Topic: Thought experiment (Read 5593 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.

Brain scan: you watch a sequence of images with a helmet of sensors. Your brain scan is sent to AI computer that has learn how to recognize who is who. It should come soon and there's a busyness here.
DNA can be stolen

Give everyone N coins at birth.  Eventually all those that did not get coins at birth (you and me) will all die off and everyone alive will have been given their N coins at birth.

But, eventually, those that collect coins will be rich and those that spend them will be poor.

You would have to require a proof of identification for each person to claim a wallet like valid ID's and you must be able to  locally connect them to your system to verify each accounts. You can also take partnerships to known banks to process and control account creation.   

I also think that there is no solution to this problem unless you find something what every person on this planet can only do once.

The question is also what you want to achieve with this. Do you just want to give every person one coin, nevertheless what they already own, or do you want a fair distribution of wealth?

The only possible solution posted so far ist from McKane


But I would skip the last point, that the ship goes back to earth to prevent replay attacks.
The spaceship should not be able to return to earth.

Next point: No one who enters the spaceship is allowed to take anything with him what could have value.

Even if there would be a solution to distribute exactly one coin to each person on earth (or mars), this would not change anything as long as there are other currencies and other valuable things owned by the people.
This one coin will not make any difference to the current distribution of wealth, if the old value remains. Hence no one should be allowed to take anything with them to the spaceship. But this is actually also mostly impossible as people are corrupt, can be bribed etc.

Next point: if however we manage to distribute exactly one coin to each person, it would not take long until we have the same situation as now.

And the reason for this is, that all people are different.
Such a system can only work if all people have the same ideals, the same morals, the same knowledge, are not greedy and all want the same things and so on. But this is an illusion.

There are always people who are smarter than other people and gain an advantage over people who are not as smart.
There are always people who want to have more than other people.

Even people who won the lottery but are unable to handle money correctly, will lose it again after some time. There are more than enough examples where this actually happened.


This means, a fairly distributed wealth is not possible for humanity.


I can think of a world completely without money, where somehow everyone can get the things he want ("want" not "need"!).
The only way you can achieve this is by connecting everybody to a virtual world where things you want can be created instantly and harm to other people does not have an effect to them physically.

Let me close this post with a quote:

Well it looks like we are going to be micro-chipped one of these days so it might be easier than you imagine. Your thought sounds like the beginning of a Universal Basic Income.
You forgot to mention what you would do with the remaining 17.5 billion coins?

Beside the DNA which is not practical, you could rely on fingerprint of all 5 fingers of let's right hand, and accept the margin of error(quite low)
You could add bio metric measurements of a person's face, like the ratio between the surface and the distance between the ears e.t.c.
I think this is already done by specialized agencies but I am sure you will not get those algorithms in the open source arena.

For this, you first need to make an identification system with decentralized architecture with the blockchain.
And only then to each identifier issue a wallet with 1 coin.

Or use one of the currently being developed - Civic or Humaniq.

DNA is not practical. I would use a combination of personal factors like, voice print, eye print, finger print, and tendency measurement like a finger signature on a smart phone.

If that's not enough for you, you can add additional variables around preference, like allowing the user to pick the order of the sign-in process, further complicating the ability of someone else to compromise security. There are other more complex tendency variables that could be built, but you get the idea.

The only way is as someone said:

You enter through a gate, you get one coin.

Somehow, it is impossible to re-enter the gate.

One way that comes to mind:

People get onto a spaceship, and fly to Mars.

Every person leaving the ship gets 1 coin.

Ship goes back to Earth to get more people. Rinse and repeat.

It impossible in general. Only in way u use a passport but in each country its different.

Exactly. It would be more practical to handout coins proportionally to some balance of cryptocurrency a user already has (like it happened with Bitcoin Cash on exchanges)

This is why this equally distributed money will change nothing.

It would be interesting to see how it plays out economically.  How some people within this economy would end up with most of the coins ... The 1 percenters.

As a thought experiment you can create an access gate. Everybody passes through once, and gets handed a wallet.
This is cheaper and faster than taking DNA samples, and better for privacy.

