If you're unclear, please check out our full transaction memo guidelines and then let us know if you have any questions.
https://steemit.com/basicincome/@steembasicincome/steem-basic-income-new-transaction-memo-guidelines
The official currency for enrollment is STEEM. We are not currently accept SBD for enrollments. The current delay on enrollment processing is 3-4 days.
Questions?
Please read our recently published FAQ. Most questions are addressed in our FAQ or in the additional resources that it suggests. If you still have questions, ask in the comments section or join us in our discord channel. To review your share counts, we explain our tracking sheet here.
Thanks I really enjoyed this interview and seeing your views concerning steemit. I'm also interested in societies that have a basic income, and I know of a place in India that works kind of like that but without money altogether. I think it is possible, if everybody is willing to help out in the proces. People who just sit back and not work for their basic income could collapse the system. The main practical issue to me with a basic income in countries is that, if let's say everybody gets $1000 a month no matter what, and people are allowed to work to earn more on top of that, soon the $1000 won't enough to support yourself because most people will earn $3000 or more (the$1000+ $2000 from work). Then the whole idea of a basic income to provide a certain base for everyone doesn't work anymore. So I wonder if someone has a solution to this? Basically you would get hyperinflation for a bit,that's my main concern. (p.s. I'm not talking about steemit, merely about base incomes in actual countries).
https://www.wired.com/story/free-money-the-surprising-effects-of-a-basic-income-supplied-by-government/
people need to be educated on what it actually means, a lot of people confuse it with a kind of wellfare, which it is ABSOLUTELY NOT pardon my caps
which in fact gives bad rep to the whole concept of ubi
for instance
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/23/finland-to-end-basic-income-trial-after-two-years
the experiment in finland actually consisted of giving a sample set of unemployed people MORE money for a while, after which they found out not many of the unemployed people who simply got more money actually started working (which is about the most silly experiment i ever heard of so far)
While ubi is for everyone, man , woman, child, employed unemployed, thing is in Utopia the already rich would decline it in favor of "the total pool" but i betcha fiver they would actually be the last to do so,
experiments like finland make it all look bad while they have actually nothing at all to do with ubi . If you do a little research you'll find plenty of examples, both real and ... well, i have no idea what those fins were thinking, maybe to discredit it or something. The true statistic is, that in a society where everyone gets a share as UBI, people will not start working LESS, some might go part time to pursue personal deployment, which frees open time for others who can fill it in , lets face it, jobs per capita havent been increasing much,
and they won't
the whole idea is to provide a base for everyone, not just for everyone who doesnt work anymore, thats WELLFARE, already have that, its a necessity to prevent more crime but UBI is something completely different because your middle manager would get it, your construction worker would get it and the guy at the train station with the styrofoam cup and the scruffy dog would get it. Not nearly enough to live a life of lambos, but enough to live
if you want more, you still have to find a way to get more, thats the core of ubi
Thanks @rudyardcatling yeah the Finnish thing was really weird haha :P I'm not so worried about people not working anymore, I'm more worried about the hyperinflation, however SBI commented about that and I haven't read that, so I'm gonna read that now :)
where would that comment be, please ?
Here: https://steemit.com/steembasicincome/@sbi5/re-markdeheide-re-steembasicincome-steem-basic-income-interview-with-f3nix-20180610t161416225z
thank you ... i'll be sure to reward you with 1% votes once i have ned and blocktrades money hahah
thanks! :)
Short-term hyperinflation driven by the basic income driving price growth. That's an interesting thought, and one that I've seen come up a few times in conversations around basic income (in fact, it's very similar to the model inflation explanations given in econ 101, especially when taught by neo-classicists).
The model suffers from extreme over-simplification, in making two key assumptions.
Basic income programs would work better (and be more sustainable) if they explicitly target a low percentage of economic activity. Instead of saying $xxx per month, you target xx% of GDP (based on a rolling three years to smooth business cycle shocks). The intention is not for it to be somebody's entire income, but to be a base that insulates them from economic shocks in their own life. (Like how car insurance means that an accident doesn't destroy your finances.)
