The Brazilian software engineer is one of the most vocal supporters of our project – and understands better than most people GoodDollar’s potential to deliver decentralised basic income at scale

On December 15, Fabiana Reis Cecin, a Brazilian software engineer and “universal basic income activist”, passionately outlined to an army of Twitter followers why GoodDollar excites her so very much. The thread, which was 17 posts in length, displayed her vast knowledge of both blockchain technology and UBI, plus the challenges UBI implementation has faced traditionally and – most importantly – how the GoodDollar global basic income and protocol might be the solution.

The 42-year-old Brazilian wrote: “GoodDollar is *designed* to *actually* be capable of serving every human being and actually implementing a planetary UBI system. By itself.”

The thread continued: “A complete global UBI system needs dozens of correctly-designed parts. GoodDollar has all of them lined up … GoodDollar, the Ethereum network [on which the protocol is built], the FUSE sidechain, and all other technology associated with the stack, is a technological marvel, a gift that allows us to pool our capital in its various forms to implement the funding approach to UBI. It means *we* can actually *do* it now.”

Fabi added: “The success of GoodDollar, *alone*, will trailblaze the understanding of fintech, crypto, crypto UBI and UBI among the mainstream … I hate everything. When I say that GoodDollar works, that is not a light statement.”

Her enthusiastic advocacy of GoodDollar and its potential is hard to beat – and her support has turned many people on to the project (including Helder S Ribeiro, our last #GoodPerson). She even wrote a column for Voice about the project just before the turn of the year. Indeed, earlier in 2020 she threatened to bash people over the head in the streets to make them sign up for GoodDollar’s daily basic income – we think she was joking! We simply had to feature Fabi as our first #GoodPerson of 2021.

Basic income advocate extraordinaire   

We caught up with Fabi shortly after the mid-December thread was posted on Twitter. She discovered GoodDollar in the middle of last year, while undertaking a survey of UBI projects using blockchain technology. “I evaluated all of them, and GoodDollar became my favourite one,” she says. “As a staunch basic income advocate, I support GoodDollar because I believe it is the system that has the best odds of reaching the most people with the largest transfer of economic power.

“I am trying to contribute in any way I can, with technical, application, and advocacy ideas. My mission in life is to promote economic democracy, and UBI is, today, the foremost movement for the implementation of economic democracy. Blockchain technology is the main social and technological avenue for implementing a mutualist web of social security that covers the entire planet. And GoodDollar is currently the most advanced and relevant initiative for building that web.”

For GoodDollar to be successful in our driving goal to deliver decentralised basic income on a global scale, Fabi believes we are on the right path, but urges members of our growing community to play their part. “The GoodDollar project just has to maintain its current technical course: to continue to develop all the blockchain and web tooling as the team has envisioned it,” she says. 

“GoodDollar has already solved the scaling issue with its current implementation and its roadmap, technically speaking. All that's left is for people to realise that GoodDollar is what Bitcoin and its clones tried to be but could not, which is people's real currency of choice that they actually have every day and use every day. That realisation will take some time, as people have to discover several things, such as the concept of basic income itself, as well as how much of a massive leap modern blockchain technology is compared to the previous iterations of the technology and to the legacy banking system.

“The community can help in many ways. For example by investing in GoodStaking and helping to spread the word, and helping with digital inclusion and teaching so that more and more people can learn about the currency so that it can achieve critical mass as a currency that is used directly in trade for goods and services.”

Building on initial success – to serve the under-privileged

What would success with GoodDollar look like for Fabi? “I think it will have completed its mission when it is transferring capital to the under-privileged in a way that makes an economic difference for them. But it is already a success now, in that it already proves, in the real world, that it is possible for us to get together and collaborate to build a global reach and global scale UBI system that is secure, scalable, efficient, user-friendly, democratic, and that actually exists and works.”

Finally, Fabi offers a message to others who are looking to get involved with GoodDollar and help us all achieve the ultimate goal and reduce global wealth inequality. “Sign up for a wallet and to learn the basics of claiming, sending, and receiving G$,” she says. “Then they would realise that every person in the world with shared access to a phone will be able to do what they just did, as easily as they have just done it. Hopefully then they will understand that if we work together, we can make the capital value of that G$ grow to the point where it will make a massive difference to those in extreme poverty.”

Fabi adds: “The experience of unconditional and democratic participation in a monetary mass is transformative because the use of money has massive symbolic, ritualistic power. If many people just use GoodDollar in that way, at some point we will all understand, collectively, the implications of possessing a scalable, efficient, and unstoppable monetary system that has, for the first time in history, built-in wealth-sharing. The Moon landings have got nothing on that.”