Topic: Thought experiment (Read 5549 times)

hello kors,
sadly your argumenting very good.
maybe you right. even if 1btc = 10m$, every person only 1333$. uhh! not very much.
maybe only way for better wealth is better access to trade via cryptocurrency. plus education of course. always education is most important. internet = free worldwide education, crypto = free worldwide payment access.
in long term i believe in solving.

Wouldn't a termograph image change all the time? Environment could influence the image (is it hot or cold). Someone who just did a workout, long walk, hot or cold shower or whatever would produce a different image. Someone who gain or lose weight would have a different image.

Even if it would be unique and don't change over time, how do you get all those images in a trustful way to the blockchain? How can you prevent uploading fake images?
Would you need to confirm your image for every transaction or only for the initial spread?

To enumerate these are the steps.

1. Record an image of thermograph of the person who are suppose to use the wallets.
2. Put it in the blockchain.
3. Only the person with that unique thermograph pattern will be able to use the wallet.
4. All others will locked out of the wallet.

Interesting thought experiment.

You would have to find something everyone can only give (e.g. small toe) or take (e.g. barcode tattoo) once in his lifetime.

Although, thinking about it, both options have drawbacks. How would you deal with persons losing their legs in an accident (in the example “give small toe)? And tattoos / implants can be forcefully removed.

Then I was thinking about how to prevent fraud when handing out the wallets/coins. How do you make sure those who distribute the wallets won’t steal? That is where I like the idea of handing out wallets during childbirth, as mentioned before. Couple that with a time-based restriction (e.g. wallet only becomes active 50 years after handing it out), it might reduce the incentive of fraud at the source (it would also not completely rule it out though).

I cannot think of anything watertight though.

I consider ideas more interesting that give every verified account holder "regular" incomes (e.g. some satoshis per month). You're right that a coin that is distributed "freely" in one single airdrop will have a hard time getting value. The main problem is that it is difficult that people would build an ecosystem on it, what is what gives cryptocurrencies a "value" - they would simply dump it when it has achieved some interesting price, the exact way Auroracoin failed.

But if a regular income appears, then for the account holders it becomes rational to at least keep the wallet for some time and use the coin. That concept can be combined with efforts to create a worldwide infraestructure (e.g. payment processing solutions, exchanges, e-commerce plugins). So I don't consider it totally impossible to create some "valuable" coin at the end.

The big - and maybe unsolvable - problem for me is a "un-gameable" identification process. As I already said, there would be a need to have a trustable identification provider in every country. Maybe private companies like https://www.trulioo.com/ or https://miicard.com could do the trick in the initial stage, but they don't work in every country - if such a service is available, in the future, in the whole world then a "worldwide basic income coin" can become possible. However, there is no way to make the process totally trustless.

Fingerprint scanners are cheap, yes, but also useless.

Fingerprints can easily be faked. You could claim 1 coin over and over with a new set of fingerprints.
http://www.wikihow.com/Fake-Fingerprints

The CCC (Chaos Computer Club) did this with just a picture from a press conference from the German minister of defense, to prove that fingerprints are not secure at all.
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/weltspiegel/chaos-computer-club-hacker-kopieren-fingerabdruck-von-ursula-von-der-leyen/11163644.html

I also don't know why people think that a finger print can secure their smart phone, when the phone is covered with fingerprints from the owner which can unlock the device...

What about amputee? There is also at least one example with a person without fingerprints at all.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/may/27/man-without-finger-prints

I would use finger print for Biometric identification due to the fact that every human being has unique fingerprint patterns. Most importantly, fingerprint scanners are cheap and widely available.

If I understood you correctly, you think, that one coin distributed to each person on earth would change, that poor people are poor.
I think, this will not change anything. You cannot make poor people get rich (or at least wealthy) with this methode.

Ok, let's do some math.
Lets's assume, that Satoshi is a really nice person and donate his 1m btc to create a new currency which is worth 1m btc.
With the current price of about 4000$ per Bitcoin, the market cap of this new coin would be 1,000,000 * 4,000$ = 4,000,000,000$.
At the moment there are about 7.5 billion people on earth. When each of them get one coin, this one coin would be worth 4,000.000.000 / 7,500,000,000 = 0.53$.
This calculation does not include the cost which would be needed to give each person one coin. If you would also calculate those costs, every coin would represent a big debt.