In this way, basic income has a high impact on the people that need it most, and a much lower impact on people that don't need the money at all. In fact, at a certain point, the taxes on a person's earned income would exceed the basic income they receive, meaning that person does not receive a basic income (in net), but it would still be there if their circumstances changed and they became more dependent on it.
The 'income multiplier' in economics measures how much each marginal dollar of spending impacts economic activity. The multiplier is inversely correlated to income levels. (The more somebody earns, the less each additional dollar that person receives will boost overall economic activity.)
So a basic income that removes excess income from high earners (with low multipliers) and passes it to low earners (with high multipliers) actually increases overall economic activity. There has even been recent research positing that the slow economic growth in the current 'recovery' cycle in developed nations is a direct consequence of our extreme wealth distributions.
Essentially, I'm saying that instead of creating inflation in the goods needed by basic income recipients, it would actually increase overall economic activity; maximizing multiplier effect by increasing the incomes of the demographics with the highest multipliers.
For the record, I don't advocate command and control economies, and I see serious drawbacks to taxation-driven economics. That's why I designed SBI as a social experiment to incentivise people with high incomes (dolphins & whales) to sponsor quality content creators of their choice for a basic level of support.
The question the experiment seeks to answer is 'Can we create a meaningful basic income program that is driven by voluntary donation/investment instead of command and control?'
While there have been some criticisms about the ROI of SBI, particularly from people that do not see the social vision and think of it merely as a money-making scheme, ROI was never the main point. The main point is bringing as many people in as possible without them having to pay anything at all. This is one reason why we almost never include ROI in our updates.
Given that more than 60% of members have never paid a single steem-cent to SBI and still receive their 'basic' upvotes, I would say that it's working exactly as intended.
@sbi5 thanks for this point, I hadn't thought about the percentage of GDP. I think that indeed if it is a low percentage the results willbe amazing. I don't know about The Netherlands, they wanted to test with 2000 euro a month per person I think, and if I calculate that 17M people x 24.000 euro a year = 408 Billion Euro's. If I remember correctly our GDP was around 800B last year so that would be way too much I think. They however also wanted to get rid of welfare completely, and replace it with a basic income.
Amazed. You should have written an article by its own with this, Joseph.
I didn't know that you designed it for dolphins and whales to sponsor quality content creators into. Do you find that's the way it's working? I feel like the most active SBI folks (but maybe it's just my sphere) are folks like @freewritehouse and other contest creators, who are often minnows, trying to help themselves and other minnows out.
It does seem to have leaned a lot more heavily toward minnows. Most dolphins/whales have pretty much ignored it. Part of that is the incentives to support through upvoting and delegation have not been adequate. Those are redesigned in the automated system, which will hopefully bring some bigger fish into the picture and give us the ability to help minnows and red fish even more!
Sbi10?! Huzzah!
Posted using Partiko Android
Great post
😎👍
You are a very interesting man. You really do have a big heart and you are extremly humble. I love the contest you host! Soon, as I transition my group to run itself ill be doing contests all over steemit and more frequently. I really enjoy finish the story contest! Glad to see the positive interview and plentiful shootouts to those closest to you!
Dear friend, let me say that I greatly appreciate your sustain to my contest/creativity workshop. As you saw, I want to keep things simple and I still didn't find a better way to stay on steemit than trying to write nice stuff and helping red-fish/minnows like I am. You participated three times, sustained everyone, voted and commented and ..I hope.. had fun with us! I really pay attention to these details..cheers! :-D
Must say that chatting with someone that I didn't know much about was fun and interesting. Love the way Steemit allows people from around the world to share thoughts and a little bit about their lives.
Looking forward to doing more interviews for SBI!
Ditto! It was extremely fun and a pleasure to know you... Sometimes when I browse everyone's blog I feel like a treasure hunter. See you in your contest @thedarkhorse asap!
