The crypto thread

[Moriarte]

It's enough to pay for 5-10% of monthly expenses by my estimation.

The lion's share of the funds is provided by USA through COFA. In return USA gets military access to 2 million square miles in the Pacific, which helps with countering China.

The key point (to me) is that this "UBI" (which doesn't even cover basic) is not surplus wealth set aside by one part of Marshallese to finance the less fortunate Marshallese. It is US aid+debt, taken on by the Marshall government through issuing tokenised bonds.

Compared to that the Saudis and their neighbours are much closer to actual UBI by financing "citizen income" with oil surpluses. Their total UBI-like payouts is in the billions of USD annually. Marshall island project is mere $27 mil annually paid mostly by the US taxpayer. (Although they say they plan to scale to $100mil per year through more bond issuance!)

 

[Moriarte]

There are really only three ways people finance anything called “UBI”:

1. Sovereign dividend - you own so much oil/minerals/land per person that the rents pay citizens directly (Alaska PFD, Saudi Citizen’s Account).
2. Tax-financed - you’re a high-trust, high-GDP country that can raise the money domestically without collapsing (most European pilots, Andrew Yang-style proposals).
3. Aid/debt-financed - foreign donors or new sovereign borrowing keeps the checks going for a few years (Marshall Islands 2025, GiveDirectly Kenya, Mongolia 2010-2012). This is just subsidised cash transfers wearing a UBI costume.

Bottom line: if you’re a rich country sitting on insane wealth per capita, you can hand citizens a real, durable dividend. If you’re poor, you get a temporary, donor-funded experiment that dies the moment the grants or bond buyers walk away. Norway and Singapore-style outcomes (so wealthy that direct cash dividends are either possible or unnecessary because public services are already world-class) are the only two stable endgames. Everything else is theatre. Crypto isn’t the issue here - it’s just a fancy pipe. The real question is how most countries ever reach the level of per-capita surplus where a sovereign UBI is even on the menu.