The Promise of People Powered Money with CirclesUBI

For this interview I spoke to Julio Linares (@Julio_Linares_) an Economic Anthropologist studied under David Graeber at the LSE, Social Outreach at the Basic Income Org, and Research & Community for CirclesUBI (@CirclesUBI). CirclesUBI is a project seeking to provide people a universal basic income using the xDAI ethereum sidechain based on mutual credit. You may have heard about CirclesUBI a while back when they first came out and everyone in cryptocurrency social media spaces was spamming their CirclesUBI profile to be trusted by three people in order to get access to their UBI.

During the interview we talk about Julio's ideas around how we can implement democratic money, how it relates to other anti-capitalist and anti-state movements like the Kurdish movement in Syria, and how a lot of influential European  thinkers were inspired by Indigenous cultures suffering under colonialism. We also talk about his experience working at CirclesUBI, what it was like to see the project go viral with most people misunderstanding how it was supposed to work, and the lessons he suggests future "left-wing" blockchain projects.

Sources
Julio's work on Ecology of Care
Julio's work on Degrowth Money

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ICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking.

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