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> Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI for the world. This kind of statement breeds skepticism of crypto. Does anyone think "proof of per

by runako 5y ago

> Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI for the world. This kind of statement breeds skepticism of crypto. Does anyone think "proof of personhood" is among the top 25 barriers for verifiable UBI for the world?

ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
I think so. Every other attempt I have ever heard of governments providing some sort of subsidy is always met by all sorts of schemes and incentives to try to game them. It would seem "being a person" is such a basic and unassailable standard that SURELY governments would be able to get a handle on that, right? Except, well, if you look at any discussion about election security, benefits payments, etc., in any area decently complex nation, it will quickly reveal that the devil is in the details when it comes to stuff like that, and that even in standards like that all sorts of fraudulent schemes abound. This is all, of course, not taking the context of a sort of GLOBAL UBI approach, where the possibilities to fake/forge "personhood" would be even easier.
- runako 5y ago
  I can name a couple of other blocking issues: - political will - perceived lack of funds Without the political will, this will not move. In America, we don't even have the political will to fund a social safety net on par with other industrialized nations. I would bet my money that no American living today will see UBI in America.
- pavlov 5y ago
  This is one of the areas where Americans see their own decrepit government infrastructure and extrapolate that all developed nations struggle with the same basic things. I lived for 35 years in Finland, and the government there has absolutely no problems verifying who’s a person. If Finland wanted to implement UBI, it could start sending money to resident citizens’ bank accounts tomorrow. Paper checks and other American-style 19th century banking relics are simply not a thing. Nobody needs crypto or a VC-funded eyeball scanner to get there, it just takes political will.
  - runako 5y ago
    Verifying personhood in America is not even a problem. The tax authorities are in the process right now of sending money to many (most?) Americans in the form of income tax refunds. There is no widespread concern about those payments being fraudulent, despite the fact that they are specifically payments to individuals.
    - tyrfing 5y ago
      > There is no widespread concern about those payments being fraudulent Tax refund fraud is a big problem, and the IRS, DOJ, etc have put a lot of effort into limiting it. Numbers are hard to find, but in 2013 it seems there was $30 billion in fraud, or around 10% of all refunds, with about $6 billion unrecovered.
      - AlexandrB 5y ago
        This might be an unpopular opinion, but any social program must be able to accept some level of "shrinkage" in the form of fraud. Just as retail businesses generally accept some level of loss to theft, return fraud, and shipping damage. Trying to create an "ungameable" system will either create a bloated bureaucracy that no one will want to use or will require a surveillance panopticon. That's not to say that fraud should no be investigated and prosecuted. Just that it's important to accept that you will never get fraud to zero and there will always be that one guy who's collecting benefits for a bunch of made-up identities.
      - UncleMeat 5y ago
        10% is not very much when it comes to barriers to UBI. If you told somebody who supported UBI that it was going to cost $1.1*X rather than $X, would they stop supporting it? If you told somebody who opposed UBI that it was going to cost $0.91*X rather than $X, would they stop opposing it?
      - runako 5y ago
        This is a good point. By widespread concern, I meant rather that tax return fraud generally does not rise to the level of campaign issue for people aspiring to political leadership.
axg11 5y ago
I agree with you, "proof of personhood" is not the greatest barrier to UBI. It is one barrier though. If you look at recent COVID benefits in Canada (CERB), there was widespread fraud in how this was claimed. That was within a country where the government has _some_ information on the majority of people, and yet was still unable to tackle this fraud at the point of claiming. In this case, the fraud rate is a good thing - there is a tradeoff between making a benefit accessible to all and reducing fraud. Now imagine a true, global UBI. It's difficult to imagine today, but perhaps in the future as a species we could agree that all people on Earth have the right to a minimum standard of living. Administering a global UBI across all nations would be impossible with technology we have today. The concept is near science fiction, but it is exactly the type of problem Worldcoin claims to be working towards.
- JacobThreeThree 5y ago
  Worldcoin wants to centralize welfare payments into one global system? Sounds like a bad idea from the outset. Funny how the promise of crypto was supposed to be about decentralization, yet efforts like this are pushing centralization.
  - drdeca 5y ago
    Depends what you mean by centralize / what aspects are centralized. Consider in one case, there are 12 currencies in use which are issued according to the choices of 12 authorities, while in the other case, there is one currency in use which is issued at a fixed schedule. In the latter case, there is a single system instead of 12, but there are no central authorities who can continually choose how much to issue. Similarly, consider 8 payment processors who are each run by companies which have authorities, who decide what rules they establish for what kinds of transactions they allow, contrasted with one payment processor which has no authorities who can forbid (as part of the payment processing) transactions. You might call “Everyone speaking lojban” “centralized” because it is of the form “for all x, f(x)=y_0 “ , but the hypothetical of “everyone speaks lojban” doesn’t involve a central authority.
    - 5y ago
merrywhether 5y ago
Fraud is a huge problem in current mainstream finance and government money programs, so why would crypto be any different? The US’ Payroll Protection Program covid response paid out tons of money to fake businesses because a similar “proof of legit business-hood” was not easy to determine in a timely manner. And stories like that do a lot of damage to the enthusiasm for such social programs, even if the program was still mostly effective; I’m not sure where PPP falls on the spectrum, but people would focus on a 10% fraud rate over a 90% success rate for instance. I think crypto is still a solution looking for a problem, but let’s not pretend that fraud wasn’t a massive pre-existing problem for humanity.
- runako 5y ago
  Businesses do not map to people. Much easier to spin up a shell business than a personal bank account that does not map to a real person, at least in the US. I can go further: a political environment where people are concerned about "fraud" in rescue money being distributed is not one with the political will to enable UBI at any meaningful scale. The two perspectives are largely incompatible. In any case, I'm not sure crypto would be my first stop for fraud prevention.
- lottin 5y ago
  > similar “proof of legit business-hood” was not easy to determine in a timely manner Source? I find it hard to believe.
- phphphphp 5y ago
  As the saying sort-of goes: choose two, cheap, fast and free from fraud. Governments could have prevented fraud but it would have been at the expense of speed, or it would have come at huge cost. Governments chose fraud as the cost of operating a fast and cheap system for distributing money to people in need. We should consider a more traditional social security program as a point of reference for fraud levels, and for those, the most cyclical estimates of fraud in most western countries are a few percentage points — and that fraud is traditionally misrepresentation of circumstance… not identity fraud.
- morelisp 5y ago
colochef 5y ago
It is a big challenge but there are far better experiments like https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ https://www.proofofhumanity.id/
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
  How is that better? If you'd said Idena, maybe. Uploading videos and photos of yourself plus a biography is ridiculous and will also be gamed by automated systems sooner or later. Already it's almost impossible for the average person to distinguish real from fake computer generated images.

