Any bumblebees in the Circles UBI community on xDai? Maybe you should be

That was another great friday Community Cafe voice call today. Thanks to everyone who joined. When Luke started talking about Circle it really triggered my memory. I had looked long and hard at Circle earlier, but dismissed it for some reason. Well, I took another long look today and I signed up.

I think Circles as a universal basic income (UBI) protocol is pretty awesome. My understanding, is that everybody deserves and qualifies for a UBI but the catch is that Circles can only be used in transactions with other Circles members. There are some mechanisms that make Circles especially useable in your immediate communities. You probably wonā€™t be paying Amazon deliveries with Circles but you might pay someone to make you a website, shovel the snow from the driveway or paint you a picture. I will revise this posting as I learn more about it.

I am excited to use Circles can be as a supplement to $hny. Maybe even help out with arbitrage for you savy traders out there. It probably will never replace $hny but it might be useful to have a second special currency to use with your immediate community. @bombus hat was another great friday Community Cafe voice call today. Thanks to everyone who joined. When Luke started talking about Circle it really triggered my memory. I had looked long and hard at Circle earlier, but dismissed it for some reason. Well, I took another long look today and I signed up.

I think Circles as a universal basic income (UBI) protocol is pretty awesome. My understanding, is that everybody deserves and qualifies for a UBI but the catch is that Circles can only be used in transactions with other Circles members. There are some mechanisms that make Circles especially useable in your immediate communities. You probably wonā€™t be paying Amazon deliveries with Circles but you might pay someone to make you a website, shovel the snow from the driveway or paint you a picture. I will revise this posting as I learn more about it.

I am excited to use Circles can be as a supplement to $hny. We can probably find some new wanna-BEEs and invite them to the Hive too. Maybe an xDai native currency could even help out with arbitrage for you savvy traders out there. It will never replace $hny but it might be useful to have a second special currency to use with your immediate community. @Bombus I know you mentioned an interest in UBI, and Iā€™ve seen a few others mention it though I canā€™t remember where. I mean, who doesnā€™t like free magic internet money right?

So I am applying, and apparently to verify my application I need 3 current members to vouch for me. Well that is tough but Iā€™m working on it. If any current member is willing to verify my application that would be great. Please fire me a dm. Can current Circles members say hello and share some of their experiences with Circle? That would be great also. There will be more than just me too. So I thought it might be handy to get an official forum post started so we can curate a little Circles family here at 1hive. I am Bright ID verified if that helps in any way.

If you are comfortable, please say hi. My name is Dave but I go by @Blazingthirdeye in Circles and Twitter. I look forward to meeting you all and also helping out the Circle community. Though how we will help them by receiving their free money I donā€™t quite understand yet. Soon enough. Maybe we can get our applications verified by each other somehow. Or help providing resources to other applicants in need of a reference.

Thanks! :pray:

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I have only dipped a toe into the Circle ā€œsphereā€. I went to their DAO Rush week event, which was a poker game that they play every week. It was pretty fun and was how I got vouched for. Iā€™m not sure if I can now vouch for people, but I would gladly vouch for youā€¦just gotta figure out how. I havenā€™t used it for anything since that day, but definitely like the concept, and the people were pretty rad too!

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I couldnā€™t figure out how to join I think I need 3 other people to join or something. Ended up moving on to something else. Maybe I will try again

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Can work-around the 3 validator thing by sending 0.2 xdai to your circles address (copied from referral link). It worked like a charm and I got in. Only problem is there are warnings throughout their docs about not trusting people you donā€™t know closely in real life. Iā€™m not sure how they expect it to function with COVID in playā€¦

I think there is great potential for creating a layer 2 type group currency build upon Circles. Because it is actually a great automatic sybil-proofing and identity piece.

I am toying with an idea of creating neighborhood/condo community currency based on Circles. It seems best fit to a closed small ecosystem to start.

It is more complex than first glance suggests. Each personā€™s circles ā€˜walletā€™ is actually a proxy contract to a Gnosis Safe. Each persons tokens are erc 20 and require gas for transacting. But all transactions go through a Circle relayer and so there are issues with sending large amounts to people far away on the trust spectrum. Basically it uses a chain style system of just hopping or leap frogging through trust links so if I donā€™t know/trust Bob I can still transfer $ to him because Bob knows Alice who knows Jill who knows John who knows me. Lots of transactions in there.
Also, it doesnā€™t appear to be compatible with web3 and metamask. Seems to be all browser based.
It is fun to learn about and nice to watch the wallet grow even if Iā€™m not sure they will ever get spent. They give great detailed examples of how to create a circles ID manually and mint circles without the slick interface in the docs.
I need to help my condo community see the benefitsā€¦

Now Circles warns only to trust people I have met and trusted in real life. This is difficult. I am a little uncertain about how to mitigate this requirement and I am unsure about the wisdom of sharing my address to strangers but here it is anyways, If you want to expand your circles you can add me and we can maybe have a quick voice chat to get to know each other. @bombus I already trusted you :open_mouth::grin:

My Circles UBI profile!
https://circles.garden/profile/0xeF5A1072486726bDbfba475941499fB44FFcc007

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We are now connected.

This is a particularly tough issue to solve right now considering the state of the world. Itā€™s the same with BrightID. In an ideal world, we would all be meeting up at crypto conventions and stuff to connect IRL. These networks are still in the bootstrapping phase too where seeding trust in the network is really crucial. While I donā€™t think that they have completely solved the problem of Sybil attacks, I think they are certainly a step in the right direction and they definitely make it harder for Sybils to operate. I believe they will continue to get better. Itā€™s just a matter of time and tech.

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I went and signed up after the Cafe call too and just like for @Monstrosity I quit as soon I saw you needed 3 vouchers. Thanks for the .2 xDai trick though that worked for me too. I canā€™t imagine that Circles wanted that to be possible so not sure how long thatā€™ll last.

Iā€™m happy to share connections with other Bees as well:

https://circles.garden/profile/0xD20AE6080433489c27850527e675b995622ccb5f