Thanks for your help! I'll watch for you on Discord so we can discuss next steps.
@f4nix runs a great contest and is a very generous Steemian. This was a pleasure to read and learn more about him. Great job on the interview @thedarkhorse 👍👍
Thank you Bruni! The best reward on steemit is to grow together.. cheers!
great interview, i joined SBI 1 month ago and everything is good.
So far so good!
Great interview . @thedarkhorse and @f3nixare two great people supporting and helping the platform grow .
Yes they sure are!
Only the best ones of steemit get a ticket for the @steembasicincome journey! ;-) Thanks @wolfhart, even though we don't always interact I see that you always do good in a concrete way and represent a true asset for steemit.
I think sometimes we just spread ourselves so thin . There is only so much time .
It was sure nice to see your name up there .
Spreading thin is the perfect image. Probably this is just a phase of a longer evolution.. Time management in steemit, should we talk about it?
@f3nix I wish someone would I suck at it . I spend a lot of time here every day and There is so much I didn't do or connect with
I feel you! Someone here has to give steemian time management courses (not us).
Ditto 👍👍
Really enjoy reading it. Great to see what other think about the Steembasicincome program and how they use it!
It would be great if we would become a friendly community, where people do look further than the value of their posts!
Really looking forward to more of these interviews!
Cheers,
Peter
Did you check out our new discord server yet? I noticed when we were talking yesterday that it was not in our shared server list.
We are working to becoming a friendly community.
Just found it before reading this reply.
Just sended a DM to tcpolymath to get full access.
Let me know if I can help! Always available to help a friendly community!
Cheers,
Peter
I think that the direction is exactly that one, Peter! A community where solidarity and friendship reigns.
Such a good idea to do this interview series @thedarkhorse and @steembasicincome! It was great to learn about @f3nix who I hadn't yet had the pleasure of interacting with, but now I'll be making my way to his post :) I love the way communities grow through this kind of genuine interaction!
It's true, we never had the pleasure but we can easily put a remedy @lynncoyle1! I always saw you and you're one of those steemians in the "to know" list. If you want to check the contest you're very welcome 😁
I'd say the remedy is done :) So nice to meet you! And that's a very kind thing to say too :)
What an interesting interview 👐, as a newbie, I find so many great contents and people through this post and program, too. I want to know more about dynamic steemian, I have to start looking at it. Thanks for sharing this ✌️
You're welcome! We've been blessed to have early support from a lot of amazing people!
Thank you, indeed there's a lot to be curious about @dipoabasch!
I even curious about why many of Steemians back to fb, too. I think they don't know about how to reach the helpful program due to the lack of language to use? What do you think @f3nix? 🤔
I believe that FB and steemit are totally different concepts.. of course if you come from FB thinking that here's the same you'll be deluded. I'm not mothertongue but for sure I can tell you that there are strong Italian, Spanish, Pinoy and other communities.. the real problem of Steemit is linked to the reward pool management imho
I agree with you about the difference between Fb and steemit, ten years on fb I think won't be suddenly easy to get along in steemit, I use fb to promote my post ☺️ now. It depends on what we're here for, isn't it?
I am an open minded person, I know that language also a burden to bear, but I find it so many people who are willing to help anyway, and forgive me if I haven't known about the kind of pool. Uhm.. It is getting more and more interesting now.
I will take my time to read and learn more about this platform. Thank you 🤝
Oh, you don't have to be forgiven, steemit can be very tech-financial oriented and geeky! The rewards could be better distributed and something done to avoid the looting through selfvotes. There's a pool here of sbd/sp/steem and it goes shared by all those who post. But honestly, this place is an opportunity for writing and meeting incredible people.. that's the important ;-)
And for some reason, steemit is free from vonvon game (something like, what will you look like if you're opposite gender) 😂😂 and the chance to meet your ex girlfriend from elementary school...