

SocialCoin: A Cryptocurrency for a Global Basic Income - llSourcell
http://llsourcell.svbtle.com/socialcoin-a-cryptocurrency-for-a-global-basic-income

======
woah
Any 'SocialCoin' scheme pales in significance to the prospect of a
decentralized network that can prove individuality, which the author brushes
off with a 'oh someone will figure it out'. This kind of technology would have
huge, far ranging impacts, much greater than any impact that Bitcoin,
Ethereum, or even Dogecoin could ever hope to aspire to.

If you have proof of individuality, proof of work goes out the window, proof
of stake goes out the window. The entire thing that makes Bitcoin and any
decentralized network hard goes out the window. Proof of human individuality
in a decentralized network would completely rewire society and computer
science in ways we can't imagine.

This SocialCoin thing is rooted in the world we have today, but the idea is
predicated on a technology that would make it irrelevant.

~~~
liamzebedee
I'd be interested in reading about any potential research in this area, it's
quite a fascinating unsolved problem. Like Bitcoin's solution to the P2P
untrusted consensus problem (Two Generals Problem), I would think that the
solution to ensuring individuality (see the Sybil attack [2]) lies in some
approach that isn't 100% failsafe but probabistically ensures the desired
result is highly likely (see 51% attack).

I think a web of trust [3] is something that could work. Given a system of
nodes with public keys (the most common form of identification in P2P), a
possible approach to estimate the 'individuality' of some identity/key would
be to measure its degree of relationships with other nodes who vouch for its
authenticity, weighted according to the 'individuality' of the other nodes
(something that could be solved with an iterative approach, as in
PageRank/EigenTrust). The idea being that while a malicious node might vouch
for many of its identities, it doesn't have any link to any other node and
thus would be weighted lower.

Turns out this exact approach had been developed in 2011 [5] (just found out
now, wow, see fig.1 on page 3) and also in other research with SybilGuard [4].
I'm not sure of the limitations of these formalised definitions, but it looks
to me like much of P2P research (see PolderCast, a marvellous innovation) --
the possibilities are never realised until someone implements it in software.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack)

[3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust)

[4]
[http://www.math.cmu.edu/~adf/research/SybilGuard.pdf](http://www.math.cmu.edu/~adf/research/SybilGuard.pdf)

[5]
[https://ccl.northwestern.edu/papers/2011/kurve.pdf](https://ccl.northwestern.edu/papers/2011/kurve.pdf)

~~~
wyager
Any known identity system can be gamed, including web of trust.

Proof of work is the _only_ known viable sybil attack prevention mechanism.

------
oakwhiz
_> In order for SocialCoin to work, we need to figure out a way to create a
decentralized ID system that doesn’t rely on government issuance like a
Driver’s License or a Passport. This is currently an unsolved problem._

 _> One possible way to do this is to have there be agents in the SocialCoin
Distributed Autonomous Corporations who a user would schedule appointments
with._

I can imagine these "agents" colluding together to prevent people from
receiving their basic income unless they receive a cut for themselves.

~~~
monkeycantype
I think eventually we will learn to do this by analysing a person's connection
to a network. Today a spy/criminal can gain a new identity by acquiring a fake
passport, what if verification of identity came not from a document, but from
an analysis of your relationships on a blockchain, who had signed that they
know and trust you, and when had they done it, and who had signed that they
trusted them. A trusted identity would become something that took years to
build. I work with a small team of developers, drip by drip I'm trying to
convince the other three this is what we should be working on.

~~~
dllthomas
I've long been quite interested in whether there's a meaningful way to use WoT
approaches to demonstrate _uniqueness_ of an identity.

------
TrainedMonkey
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.

~~~
lukifer
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.)

