Universal Basic Income with Proof of Humanity

Transcript

all right good morning everyone my name is santiago siri at santi city on twitter and elsewhere telegram etc uh feels great to be doing a real conference uh no longer over soon so it's very exciting to be here in paris today i'm going to talk about universal basic income it's a very interesting topic that has been followed by a a nice subset of ethereans over the years and how we're trying to achieve to make this happen uh with the with ethereum and the proof

of humanity protocol which is a project that recently launched this year in march 2021 so first i'd like to give you a brief history of ubi or the ideas in connection to universal basic income over the last 30 40 years it's a relatively recent idea um but surprisingly it's not necessarily an idea that comes from socialist circles actually has a lot of let's say capitalist thinkers backing the concept of uei there's a very interesting book that goes through through the history of ubi that's called utopia for realists

written by this dutch philosopher rudger bergman where he argues in favor of universal basic income open borders 15 hour work weeks and just to give a brief code of this book he basically says that poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash greater flexibility in the workplace demands that we also create greater security and he goes to into the details of uvi experiments that happened in the 70s and 80s there were some isolated experiments in canada in a small town in canada where the conclusion is that

essentially the resources that are required to provide people with security with health or public services are usually more costly than directly giving people some money that allows them to bootstrap themselves and get them out of a situation of whether they are living in the streets or they're living in a situation of poverty it turns out that according to the early research in the mid 70s ubi or some form of directly giving people money rather than using the multiple resources that the state has might be more efficient for the state for the entity allocating those resources

and will help governments save money while actually delivering something that is more meaningful and gives people a choice something where they get to decide what to do with that money another interesting proponent of universal basic income is milton friedman who is not your average marxist to be honest and he has written extensively about it he described an idea called a negative income tax in his last during the 80s he basically says the same thing let us not underestimate the injury ingenuity of the poor people converting what they get from relief from the relief worker to what they want

they would be far better off if we just gave them the money and let them spend it and not underestimating those that are receiving some kind of welfare from the state so the ideas of friedman didn't turn out to be implemented in anywhere but he was an active proponent of the concept also hayek among other thinkers were interested in the idea of giving ubi because ultimately in their philosophy i would argue that it's about giving people choice giving people the choice of what to do with their life with their decisions and and with their money rather than coercing them in a clientelist way uh um which is

something that is very happen very common in in developing countries where you would see often the state actually giving refrigerators or giving some kind of object or some kind of assistance not giving any direct money and usually that leads to some kind of coercion where ends up in this very corrupt relation where the state is giving away either refrigerators or beds or some basic goods like that in exchange for boats so you have this clientelist relation that is extremely corrupt and leads to very bad results in terms of governance which and sadly is a very common thing in in the developing world

so a lot of thinkers like milton friedman and hayek actually argue let's do not coerce people by you know establishing this relation of where we give them this in exchange for that let's just give them money and allow them to do what they want um another perspective around uei which is interesting uh was i i've heard about it from ray kurzweil which is this well-known uh also futurist philosopher from the bay area and he actually argues that one of the biggest threats that we're facing as a civilization and as a society is the fact that automation robotization artificial intelligence is taking our

jobs inevitably you know probably by by 2021 15 to 20 of the jobs out there have been removed by some form of automation um and according to kurzweil by 2050 you know in a couple 30 years from now most of the jobs if not all of the jobs might be removed by some form of automation so as we get to see people being displaced around the world we saw it during the last decade for example with the clashes happening across every city every major city in the planet with uber drivers and taxi drivers in argentina for example if you wanted to ride an uber drive

an uber car you have to sit on the front of the car because if a taxi driver sees you sitting on the back of an ordinary car they might just get out of their taxi and smash the uber driver's car everyone that lived in buenos aires has seen something like that in the last couple of years so this clash between the working people and automation and machines it seems to be only getting worse as we get self-driving cars and as we get new ways of automation displacing people with jobs that help to make their living so looking into the future the relevance of uvi becomes more important

and we should ask ourselves who are the machines working for us or are we working for the machines i think that's a very relevant question how can we get the machines to serve society or is it about society serving the machines so uei is is something that hopefully will get us closer to the idea of the machines working for us of some kind of ai in the future paying its taxes and helping to deliver some form of uvi so can we implement uvi through the traditional mechanisms of bureaucratic governments and and the state

or surprisingly there has been some attempts to do this uh of all people richard nixon the former president of the united states he tried twice not once but twice i think in 69 and then in in the 1970s or 71 before he resigned to introduce a guaranteed income a very progressive idea coming from a republican probably by back then um the two times this i this his bill to generate a guaranteed income for all americans in 68 and and 71 got approved by the congress by by by the congress but it got rejected