On a practical small scale you can give your new wallets to students entering their university building, passengers entering a plane, or fans entering a stadium.

On a practical large scale you can use facebook. Many people have more than one account, but you can reach a billion real people.

In other to prevent someone from claiming more than 1 wallet. You will need to setup a machine for scanning both thumb, eye and teeth because every individual have a unique thumb, eyes and teeth shape.

People can and do have more than 1 phone number. He wants everyone to start with 1 coin, so they can only claim 1 wallet.

How about approaching it from the other direction. It isn't a realistic proposal but it could/should work.
Everyone can collect their coin/wallet, and when they do (they would have to physically collect something) you could mark them or fingerprint them. By mark them I mean a small tattoo or alike.

Then whenever someone collects their wallet, if they are marked, or have already given their fingerprint, they cannot collect another wallet.
People will cheat the system, no matter what you do. Removed tattoos or silicon finger prints or so.  People will also use the old system to corrupt the new, i.e. the poor will sell thir new coin to the rich, meaning that the rich will dominate this new coin too, making distribution unfair.

Google caller id spoofing

why don't you just use phone verification? no one can have the same phone number as yours, am i right?
but i can't understand the purpose of prohibitting users from having more then one wallet! what is that good for?
can you explain please.

I can see the idea of hashing DNA in futuristic dystopian future

The idea of giving all people 1 coin is good but how to make sure that people would not be claiming again and again can be so tedious in terms of resources. In case of implementing KYC system, that also can take a lot of time and manpower because those documents have to be verified and software for this work still need some people to make sure it is really working (and this type of software will never be perfect).

Anyway, just want to inform all here that charitable programs with an emphasis on giving people some sort of money will never work in the long run and can even lead to some form of corruption. In the history of developmental work, money alone will not really solve the curses of poverty and deprivation. You can give all people all the money but after some time they will get back to where they started.

However, I salute the idea of helping people.

nice thoughts here, it's also a nice question it also make me stop my activities in while. I suggest biometric checking might work.

In this way no need to mine. Just create new coin address to get 1 coin. Interesting idea but I think coin cost will be about zero.
The idea of limitation of new address creation in a network will not work for sure.

It'd be funny if there was a tax on online games or something, or an altcoin that held a % of all transactions for a food based charity. Or any charity really. and the charity voting was based on the network.

Anyway this was a fun experiment, and the deeper question of giving stuff to everyone on earth im sure is something that's been addressed forever.. so I hope if something like this happens its for food and water first : )

I think gamification of "giving everyone food" would be more effective. Like that online game where you play with rice and you earn rice for people in third world countries.

I wonder if we could do something similar with mining, or if miners could encourage higher fees to do such a thing.

Isn't this effectively what CIVIC aims to do? (https://www.civic.com/) Acting as an middleman between trusted identiy verification services and other services that require your ID. It's funny to think that something as "simple" as giving everyone on the planet one dollar or whatever would be so complex. Tons of people dont even have computers too- so thats a big issue for distributing something like this. I think it would require a really big team of people working together all over the planet to distribute this. I hope if a system like this is ever created that it's used to help give everyone food.

OK. Let's say we got over this DNA problem and everybody has 1 coin. Now Alice transfers his coin to Bob (because Bob threatened her with a baseball bat for example) . As a result Alice is poor and Bob is the richest guy on earth.

PGP key signatures that creates a web of trust. Who's to say you are not a clone? DNA also changes over time (although not significantly).

If 100 of your close friends/peers say you are you, then that should be enough...Right? Well...
What if 1000 of someone else's friends say otherwise?

Now it comes down to who has existed first.

