It isn't really free money because you have to make the effort to contact them to get a share. But after that first dispensation, how do you earn more? It needs exchange listings, and merchant adoption, or at least OTC shapeshift-style exchangers to give it exchange value. Unless it has reasonably compelling utility, it will have no value and more or less will be worthless.

I don't see any real reason why it could not acquire new value, except if it is issued too aggressively and users are primarily trying to sell it and nobody wants to buy it. UBI is really a nonsense idea, completely ignoring the facts of economics, that only useful (and durable) and scarce things have exchange value. This thing will not work if the last element is wrong, and without adoption the utility will also be lackluster.

Ultimately, all monetary items tend to be relatively cheap to acquire but do not become valuable if there is too much, if it's difficult to use and store, and if nobody accepts it as payment or for exchange.

In my opinion, a far better 'UBI' program would see them giving out crypto mining rigs on a payment plan. One decent current model miner only costs around $1500-2000 and pays for itself in 3 months. The sticky part of such an idea would be in ensuring that people don't just get them, sell them anonymously and go incommunicado. In fact, Steem itself is a great UBI, or it could be better at least, if it had a social credit system implemented in a reputation system, one that mandates distribution and gives no benefit to self-assignment of rewards. The way it is right now it's less than good because of the binding of stake to influence, and the fact that there is a tiny oligarchy of elite accounts that dictate everything, and who can silence critics by shutting off the rewards faucet. But I won't go too deeply into that problem, as nobody here who has influence cares about distributing it, a classic prisoner's dilemma.