by runako 5y ago

ChicagoBoy11 5y ago

I think so. Every other attempt I have ever heard of governments providing some sort of subsidy is always met by all sorts of schemes and incentives to try to game them. It would seem "being a person" is such a basic and unassailable standard that SURELY governments would be able to get a handle on that, right? Except, well, if you look at any discussion about election security, benefits payments, etc., in any area decently complex nation, it will quickly reveal that the devil is in the details when it comes to stuff like that, and that even in standards like that all sorts of fraudulent schemes abound. This is all, of course, not taking the context of a sort of GLOBAL UBI approach, where the possibilities to fake/forge "personhood" would be even easier.

runako 5y ago
I can name a couple of other blocking issues: - political will - perceived lack of funds Without the political will, this will not move. In America, we don't even have the political will to fund a social safety net on par with other industrialized nations. I would bet my money that no American living today will see UBI in America.
pavlov 5y ago
This is one of the areas where Americans see their own decrepit government infrastructure and extrapolate that all developed nations struggle with the same basic things. I lived for 35 years in Finland, and the government there has absolutely no problems verifying who’s a person. If Finland wanted to implement UBI, it could start sending money to resident citizens’ bank accounts tomorrow. Paper checks and other American-style 19th century banking relics are simply not a thing. Nobody needs crypto or a VC-funded eyeball scanner to get there, it just takes political will.
- runako 5y ago
  Verifying personhood in America is not even a problem. The tax authorities are in the process right now of sending money to many (most?) Americans in the form of income tax refunds. There is no widespread concern about those payments being fraudulent, despite the fact that they are specifically payments to individuals.
  - tyrfing 5y ago
    > There is no widespread concern about those payments being fraudulent Tax refund fraud is a big problem, and the IRS, DOJ, etc have put a lot of effort into limiting it. Numbers are hard to find, but in 2013 it seems there was $30 billion in fraud, or around 10% of all refunds, with about $6 billion unrecovered.
    - AlexandrB 5y ago
      This might be an unpopular opinion, but any social program must be able to accept some level of "shrinkage" in the form of fraud. Just as retail businesses generally accept some level of loss to theft, return fraud, and shipping damage. Trying to create an "ungameable" system will either create a bloated bureaucracy that no one will want to use or will require a surveillance panopticon. That's not to say that fraud should no be investigated and prosecuted. Just that it's important to accept that you will never get fraud to zero and there will always be that one guy who's collecting benefits for a bunch of made-up identities.
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      10% is not very much when it comes to barriers to UBI. If you told somebody who supported UBI that it was going to cost $1.1*X rather than $X, would they stop supporting it? If you told somebody who opposed UBI that it was going to cost $0.91*X rather than $X, would they stop opposing it?
    - runako 5y ago
      This is a good point. By widespread concern, I meant rather that tax return fraud generally does not rise to the level of campaign issue for people aspiring to political leadership.

