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I do not think bitcoin derivative is the right solution for something like basic income. It is hard to distribute resources fairly and anonymously, this kind o

I do not think bitcoin derivative is the right solution for something like basic income. It is hard to distribute resources fairly and anonymously, this kind of thing that governments excel at precisely because there is no expectation of anonymity. It might be possible to come up with a solution, however at that point it would likely be either too complex to be practical, or not fair, or not anonymous. TL;DR doing this with crypto-currency defeats purpose of crypto-currency.

monkeycantype 12y ago
I wonder if crypto-currency's best feature, might turn out to be not secrecy, but transparency. Imagine a government that can only spend crypto-currency, where it's every transaction only becomes a transaction by virtue of it being on the public record / block-chain. Where any transfer by the government to a recipient who was not publicly identified with signed keys, was a criminal act of fraud for which the government could be held accountable. I think, as you suggest, that would defeat the original design purposes of crypto-currency, but it might be purpose for which crypo-currecy works very well.
lukifer 12y ago
Another way of framing the problem is that we don't currently have a distributed way to authenticate identity at scale; currently the least worst solution is some kind of bureaucratic institution. (Public key encryption is a good start, but it doesn't prevent the creation of infinite sock puppets, or offer a good solution for stolen keys.)
- dllthomas 12y ago
  Part of the problem here is that we need to not only authenticate that you have a persistent identity - which we are very good at, human interface notwithstanding - but that you have a unique persistent identity. Since we need to let people join, that's going to take more than just math.
- patcon 12y ago
  Maybe the limiting factor for each participant is social interactions of a certain sort -- something to act as a rough proxy for "time", specifically "time interacting with fellow humans". After all, time is the finite resource that we can only divide between our sockpuppet identities, but we can't poof more of it into our aggregate identities. That's assuming that this "certain sort of interaction" is something that can't easily be scaled out of sync with our time (as could perhaps be done with our digital interactions on Twitter). My first crazy thought was some sort of average proximity from other human beings, where perhaps our phones could sign a digital transaction when we pass within a certain proximity and stay there some amount of time /t/, for some value weighted by proximity and time. The time-proximity (to make up a word, because why not?) from fellow humans might vary by geography, but I assume it might have some degree of consistency on the order of magnitude. So someone in Toronto, Canada would have a value comparable to fellow citizens, but would obviously not be on the same magnitude as someone in a rural Russian village. So if I'm in a certain geographic place and my time-proximity for interacting with my fellow humans is consistent, and aligns with margins of error for that place, then maybe some undescribed service or oracle monitoring the identity network are happy. but if that drops drastically, then maybe that's because i've created a new identity and started to sign interactions with that. Or maybe it's something more innocent, like a job switch. Or a depression. Maybe that's what the oracle needs to confirm. But anyhow, simple time-proximity wouldn't work, as the real humans are using phones that aren't visually confirming the interaction with another real human. So maybe it would need to be something like Google Glass that recognizes and signs transactions using eye contact as the trigger -- detecting eye contact as a symmetrical relationship, reading/sharing identities, signing and broadcasting a record of that human interaction. Someone could fake data, but it would likely interact with the "real" world network's data in a detectably odd way. I guess what this is all about is a distributed, self-referential version of TrustCloud.com. But none of this seems to solve the "this is a human: y/n" sort of question -- but more like a "this human is likely 80% of a human identity in geography X" or something like that. So maybe they now deserve a certain take of a pie (if socialcoin were a thing). Anyhow, I'm sure this is incredibly flawed on many levels, but it was a fun thought experiment to work through :) Feel free to point out any glaring errors in logic, or to promptly ignore it, for that matter
  - 12y ago

monkeycantype 12y ago

I wonder if crypto-currency's best feature, might turn out to be not secrecy, but transparency. Imagine a government that can only spend crypto-currency, where it's every transaction only becomes a transaction by virtue of it being on the public record / block-chain. Where any transfer by the government to a recipient who was not publicly identified with signed keys, was a criminal act of fraud for which the government could be held accountable. I think, as you suggest, that would defeat the original design purposes of crypto-currency, but it might be purpose for which crypo-currecy works very well.

lukifer 12y ago

Another way of framing the problem is that we don't currently have a distributed way to authenticate identity at scale; currently the least worst solution is some kind of bureaucratic institution. (Public key encryption is a good start, but it doesn't prevent the creation of infinite sock puppets, or offer a good solution for stolen keys.)

dllthomas 12y ago
Part of the problem here is that we need to not only authenticate that you have a persistent identity - which we are very good at, human interface notwithstanding - but that you have a unique persistent identity. Since we need to let people join, that's going to take more than just math.
patcon 12y ago
Maybe the limiting factor for each participant is social interactions of a certain sort -- something to act as a rough proxy for "time", specifically "time interacting with fellow humans". After all, time is the finite resource that we can only divide between our sockpuppet identities, but we can't poof more of it into our aggregate identities. That's assuming that this "certain sort of interaction" is something that can't easily be scaled out of sync with our time (as could perhaps be done with our digital interactions on Twitter). My first crazy thought was some sort of average proximity from other human beings, where perhaps our phones could sign a digital transaction when we pass within a certain proximity and stay there some amount of time /t/, for some value weighted by proximity and time. The time-proximity (to make up a word, because why not?) from fellow humans might vary by geography, but I assume it might have some degree of consistency on the order of magnitude. So someone in Toronto, Canada would have a value comparable to fellow citizens, but would obviously not be on the same magnitude as someone in a rural Russian village. So if I'm in a certain geographic place and my time-proximity for interacting with my fellow humans is consistent, and aligns with margins of error for that place, then maybe some undescribed service or oracle monitoring the identity network are happy. but if that drops drastically, then maybe that's because i've created a new identity and started to sign interactions with that. Or maybe it's something more innocent, like a job switch. Or a depression. Maybe that's what the oracle needs to confirm. But anyhow, simple time-proximity wouldn't work, as the real humans are using phones that aren't visually confirming the interaction with another real human. So maybe it would need to be something like Google Glass that recognizes and signs transactions using eye contact as the trigger -- detecting eye contact as a symmetrical relationship, reading/sharing identities, signing and broadcasting a record of that human interaction. Someone could fake data, but it would likely interact with the "real" world network's data in a detectably odd way. I guess what this is all about is a distributed, self-referential version of TrustCloud.com. But none of this seems to solve the "this is a human: y/n" sort of question -- but more like a "this human is likely 80% of a human identity in geography X" or something like that. So maybe they now deserve a certain take of a pie (if socialcoin were a thing). Anyhow, I'm sure this is incredibly flawed on many levels, but it was a fun thought experiment to work through :) Feel free to point out any glaring errors in logic, or to promptly ignore it, for that matter
- 12y ago