It wouldn't work and it wouldn't equalize anything. I think one of the most important mind expansions the average person needs is an abandonment of dollars representing a baseline truth for what value is.

Dollars are not a baseline truth for what value is more than any other thing. Some of the other common ways people think about value are time, energy, risk/security, enjoyment, physical commodities, other currencies, social influence. All of those are as correct to use as a baseline for value. It's called value equivalence theory. You can always convert or express one as an equivelant amount of any of the others.

To the extent that dollars have dominated the average psyche as being the primary thing synonymous with value, that continuing depends on the continuation of factors that made it so. The world is full of things eager to take its place for how humans think about value. Of course it benefits some for dollars to remain the thing, which is why it is the thing. It's engineered so to help it marginally take the edge in the average person's mind among a large list of near candidates.

But while that is engineered they can't modify it in any and all arbitrary ways without breaking that.

Let's get to the point. If dollars are functionally not scarce or exclusive they will not be synonymous with value over things that remain that way. And some certainly will. In theory if dollars are not exclusive and you can convert them to any other thing then none of the others will be exclusive. I promise you that social influence/power will always be exclusive.

Now dollars aren't 100% exclusive now, nor is social influence, nor would they be post universal income. So let me define better the borders of exclusivity we mean here. We mean a resource which is bottle-necked to an extent that it can cause dread and fear, and through that dread and fear create an impulse for action. So this is really the invariant that has to continue, that is the opposes the claim of universal income. The implied claim of universal income is that everyone will have money and be able to live a relaxed life with no fear and no scarcity of resources at least to the extent that no one dreads it. This is the dream they paint. Not happening.

If people can convert money into influence and people have enough money to not face dread then they have enough money to convert to a sufficient amount of influence to face no dread on that front. But that will not happen. The competitive nature in which people use influence to control others and promote conditions for themselves at the exclusion others's wants guarantees that influence will never be shared in a way that will be universally dread free. This is especially the case since the control variant of influence unusually requires imposing dread on others. So someone, if not nearly everyone, will have some insufficiency in influence to be dread free, and therefore they have an insufficient amount of money to be dread free.

So one of three things can happen in universal income. The first is that no amount of it will ever bring the promised dream. Absurd amounts of inflation can happen and the payment amounts can track inflation and exceed it in hopes of delivering that dream and it will never happen at any level of inflation. The second, and very unlikely, is that no effort is made to keep universal income tracking inflation, and there is no effort to get it to deliver that dream after the first attempt. Inflation makes the payments negledgable and the world continues to function almost exactly like it does right now. So effectively there is no universal basic income. Third is that dollars really are non-scarce but other things are. People stop thinking about dollars as synonymous with value and they become tokens on your CBDC wallet that no one cares about. People now think in terms of remaining scarcities and the currencies and measures of value that still track real value. Those dollars buy none of these real measures of value because people will only give up a scarce resource if it will help address their dread, which at this point dollars don't. (Can I buy a steak with Donkey Kong points)?

To me the third option is a real possibility. If you treat dollars the same you would tokens in some obscure game, then they become tokens in some obscure game no one cares about. I could create tokens on Matrix and dole them out. No one would care. And people's relationship with the dollar would be the same under one of those three options. Now we know option 1 couldn't continue forever. Eventually people would give up. We know option 2 doesn't match human psychology. People will try to make that dream work. So option 3 it is.

Option 1 if pursued for a while can also lead to option 3. If there is ultra-inflation in some currency so that it can't represent a stable amount of other actually scarce resources then people will begin to think more purely in terms of those actually scarce resources or adopt thinking in terms of a currency that does. Remember there are a 1000 contenders. And then those tokens will become meaningless tokens stashed away on some app.

tl;dr: If they implement UBI they are basically suiciding their current advantage of being able to print something with no value that people think of as being the definition of value. Part of me almost wants to support it for that fact. The pain and chaos it would cause is maybe not something I would support. But another part of me is ready to call the bluff. Go ahead and suicide your bullshit monetary system. Go for it.