Designing Universal Basic Income and Trusted Execution Environments

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.” Special Guest: Alain Brenzikofer.