If my web-of-trust exists first, I am effectively the real me.

yes they can be but it still work in the other ways. and it can help in this way

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, DNA analysis has revolutionized forensic science, and has become a dominant tool in law enforcement. Today, DNA evidence is key to the conviction or exoneration of suspects of various types of crime, from theft to rape and murder. However, the disturbing possibility that DNA evidence can be faked has been overlooked. It turns out that standard molecular biology techniques such as PCR, molecular cloning, and recently developed whole genome amplification (WGA), enable anyone with basic equipment and know-how to produce practically unlimited amounts of in vitro synthesized (artificial) DNA with any desired genetic profile. This artificial DNA can then be applied to surfaces of objects or incorporated into genuine human tissues and planted in crime scenes. Here we show that the current forensic procedure fails to distinguish between such samples of blood, saliva, and touched surfaces with artificial DNA, and corresponding samples with in vivo generated (natural) DNA. Furthermore, genotyping of both artificial and natural samples with Profiler Plus® yielded full profiles with no anomalies. In order to effectively deal with this problem, we developed an authentication assay, which distinguishes between natural and artificial DNA based on methylation analysis of a set of genomic loci: in natural DNA, some loci are methylated and others are unmethylated, while in artificial DNA all loci are unmethylated. The assay was tested on natural and artificial samples of blood, saliva, and touched surfaces, with complete success. Adopting an authentication assay for casework samples as part of the forensic procedure is necessary for maintaining the high credibility of DNA evidence in the judiciary system.

http://www.fsigenetics.com/article/S1872-4973(09)00099-4/abstract

afaik this assay has not been adopted by law enforcement anywhere, and don't get me started on fingerprints. Juries are still too easily bamboozled, and criminals almost always leave compunding forensic trails.
the 'assay' may also be more of a kite sent out by some company to feel for interest. (Who paid for the above 'research'?)

another datapoint to distinguish an individual might be gait - we all have a different walk, or so 'they' say
another is your GPG fingerprint

finally, Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age' is a great antidote to socialist leanings.

Another issue to consider is that people who are wealthy will amount more wealth since they're able to do things like buy the property pushing the remaining house prices up thereby making more people have to pay rent which makes the home owners even wealthier again in a vicious circle.

To solve that you build more houses or impose taxes to make owning more property uneconomical to the wealthy... the same would need to be true for any coin to represent equal wealthy playing field.  Even if it was rebalanced each year people would simply move their value out of the coin into property, gold, bitcoin, etc.. and the cycle continues.

Not saying this is a solution, just highlighting the issues to overcome when making a fairer economy that allows for capitalism.

What is different this time however is we can do unthinkable things than before, e.g. each person can now own a stake in a fraction of a resource in realtime.  That opens some new opportunities to the ways economies can be run.  E.g. take the basics of an egg farmer.  He can now distribute 0.00000001% of an egg to every individual in the world.
A house builder could distribute say 0.0001% of a house to every individual.  Once someone owns 100% of an egg they can go to the egg farmer to redeem it.

Not sure what this would be called yet and how it would play out with incentives to work but moves more towards a barter trade without money which is probably a fairer society.

At the moment it seems too complex to implement in reality but could make a great PhD thesis.

I also thought about DNA but like many people mentioned it would be very expensive.

Than I thought about a system that could monitor different parameters (IP, IBAN, Computer, Smartphone, location, language...) that would remain secret. When the system would detect that someone is using 2 wallets it would destroy those 2 wallets. Making it counterproductive claiming more than one wallet. But I don't think such system is possible because it would be very complex and it could give many false positives.

The reason for this thought experiment is that I think wealth is not fairly distributed (duh) and a 'universal coin' could maybe reduce this problem (remember this is a thought experiment). Even with bitcoin (please don't be buthurt) people that join later have a big disadvantage and the biggest reasons for this is are: they didn't hear about it or couldn't access it or the price is to high for them. Giving everyone access to this 'universal coin' would partially solve those problems. Maybe with a staking system they could even have a sort of interest (like a saving account).

I've been thinking about this precise problem for a long time.  It's to effectively rid the sybil attack vector in order to do a fair distribution globally.

I went down the route of microminers to copy how Bitcoin solved the problem of sybil attacks.  The issue there is it doesn't really work on individuals since people can mass market these microminers to artificially increase their family size and thereby have more funds available to spend.

One solution was to mix in a degree of peer authentication a bit like a tangle.  I guess this is an area of ongoing research though...