~~~
patcon
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

~~~
patcon
ugh. embarrassed by my uncharacteristic rambling... :/

------
gremlinsinc
One thing this autonomous corporation should do is have a tax built in to pay
the verification teams, and also to keep the system going as mining becomes
harder and harder -- if say 2-3% of all transactions go to pay verifiers, and
into the GBI pool, ... it might be more stable. You could also have some sort
of bonus program where people could run small-time cpu/gpu miners on their
home pc--donate all the hashing power back to the main network where 100% goes
towards the GBI pool, and it'll sort of be like a huge botnet of miners
keeping the gbi aspect going... etc... -- There will need to be a LOT of
thought about how to ensure stability 5+ years into the future.

------
thomas4019
You're right about the problem, your solution is off.

> It doesn’t matter if retailers don’t accept the coin, users can just
> exchange the coins for bitcoins or local fiat currency for immediate real
> world use.

No entity would give fiat currency for these SocialCoins unless they had some
real or speculative value.

> The basic idea is that 10% of the profits that miners earn from mining this
> coin is pooled and distributed to every member of the network on a bi-weekly
> basis.

Are these "profits" from inflation or a transaction fees?

~~~
dllthomas
_" No entity would give fiat currency for these SocialCoins unless they had
some real or speculative value."_

Or the entity had some other interest in keeping the scheme going.

Not that this necessarily seems likely/sustainable/advisable...

------
broolstoryco
"In order for SocialCoin to work, we need to figure out a way to create a
decentralized ID system that doesn’t rely on government ... This is currently
an unsolved problem ... The user would set an appointment with 3-5 agents
individually and each agent would scan the user’s irises in person to verify
that they are a real human"

This has to be satire

------
dr_win
I think that governments will sooner or later start taxing work of robots to
redirect the resources into social safety nets.

------
UweSchmidt
Could this be the most ambitious project of all times? It requires

\- mass adoption of cryptocurrencies

\- guaranteed basic income

\- libertarian principles limiting the role of government

My guess is that we'll have that mars colony first.

------
orasis
You could bootstrap the identity verification off of Facebook and do some
machine learning to look for bot clusters.

------
Executor
Or we can get rid of monetary systems and use a resource-based economy (read
Venus Project).

------
dllthomas
If this can actually be worked out, I'd love to see it. I'm pretty skeptical
though.

------
wyager
Hahaha. This is so blatantly stupid.

>In order for SocialCoin to work, we need to figure out a way to create a
decentralized ID system that doesn’t rely on government issuance like a
Driver’s License or a Passport. This is currently an unsolved problem.

It's unsolved because it is literally impossible. There is no rigorous
mathematical definition of identity, and no way to construct a generic
identity-proof algorithm. Even humans can't agree what constitutes an
identity, and we've had many millions of years as social animals to evolve
heuristics.

Are clones separate people? Are molecular copies separate people? Are brain
simulations separate people? If they are, I can just spawn 1,000,000 copies of
my brain and collect their SocialCoin. And then it becomes a competition of
computing power, just like Bitcoin!

And, of course, there's no non-blinded automated test that can differentiate a
human and a machine, neither in theory nor in practice.