axg11 5y ago

I agree with you, "proof of personhood" is not the greatest barrier to UBI. It is one barrier though. If you look at recent COVID benefits in Canada (CERB), there was widespread fraud in how this was claimed. That was within a country where the government has _some_ information on the majority of people, and yet was still unable to tackle this fraud at the point of claiming. In this case, the fraud rate is a good thing - there is a tradeoff between making a benefit accessible to all and reducing fraud. Now imagine a true, global UBI. It's difficult to imagine today, but perhaps in the future as a species we could agree that all people on Earth have the right to a minimum standard of living. Administering a global UBI across all nations would be impossible with technology we have today. The concept is near science fiction, but it is exactly the type of problem Worldcoin claims to be working towards.

JacobThreeThree 5y ago
Worldcoin wants to centralize welfare payments into one global system? Sounds like a bad idea from the outset. Funny how the promise of crypto was supposed to be about decentralization, yet efforts like this are pushing centralization.
- drdeca 5y ago
  Depends what you mean by centralize / what aspects are centralized. Consider in one case, there are 12 currencies in use which are issued according to the choices of 12 authorities, while in the other case, there is one currency in use which is issued at a fixed schedule. In the latter case, there is a single system instead of 12, but there are no central authorities who can continually choose how much to issue. Similarly, consider 8 payment processors who are each run by companies which have authorities, who decide what rules they establish for what kinds of transactions they allow, contrasted with one payment processor which has no authorities who can forbid (as part of the payment processing) transactions. You might call “Everyone speaking lojban” “centralized” because it is of the form “for all x, f(x)=y_0 “ , but the hypothetical of “everyone speaks lojban” doesn’t involve a central authority.
  - 5y ago

merrywhether 5y ago

Fraud is a huge problem in current mainstream finance and government money programs, so why would crypto be any different? The US’ Payroll Protection Program covid response paid out tons of money to fake businesses because a similar “proof of legit business-hood” was not easy to determine in a timely manner. And stories like that do a lot of damage to the enthusiasm for such social programs, even if the program was still mostly effective; I’m not sure where PPP falls on the spectrum, but people would focus on a 10% fraud rate over a 90% success rate for instance. I think crypto is still a solution looking for a problem, but let’s not pretend that fraud wasn’t a massive pre-existing problem for humanity.

runako 5y ago
Businesses do not map to people. Much easier to spin up a shell business than a personal bank account that does not map to a real person, at least in the US. I can go further: a political environment where people are concerned about "fraud" in rescue money being distributed is not one with the political will to enable UBI at any meaningful scale. The two perspectives are largely incompatible. In any case, I'm not sure crypto would be my first stop for fraud prevention.
lottin 5y ago
> similar “proof of legit business-hood” was not easy to determine in a timely manner Source? I find it hard to believe.
phphphphp 5y ago
As the saying sort-of goes: choose two, cheap, fast and free from fraud. Governments could have prevented fraud but it would have been at the expense of speed, or it would have come at huge cost. Governments chose fraud as the cost of operating a fast and cheap system for distributing money to people in need. We should consider a more traditional social security program as a point of reference for fraud levels, and for those, the most cyclical estimates of fraud in most western countries are a few percentage points — and that fraud is traditionally misrepresentation of circumstance… not identity fraud.
morelisp 5y ago

colochef 5y ago

It is a big challenge but there are far better experiments like https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ https://www.proofofhumanity.id/

trompetenaccoun 5y ago
How is that better? If you'd said Idena, maybe. Uploading videos and photos of yourself plus a biography is ridiculous and will also be gamed by automated systems sooner or later. Already it's almost impossible for the average person to distinguish real from fake computer generated images.