IIRC, it was already tried years ago with Auroracoin. This was given to everyone in Iceland, supposedly initially (nominally) worth $20/coin. Icelanders merely had to opt-in and get their coin. Few did, and most seemed to sell immediately. Last I saw some years ago, there were multiple zeros to the right of the decimal point before the first significant digit of its value in any hard currency.

Not that one try means all others will fail, but any new proposal must at least attempt to discover and overcome the factors of failures like that one. I don't see any such effort in this proposal.

Too bad, because overall, the idea of distributing new currency from the bottom up is vastly superior to any other distribution proposal. Giving directly to the population will create the largest multiplier effect as the velocity of that money will be highest — almost all of it will be spent, and re-spent in a matter of days, whereas going into the banking system it will both be delayed in effect and also have much fewer transactions/currency_unit.

But does it need a blockchain? Not convinced.