The only people who think up foolish schemes like this are those who utterly
fail to grasp the genius of solving voting problems with HashCash style proof-
of-work mechanisms.

~~~
dllthomas
I don't think we need to solve the question of molecular copies or brain
simulations before considering this. Clones already exist, of course, in the
form of identical twins - and I can't imagine us considering them anything but
separate people.

I totally agree that this can't be done with math _alone_ , but I've not seen
any proof that it's "literally impossible" to produce a system where the
incentives work out for enough people to play by - and enforce - the rules
with the _help_ of math.

I've also not seen credible proposals for such a system, I don't _know_ that
such system could exist, and I certainly don't know that we will be able to
produce such a system any time soon. These _are_ hard problems. But "literally
impossible" is a bold claim - far too bold unless you have more to support it
than what you wrote above.

------
lorddoig
The economics behind this is staggeringly flawed.

Technological innovation _increases wealth_. This is a basic economic
principle as evidenced by the industrial revolution (machines took over most
of those old jobs, and now there's much less unemployment, poorhouses don't
exist, and the average person is much richer in _real_ terms.) To speak of
some kind of saturation point where there is a machine for everything is
pretty crazy.

Let's step into lala-land and assume there's one machine that can produce
anything and perform any task. It requires no maintenance and no inputs.
What's the problem? Everyone can have everything. No money required. Winning.

Stepping back to reality all these machines will require production, sales
efforts, maintenance, electricity, network infrastructure, yadda yadda. Goods-
producing machines will need a supply chain and QA, and people to figure out
what to make with it next. And when exactly do we foresee machines taking over
the service industry? A machine that provides business consultancy? Cuts your
hair? Caters to your animalistic needs? This stuff is a long way off if it's
even possible.

Even when machines can do all this we'd need to remove every source of
friction in the economy before we could even begin to dream of approaching
that saturation point - in short that means global governance and regulation,
no taxes, free trade, no behaviour limiting contracts, no currency risk, no
language barrier. All of these things create market distortions that create
the potential for profit, and where the potential for profit exists, people
will exploit it, and there will be jobs.

Long story short: we have many, many problems left to solve before we can all
kick back and let the robot butler massage our feet.

Further, the idea that a basic income is best tackled with a crypto-currency
is nonsense. Crypto-currencies, like other currencies, derive their value from
the underlying assets. You can mine coins, but you can't mine value. In the UK
we have a bottom-line tax rate of about 30% of GDP, and about 30% of that is
social security. We're a generous country in this regard and have lots of
people happily living their lives doing nothing. It's pretty close to this
romantic notion of 'basic income'.

If you haven't done the maths on that yet, the UK's percentage of GDP spent on
social security is 30% x 30% = 9%. Assuming SocialCoin is the only currency in
the world and that global PPP is uniform (and in line with the UK today), we
need to solve (as per the 10% of mining proceeds idea):

required_inflation * 0.1 = 0.09 required_inflation = (0.09/0.1) = 0.9 = 90%

A world with 90% inflation is a world in crisis. Assuming instead that we give
_all_ mining profits to the needy, we'd still need to maintain 9%
inflation...which is also a world in crisis.

I haven't, and won't, even touch on the absurdity of the very notion of 'basic
income' (but there's a reason it doesn't enter economists heads).

All in this is just a thin and problematic veil over the desire to
redistribute wealth from those who have it to those who don't. Theoretically
this is already solidly solved - you take lumps of money from the rich (in any
currency you fancy), you walk over to the poor, and you hand it to them. You
don't add conditions to it and you do everything to seriously minimise
administration costs. This is the _second fundamental theorem of welfare
economics_.

~~~
ewzimm
The problem of wealth distribution is certainly not solved, because the system
you are describing, in which wealth is taken from someone, involves coersion.
It requires violence to enforce. It requires consolidation of power. The
system proposed here, however simple, is describing voluntary wealth
redistribution. No one is forced into the system, but the rules of the system
are set to level the playing field.

I think this is a good start, and we will likely see many more implementations
of this basic idea. One genius aspect of software-based currency is that it
allows the possibility of the establishment of laws without a police force.
The currency is its own police force. Anyone who doesn't like the rules can
choose to use another cryptocurrency with different rules. This is consensus-
based law, and it is a movement in the right direction.

------
seoguru
crypto-currency's value is derived from the "greater fool theory" I don't
think socialcoin will fly. Happy to be proven wrong.

[http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/05/need-taxes-mmt-
pe...](http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/05/need-taxes-mmt-
perspective.html)

------
monkeypizza
A system where people can survive and reproduce without working can't end
well.

Imagine it in the context of computer resource management - "every program
deserves this much RAM and this much CPU". When you have randomly varying,
recombining programs, what will the result be after 50 generations? Eventually
a program will evolve to reproduce faster, and it will come to dominate the
population. Why would you think that such a thing wouldn't happen with human
beings, too?

What do you think happens when you provide unlimited free food to a population
of rats? A few continue being "productive" \- searching for new food supplies,
etc. but they get out-reproduced by the ones who just eat all day. So the
population explodes, eventually the food runs out, and then they all die.

So overall I think that a global basic income, combined with unlimited
reproduction, would have a horrible outcome for humanity.

~~~
codemac
> What do you think happens when you provide unlimited free food to a
> population of rats?

1) No idea, I'm not a rat, nor do I have any expertise in the economic lives
of rats. Have there been any studies that show this? I don't have access to
many journals.

2) Do you think that humans have the same goals, aspirations, and survival
behaviors as rats? Do you think they are so similar that given a cage and
food, humans would reproduce until they all died out?

~~~
monkeypizza
This link is somewhat relevant:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mautam](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mautam)

In India there's a species of bamboo that flowers every 48 years; during each
flowering, the rat population explodes. Once they've eaten all the bamboo,
they turn to anything else they can find.