So, this would not change anything. Even with a price of 100,000$ per BTC such a new coin would only be worth 13.33$.

The new currency you want to spread out need to have a significant value to change anything. But this value does not come from thin air. Someone need to invest in it to give it the value it needs.
Just giving one coin to each person would not give this coin any value.

As much as I would love to see a better distribution of wealth, in the real world this will never happen. And unfortunatly this idea cannot work.
But prove me wrong. Maybe you have a better idea to give this coin the value it needs.

As several have said it is a totally pointless exercise to give everyone on Earth one coin.  There are two possibilites:

1) Since everyone has the same amount of coins the coins are perceived as having no value therefore they have no value and the entire experiment is a flop.

2) If for some reason the coins are perceived to have some value then within a very short period of time all the rich will end up having all the coins and all the poor will have no coins and again the entire experiment is a flop.

Biometric combination of fingerprint and retina/iris scanner.  The sum o f these two scans should be unique.

Then there's devaluable of crypto, because there's no "difficulties" on getting it
People just try to fake their data until the coin has no more value

you wrote benefit yourself and dont see benefit?
"Rich people stay rich, poor people stay poor."
exactly to change that fact.
satoshi may do this because he never touched own btc and acted very altruistic all the way.
i believe this his great vision: everybody have crypto equal.
sure would not invalidate other crypto. but satoshi supported coin with equal distrubution and adoption of lets say 50 - 90% would be insane value.

Some years ago (in the Auroracoin times ) I started a discussion about exactly that topic in the German Forum. Some found the idea ridiculous, others brought in interesting approaches, like a combination of phone numbers, IDs and audio verification. It would however not be 100% ungameable.

My conclusion is, for now: A worldwide airdrop that is completely (or at least, 99,9% ...) "un-gameable" would only work if in every single country of the world was a large, engaged group of users that cared about the verification process and knew the problems of identification in their country. One entity I could imagine as a "partner" would be local universities because they run their own identification systems, but they're not trustable in every country (in some, they're too close related to the government, in others, there's widespread corruption) out there - it would need the opinion of the local community about them as an input. Another interesting idea I read about were "identification parties" or "verification parties" (I don't remember the exact name), where a pseudonymous ID is granted to everyone that is physically present at a location where the ID is issued.

A thing that came in my mind as an alternative, would be a GPS-based airdrop: coins would be distributed randomly with the latitude of the receiver as "identification". But that would need trusted hardware and if someone can "fake" trusted hardware (e.g. an employee of the ) he would game the system.

All these approaches need some kind of trust - I doubt a completely trustless system would be possible unless we had a "big brother" kind of 24/7 worldwide vigilante state.

Why should Satoshi use his 1m btc to make this idea a reality?
Why should anybody waste his money for this idea?

What would be the result?
Everybody on earth would own one coin of a new currency.
This will not invalidate the old currencies.
Rich people stay rich, poor people stay poor.

I don't see any benefit for this. Or am I missing something?

that indeed is the only current solution. it would cost billions upon billions of $.
i really hope satoshi nakamoto uses his 1m btc to make this idea a reality!

After doing everything to ensure that everyone got only one wallet, some people would come and fuck up everything by forking the software and creating

Double the amounts in a single minute mate. in case if you are just learning about the world and how things work, this is why we have governments and why

We have so many organizations and agencies. if you want to succeed in a massive scale like your experiment the only way is to establish regional governments

To handle the work load for you and they all will have to follow one set of rules, AKA >GOVERNMENT< is born.

Maybe something that evaluates the retina or as many said you, with your national ID.

This thought experiment has already partially occurred. That's exactly what Auroracoin did with the population of Iceland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroracoin

Its distribution was tied in with their national ID system.

I've no idea how you'd achieve it internationally as it would be a shocking mishmash of attempts at identification.

I think we could use something like faceId which Apple uses on their phones, since all of our faces are unique! Which could easily become a possibility as coindesk reported apple and other tech companies were looking into cryptocurrency API's. FaceId could also be used for your bitcoin wallet password as well.

That would be a very hard thing to regulate. But i think it helps if you implement stricter user profile verification processes in to your wallet to ensure no duplication. I'm thinking of adding additional safety and unlock features like finger print verification or iris verification. Since most mobile phones have finger print scanners so that would do for a start.