I love this and may use part of the idea with something we are working on.

-It would require a DNA sample and you still may have a few openings in the net, such as identical twins

It would be easier if you were comfortable with a success rate lower than 100%, like say 95%. That extra 5% would be much costlier to get.

Some people are chimeric and some of their tissues have different DNA than others. e.g. due to combining with a sibling in the womb.

I can see it now, the new alt coin. DNA coin, pre-mined and a wallet created just for your convenience. Every person in the world has the right to one so in order to claim yours completely free, just send us a copy of you DNA STRANDZ. You just pay shipping  





Also fingerprints can be altered as well. Shoot even DNA may cause a problem in some individuals including identical twins etc etc

Passport, license, ID in general doesn't work. They can be and are faked all the time.
The real way to verify someone's true identity is biologically... Fingerprint/DNA tests.
Each person is different in this regard.

I agree, this is the only verifiable way.

At the same time that the DNA sample is taken from the human,
"the sample takers" would also scan their Hand & Foot prints and their
Retinas, so that all four are hashed together.
 
Not only would the other three data points allow more precision when
distinguishing between twins/etc and clones, but also adds more
security layers for any other systems that are built upon this data later.
(In effect, this forms your "Living private key", which will make each
person ID-able and verifiable/accountable for every active interaction
in society. Since DNA can be easily attained by a few cells and without
needing the human's permission, at this point in time humans will wear
special fitting gloves and eye lenses to prevent passive "ID thefts" in
public. The lenses can shift within the electromagnetic spectrum and
perform functions like vision correction, night vision, and UV protection,
and do not need to be removed ever, even during sleep.)

Though the ultimate outcome of maintaining/using this type of data
and systems will be used to grant/restrict individual rights in daily ways
(ex. access accounts, access doors, access stores, access computers,
access transportation, etc) it will only be used for good within the human
populations that are maintained and monitored by AI.

If this type of technology is used with today's world population and
human governments that do not defer to AI governance, it will be
used by a few humans to oppress many humans indefinitely. Data
mining this data (DNA, Hand&Foot Prints, Retinas, etc) should not be
allowed or legalized until better system to prevent its abuse are created.

That would be the biggest dox this planet has ever seen just in case. Also, if it requires such verification, how would the people be motivated to collect their share of the crypto? But that is another story. The only thing to claim it  by every single person in this world is by submitting proof of identification like IDs and (possibly) hair samples for DNA testing (which is very expensive).

Forget about the wallets and coins.  Your thought experiment can be simplified.  Simply ask yourself:

"What is the most cost efficient and most effective way to uniquely identify a single person such that nobody else can pretend to be them and they can not pretend not to be themselves?"

Identification papers (passport, drivers license or national ID card, etc) can be copied, stolen, or faked.

The only answer I can come up with would be to require that the person be physically in your presence and that you find a way to reliably take a DNA sample from them.  Then fully sequence that DNA and store a hash of the result in a database.  Compare the results of each new person against all the results in your database.  Note that you may run into a problem with identical twins (triplets, quadruplets, etc).  In that case, you might require that they all be present together at the time of DNA extraction, and that if any are missing they will be excluded from the offer.

Obviously this would be a difficult and expensive thing to accomplish, but as a thought experiment it's the most reliable method I can think of.  You could reduce the costs if you were willing to accept that some people will be able to take advantage of the system.  How much effort and money you could save would depend on how much risk you were willing to accept of people gaining access to multiple wallets.

It would require something unique and universal, like a passport, drivers license or national ID card, it depends on which country the person lives.

Works the same way as KYC on any exchange, poker site, betting site, etc, and it would be quite expensive.

I was having a kind of thought experiment...

Let's say that you create a new crypto-currency. Before the creation of the first genesis block you create 25 billion wallets with each 1 coin in it. The purpose of this would be that anyone on earth, could claim his 1 coin at anytime.

My question:

How would you prevent that someone claims more than 1 wallet?


PS: I didn't incorporate more details because this is not necessary for the question at hand.