Palai
Palai is a digital currency created by the Access to Basic Income E.V. organization in Leipzig, Germany, in 2018. Palai has no ticker abbreviation as of March 2021; it has a currency symbol, ¶ (the same as the paragraph symbol used in editing); the symbol is used after the amount, so if you want to represent twenty Palai, this would be symbolized by "20 ¶". The currency is known for its distribution as a universal basic income sent to all users with an active verification, and for the demurrage (a.k.a. evaporation) that occurs slowly over time to encourage the use of the currency. The currency is currently being used to pay for goods and services on various websites, mostly within Germany.
History[edit]
According to the network growth chart on the Palai website, Palai was founded in May 2018. However, the word of Palai was posted on various forums, mostly cryptocurrency boards, in November 2018, though the German classifieds website Das Schwarze Brett had already been using it for two or so months. The Palai currency had already been mentioned in the Crypto UBI Facebook group in November 2018, and some time in early 2019, the CryptoUBI.org website listed Palai as one of the digital currency projects that have implemented a universal basic income (UBI). Around this time, communities began to spring up, including the Palai Community page and group on Facebook (primarily in German), the Palai Currency page on Facebook (mostly in English), and the Palai Grundeinkommen group on Facebook (almost completely in German). German philosophy magazine HARP announced in a November 2019 blog post that they were taking donations and subscriptions in Palai. However, the Das Schwarze Brett site saw a trend around this time where most users of Palai were selling their coins; Palai is not officially traded on exchanges, so they have sold for different prices depending on the deal that each buyer and seller makes. As of 2021, Palai has fewer active users than it had in mid 2019, but if the transaction IDs are any sign, the active users still claim their basic income and even make transactions sometimes.
Economics[edit]
A finite number of Palai are minted every day, similar to a block reward in mineable cryptocurrencies. These new coins are distributed evenly among verified users as a basic income, also known as the Palai humanity dividend, a name that implies that all humans should receive this money just for being human. People can go ten days without claiming basic income; after ten days, the basic income for each day starts disappearing; for example, on the eleventh day without claiming, the money from the first day without claiming disappears completely, and so on, so users should claim every ten days; however, users who claim daily without missing one can create a "basic income streak"; there is no financial advantage for having a streak, but the website counts the streak so people who appreciate Palai can show how much they appreciate it by claiming regularly. The currency is not inflation-based like most fiat money, and not deflation-based like mainstream cryptocurrencies; it is demurrage-based, so people who save Palai for a long time will see their coins slowly depreciate; every six months, the demurrage rate (also known as evaporation) increases slightly, though likely it will stop increasing once it reaches 6%. The demurrage rate starts out small because there aren't many places to spend Palai, however a higher demurrage rate will encourage users to spend it once a wide variety of spending options are available. When coins expire from being saved for too long without being spent, the expired coins renew themselves and get sent to the basic income pool; so if you have 1000 ¶ for a year with a 1% demurrage rate, you will have 990 ¶ left with 10 ¶ having been leaked into the general Palai basic income pool. When Palai is spent, a consistent transaction fee of 0.02 ¶ is part of the transaction to prevent users from jamming the network with transfer spam. When Palai is spent, and even when a welcome bonus or basic income is claimed, a transaction ID is generated; transactions from January 2019 had five-digit transaction numbers, while transactions from late 2020 and 2021 had seven-digit transaction numbers; this is possibly a gauge of how much the network is being used, so if you get the transaction number 1642389, this is likely how many transactions have taken place in the history of Palai. People tend to find Palai attractive due to the demurrage feature, as a number of other basic income digital currencies are inflation-based, despite coins like Bitcoin being deflation-based. The number of active Palai users is believed to be in the thousands given the estimated daily block reward and the size of the daily basic income, since the daily basic income per person gets lower the more people join, and this value gets higher the more people let their verifications expire.
Verification[edit]
Verification, or person certification, is the process of validating people so they are eligible for Palai basic income. Even people without this can still be paid in Palai by another user, and they can spend Palai if they have some, but they are not receivers of any newly minted coins at basic income time. A Palai user must enter a text-receiving mobile number in the person certification field; the number must be a mobile phone number, since home phone numbers can be generated by VOIP services such as Google Voice and used to cheat the system. The text is sent after approximately one hour of the number being entered, to prevent a user from borrowing a cell phone for a couple of minutes to make a fraudulent second certification. Once the text is sent, the confirmation code can be typed into the field to create the person certification. The user is now eligible for Palai basic income; if it is the user's first time, they will receive a welcome bonus. This certification lasts one year, and two months before the certification expires, a warning appears on the user's Palai dashboard that they have to reverify; reverification can not happen before this warning appears. Reverification is exactly like a user's first certification, except welcome bonuses are not received on reverification; only first-time users get a welcome bonus.
Referral program[edit]
If User A refers User B and User B successfully completes the personcertification, User A receives an amount of Palai approximately equal to that day's basic income from the basic income pool, since the basic income pool is full of evaporated currency, transaction fees worth 0.02 ¶, coins from people who have discarded their accounts without emptying them, and unclaimed coins from people who haven't checked their basic income in eleven or more days. Referring users is highly encouraged in the Palai community to help expand Palai's user base, since a currency becomes more valuable with each user.