by the senate and so it got killed by the senate twice with the usual arguments where do we we will get the money who will fund this but uh there's the first historic present and again it does not it did not come come from someone from the left or from you know marxist ideas i would argue that probably dick nixon was certainly a republican um in more recent years there was probably some of you know andrew young who was a presidential candidate that ran in the democrat primaries in the u.s and his one of the biggest parts of his platform was ubi he proposed the idea of giving a

universal basic income to every american that everyone should earn at least a thousand dollars a month uh he even tried to make some for his campaign to make some pilots uh doing this with a small community uh of a few hundreds of people and among the andrew young followers there were a lot of enthusiasts he was able to rally and and and conquer the hearts of all the entities of around the ubi uh in the united states which is really interesting um there have been some other pilots that happened like this the city of oakland next to san francisco did a small pilot a couple of years ago with the help of y combinator so there were some interesting

implementations but nothing at very large scale so what we're trying to figure out uh at least some of us working on the proof of humanity protocol uh the from the cleros team from the democracy earth team which are some of the teams involved with this project is could we achieve uvi with ethereum can when can we do uei can we achieve uh this through extremely capitalistic technologies um so the first hurdle that we need to face in order to do a social system any kind of social system on ethereum uh most systems today's are still pretty

much uh one cpu one vote as satoshi said not very social is figuring out a way of formalizing human identity how do we get to the human identity hopefully in a way that avoids the route of becoming either facebook or the chinese communist party which is a consequence of the lack of formalization of identity on the web protocols that ended up to a handful of companies in the us and in china and around the world centralizing identity and of course completely violating or rights to privacy so there's a paper i i have the honor to

be among the co-authors called who watches the watchmen that it's basically a review of all of the proof of personhood protocols that were researched and developed these prototypes that were developed in the last couple of years that are trying to formalize identity through the use of decentralized peer-to-peer networks in different ways and to summary to give you a brief summary of this of this paper there's probably three protocols out there right now i would encourage you to check them out check them out to check to test them and to use them to see how they work they all have different tradeoffs there's a project called idina

they have their own blockchain this is a not a non-ethereum project idina uses a synchronous turing tests that need to be solved every week where everyone connected to the network has to connect at the same time to solve a set of turing tests that the system knows that usually this test 50 55 percent of the times machines get right 90 95 percent of the times humans get right so we know these are turing tests that are easy for humans hard for machines uh usually the idina tests consist of four images uh and this you see this two str

strips of ima of those four images in one of the strips the images tell a story in in the other flip as they call it the image makes no sense it's easy for humans to deduce a story from four images uh it's hard for machines because they lack the cultural background to deduce what the machines or what the images what story the images are telling idina is completely private there's you know so you do not have a possibility of seeing any false positives if there are any false positives and right now i didn't i think they have around 8 500 nodes in the network which they argue are personhood notes they don't

do not have the certainty that they effectively belong to a human maybe there are some genius out there that can solve a lot of these tests very fast and might control more than one note um then there's bright id and i'll gonna leave proof of humanity for for the last the last one since it's the one i'm detailing right id uses a social graph social verification uh through the social graph and a reputation mechanism based on the trust of the different groups you belong to so uses the intersection of those groups uh also very privacy respecting uh bright id right now has 21 000 nodes around 21 000 and it's mostly a probabilistic score

uh right id will tell will signal uh how likely it is uh in in terms of percentage or in terms of a probabilistic score how likely it is that you're interacting with a civil uh or not so proof of humanity proof of humanity was launched in march this year march 10 2021 right now it has roughly 8 000 humans we just crossed the 8 000 note count a couple of days ago and it combines a little bit of what we consider the best of the different protocols we have researched so far it uses

video proofs so you have to generate a video of yourself where you have to make a statement that is i certify that i'm a human and i do not have a register in this registry so basically you have to shoot a video of yourself showing uh your address on the blockchain you're the address that you're going to be using to submit the proof the address needs to coincide with the one that is being used on your wallet so the address that you are showing on the video needs to coincide and uh once you submit your video proof you submit that with a deposit that deposit right now is 0.184 if we're looking into ways to make it

this more inclusive more accessible 0.18 if er is a significant amount of money in most part of the world but we need this deposit to guarantee or to incent the user to effectively making a good video with the required content with a required proof uh and if the deposit gets challenged it will go into an arbitration system and i will go into that later on the next step once you submit the video the next step is getting a vouch about means someone else from the network that has already been verified by the network needs to vouch for you so now right now the requirement is a vouch for

