Introducing MUNI (the idea, not the coin...yet).
I've been thinking a lot recently about ways to make my city (Durham, NC what what!!!) a better place to live both now and in the future. I had the idea of a municipal coin (MUNI anyone?) that would work on a local level and provide benefits to citizens within their own municipality . I'd love some feedback, assumption busting, etc so that I can think a lot more deeply about this and also understand what is both good, bad, and impossible about the idea.
THE IDEA
Imagine taking the STEEM model (or parts of it) and applying it to some of the problems we face in our communities. IE, you get MUNI for doing different types of actions most based around Civic Engagement, but also mining, and upvotes (say you create good policy, or just do something awesome like save a cat). You can then use MUNI on things like city museums, public transportation, EBT/Food stamps, local businesses, affordable housing, etc. But first you have to...
GET THAT MUNI:
- Voting
- Recycling
- Using Public Transportation
- Donating goods
- Community Service
- Etc (i feel like i'm missing some obvious things).
Another avenue that could be interesting is providing space (public library) and training so that the desolate and full of despair could actually become a significant part of the mining/witness network and thus be provided on some scale something that might start to resemble universal basic income. I will be the first dude to admit though that this avenue is full of some massive challenges and roadblocks and is potentially garbage. The community service piece alone though I think could provide enough financial incentive and flexibility to really change both communities as well as help lower income families begin to rise to something that might resemble a new middle class. Or at least to not have to work four shitty ass jobs to provide for the fam. But let's get back to the spend...
SPEND THAT CASH MUNI:
- Public transportation
- EBT/Food stamps/groceries
- Local businesses
- Affordable housing
- School lunch
- City Museums
- Community College
- Vocational School
- School Books
- lots more stuff
So that's the concept in a huge and not very delicious nutshell. Here are a few of the massive challenges:
CHALLENGES
- City infrastructure to monitor transactions and provide MUNI
- Providing smartphones to the lowest income users of MUNI so that they can collect points
- Training an uneducated demographic how to provide value to a blockchain
- Things that i'm either forgetting or that people much smarter than I will point out to me now.
Hopefully this wasn't a massive waste of anyone's time. I'm really curious as if to something like this could work provided the buy in from the community as well as the city that would have the implementation challenges. Would love to hear thoughts, criticisms, etc...