Every person, 24 hours a day, given as time, given to each other.

What this is

Time for UBI is a protocol for a different kind of currency — one that can't be accumulated without limit, one that arrives in equal measure to every person alive. Twenty-four hours a day. Issued at midnight. Spent freely, given freely, or quietly returned to the community at the end of the day. No one owns it. No one runs it from a capital. It's a commons, and like every commons, it works because people show up to hold it.

Each node is one of those people showing up. cat.ubi.asia is a node. So is the one next door. So is the one being stood up in a university lab on the other side of the world this evening. Together they are the network.

Three reading paths

• Read the spec ubi.vision

  The technical whitepaper. The protocol described in the language of engineers — handles, wallets, vaults, circles, federation. Start here if you want to know how the architecture holds.

• Read the book ubi.education

  Time for UBI: How Capitalism Broke the World and How Time Can Fix It. The long-form argument — ten chapters from the diagnosis to the design. Start here if you want to know why.

• Watch the ledger ubi.world

  The public transaction ledger. Live transparency: every minute issued, every minute transferred, every Circle settled. The network does its work in the open.

Host your own node

The network grows one node at a time. There is no central registry to apply to, no membership to be granted, no fee to pay. If you want a node to exist where you live, where you work, where your community is, you stand one up. That's it. That's the whole onboarding.

A node operator is the person — or the team, or the cooperative, or the institution — that runs a node. You commit no money to the project. You become no one's shareholder, because there are no shares. You run a node because you want a node to exist, and because the only way for a node to exist is for someone to run it.

The practical floor is honest and small: a server (a $5/month virtual machine is enough), a domain name, a Telegram account, and an hour of attention. You'll want some basic comfort with the Linux command line. You don't need to be a developer. The deployment guide is a step-by-step recipe — pull the code, set a couple of variables, start the process, watch the logs scroll by until your own bot greets itself.

The first hundred operators will know each other by name. The next ten thousand will know each other by node domain. The next million will simply be the network, and no one will think about it any more than they think about the email server that delivers their messages today.