We don’t have food stamps in Australia but they seem to work well in the USA – I don’t hear anyone complaining about them. Australia is trialling something similar for people who are receiving benefits and have repeatedly failed a drug test.

Universal income has received a lot of discussion recently, and is being championed by Silicon Valley.

And of course BitCoin is still doing well.

Why don’t we combine all 3? Everyone receives a universal income, via purpose-made crypto-currency, that can only be spent on certain items like food and rent.

Using crypto-currency to distribute universal income is not a new idea, and it has been discussed in a comprehensive article at Vice.

My two cents is that:

• it is easy to implement, and harder to cheat, for making it available for only certain categories like fresh food, public transport, and rent
• because it will be a government that creates the currency, it is more likely to be adopted as a general digital currency for everyone to use
• welfare payments and the salaries of government employees could be achieved with it. See my idea on this an Ordu