November 2, 2019 Journal article Open Access

Resilience: Links in path-based payments as "conduits" for tax redistribution, to guarantee basic income

Johan Nyren

REVOLUTION: Ripple, the multi-hop mutual credit system invented by Ryan Fugger in 2003, is an ideal topology for a new type of mass-scale redistribution of wealth. The credit lines in Ripple can be used as conduits for reallocation of transaction taxes, achieving scalability by “multi-hop routing”, the same design philosophy that governs data transmission on the internet. Tax is reallocated by “hopping” from person-to-person along credit lines, analogous to packages of data in TCP/IP, propagating until it finds a person without an “income”. This new mechanism for redistribution of wealth is fault tolerant, has no central points of control, and scales to infinite size.