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At sufficient scale, Glo can lift every person out of extreme poverty

14 points| glocoin | 3 years ago |globalincomecoin.com

21 comments

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AnimalMuppet|3 years ago

Forget "money" for a minute. Instead, think in terms of "stuff" - actual, physical goods, and also services.

Where does the stuff come from to lift every person out of poverty? There are only two possible answers - create more stuff, or redistribute the stuff that we have (or a combination of the two). Which one does Glo do, and how does it do that? Especially, "at sufficient scale", how would it do that?

setgree|3 years ago

A bit of both.

The long-term vision is to move (some portion of) economic activity onto a globally accessible stablecoin. We think this has potential to reduce friction in international finance & commerce, which will grow the economic pie. (The fact that it's actually still pretty hard to venmo someone from the US to Canada, or move dollars out of Argentina, creates a lot of deadweight loss and opportunities for rent-seeking.)

But ultimately Glo is redistributive. In the near-term, putting money into Glo is like putting money into a T-bill-linked savings account, except someone else gets the yield.

Hope that helps, happy to keep chatting, etc.

bluehorseray|3 years ago

Is this basically a low friction way to help people in poverty to invest in an index-fund? Not a bad idea

setgree|3 years ago

On the right track, but the core idea is:

Glo is a stablecoin that crypto investors/regular folks buy that generates returns for people living in poverty.

Glo gives money away through GiveDirectly, so the recipients get the money in their local currency.

More on the basic model: https://twitter.com/GLO_incomecoin/status/157187934049285325...

blacksqr|3 years ago

Somebody really needs to explain the law of supply and demand to these people.

They propose to invest 7% of all the money in the world in US Treasury bills and use the interest to eliminate poverty.

Of course if they came anywhere near that goal interest rates on T-Bills would plummet.

setgree|3 years ago

We note this elsewhere [0] -- and it's a fair rejoinder that we should probably include this on our actual website -- but if Glo reaches trillions of dollars of market cap, we're most likely operating in a world where we issue multiple stablecoins in different currencies. Each reserve would then be backed by government bonds denominated in each stablecoin's currency.

It's certainly true that if we added trillions in new demand for any particular asset, or even class of asset, we'd change the market a lot. At the point where we 'exhaust' demand for government bonds and drive their returns to zero, the global monetary environment would look so different that we'd probably need to adjust multiple things about our strategy and implementation. The doc in the original link is intended as a vision of what we think is possible in terms of scale, but the fact that we're talking about the far future pretty much necessitates that some of the implementation details will have to be clarified when we know more.

[0] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EAiwxZN4Jiyup8d9G/...

atdrummond|3 years ago

As with the previous article on this topic, happy to explain why I chose to join GLO as someone who is relatively crypto-skeptical or answer any questions I can. :)

jeffwask|3 years ago

"How long before the founder of this "stable" coin is on the run from authorities" should be something a can wager on Sport Books.

setgree|3 years ago

i fully endorse the creation of this market on PredictIt but we're real people, have pre-existing reputations and social ties, etc.

Our main funder is Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab, who's pretty integrally involved, whose reputation is linked to Glo's success/legitimacy, etc.

More on us here https://www.globalincomecoin.com/articles/careers

P.S. I am a real live person and my website is seth ariel green dot com