Designing Universal Basic Income and Trusted Execution Environments

About this Episode

How do you design an effective universal basic income scheme on the blockchain? What are trusted execution environments, and how can they be used to enhance privacy?

In this episode, host Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity) speaks with Alain Brenzikofer of encointer, a blockchain-based universal basic income (UBI) system, and Supercomputing Systems, which is developing the SubstraTEE trusted execution environment (TEE) framework.

With encointer, Brenzikofer came up with a novel way for personhood to be established so that people can’t game the UBI scheme: time-synchronized meetups called ceremonies. Encointer is also potentially the first cryptocurrency project innovating local, geographically-based currencies. With SubstraTEE, Brenzikofer is working to improve the privacy, scalability and interoperability of Substrate-based blockchains by off-loading state updates into TEEs.

Highlights:
00:57 - What is encointer?
04:00 - How to model a UBI system
06:37 - Proportional transaction fees
08:05 - How encointer ceremonies work
10:37 - Innovating local cryptocurrencies
14:50 - Privacy and trusted execution environments
22:52 - SubstraTEE
30:27 - SubstraTEE target user base
38:35 - Current state of SubstraTEE and roadmap

Links:
https://encointer.org/
https://github.com/encointer
https://github.com/brenzi/substraTEE

Key Quotes:
“One thing special about encointer is that I’m not intending to have transaction-based fees. I want to have proportional fees. That means there is no issue with micropayments in developing countries for example. Because if you look at the transaction fees of bitcoin and ether as well, the transaction fees can be as high as a day’s income or even worse.”