Tradeable Compute Stake

Discussion

Em Lenartowicz:

"Poland ran the experiment on the tradable stake. So did the Czech voucher programme, and Russia's. A tradable stake in the hands of someone who needs cash this month becomes cash this month, at whatever price is offered, and the ownership re-concentrates exactly where it was heading anyway. If AI shifts value even deeper from wages to capital, as the IMF's economists, the International AI Safety Report, and plenty of other sources are foreseeing, then the ability to hold a slice of capital becomes the dividing line. While holding is exactly what poverty does not permit. An asset in a poor household is groceries deferred; it will be sold, and the appreciation will belong to the buyer.

And the people who cannot keep it are no edge case, even in the proposals' own country. Thirty-seven per cent of American adults could not cover a $400 emergency from cash on hand; 48 million Americans lived in food-insecure households in 2024. Widen to the world the technology is built on, and the numbers deepen: over 800 million people - one in ten of us - live below the World Bank's extreme-poverty line, and about twenty-eight per cent of us cannot count on reliable access to food. If you think people in these circumstances will hold a tradable capital asset, watching the stock chart for years while it accrues value, you are a lunatic. The assets will be back in billionaire hands within weeks.

Altman's sketch leaves open whether the compute slice would be a holding sold once or an allocation arriving monthly; my Polish kiosk answers both. A monthly allocation sold monthly is a basic income paid in kind, with the compute era's own kiosk machinery collecting the discount - and a capitalised slice goes the way of my mum's certificates. One stake-based design has lasted, though - four decades and counting - because it treats the word "stake" differently. Alaska's Permanent Fund keeps the principal in public custody - no resident holds a share, nothing can be individually sold - and what arrives is equal, unconditional cash for every Alaskan, every year. A basic income in all but name, funded by an asset its beneficiaries cannot be talked out of. A periodic payment that cannot be sold forward is the one form of stake its holder cannot be separated from."

(https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/abundance-distribute-itself-dr-em-lenartowicz-epcme/)