from at least one person and once you get the vouch there will be a window of three days where you could be challenged by someone else that might disagree with with your proof so the challenge is really an interesting part if you get challenged in that in those three days if you receive a challenge you will go into an arbitration mechanism to ana to a court built with cleros and through the clerus mechanism of with the different rounds of appeals with the jurors that's take pnk that will get to decide whether or not the video meets the criteria we will see if

your proof is considered valid by the community or not a couple of stories around this just an interesting example of how this worked out one of the requirements is in order to prevent deep fakes and to have videos that have a decent resolution for any human to effectively see if the person on the video is a deep fake or not or you know videos have the requirement of the requirements is that videos should have at least 360 pixels wide in in resolution to prevent small resolution videos from being used in the in the system so apparently whatsapp when you send a video over whatsapp for some reason we

should actually figure out uh whatsapp crops videos for pixels on each site so videos shot that got sent through whatsapp end up having pixels in resolution and this led to a whole situation in the community because some people were challenging videos only because of the reason that they had 352 pixels of width and they did not meet the criteria of at least having 360p of resolution so it was it was a very heated debate in the community whether those videos were valid or not whether those challenging those videos were opportunists trying to you know get some the the deposit from

the innocent users that were using the system and they didn't know that whatsapp had this so that led to the first upgrade to the protocol that when that was the first humanity improvement proposal that we ended up upgrading the protocol to consider videos that were having 352 pixels but again it it created really interesting questions about decentralized justice is it is it fair is is it justice being challenged for you know just unexpectedly making a video that has eight pixels less than what it should have under normal conditions well this this i think it helps show some of the constraints and some of the

limits when we design and build these systems uh and the i think it has brought a lot of interesting cases to to to the cleros court um so once you become verified as a human in the network you start getting a ubi which is a near c20 token that gets automatically streamed straight into your ethereum wallet to our knowledge this is the first erc20 that streams itself um i copy-pasted the code from something that ave was doing that they didn't launch back then in relation to how to achieve the streaming feature so thanks for to to the other team for that and you

immediately will start seeing on your metamask or your ethereum wallet that every second or at least every 15 seconds or every new block you will get your fractions of uvi updated in your balance every every every new block that gets the wallet updated this is manushinovic he won four nba championships he's one of the members of uei we were excited to have celebrities like that testing and playing with the system very early on and one of the most surprising things to to me as a as a geek as a computer user was that we started seeing a lot of families in the protocol a lot of grandparents

it's it's really very easy if you go to the ue to the proof of humanity that and you just browse the profiles and you look at the proofs you will find a lot of people like her a lot of grandparents actually using ethereum for the first time in their lives there's probably their son or their daughter that's you know telling grandpa to to use this and to and one of the reasons is that a uei you know for a couple of months in it's a very young and nasty project and we still have a long way to go but you know in in in its initial form it was it's already giving a pension system or a pension that is greater than the pension being provided by the local governments uh in latin

america or in southeast asia or in africa uh where most of our users actually come from so um to me it's mind-blowing to see ethereum being used by you know that generation or reaching that part of society for the first time no longer being just a thing among us geeks but actually being able to create a system where people are willing and considering on boarding their entire family because this is a system that is facing society it's not giving its back to society uh but actually trying to provide an alternative a solution that is able to potentially compete with or improve what is being offered by national governments

uh and every time i see a grandparent on on on this platform it really it's a really very powerful feeling because it means that we're actually being able to reach those that need something like this the most so tokenomics the difficult subject around uvi let's be honest about that um how we're dealing with this of course the first thing everyone tries to check about uvi is the issuance and we took a philosophy of kiss keep it simple stupid this there are a lot of very complex decisions when you build systems like this and probably because we do not have all

of the answers we actually have all of the questions for sure but we do not have all of the answers we took a philosophy of just making a system that's simple enough and that we can keep building around with it and can keep improving it along the time as we figure things out as a community so issuance is one ubi per hour one uva per hour uh from a user experience perspective it's nicer to accrue one unit over an hour than just a crew one unit over a day or over a month and been dealing with fractions we want to make this currency easy to transact with we want to make the logic behind this currency simple to understand for most mortals so the accrual is around 1 uvi per hour

and actually the issuance rate if you look into the smart contract code is 0.00028 uvi per second because the balance gets calculated over time and it's calculated down to each second uh and you get the uvi drip we use the we use the drip emoji on social media uh you get the uvi drip on every second on your on your metamask or or on your wallet on on ethereum um so obviously this amount of issuance uh one uei per hour per verified human as long as we have more

and more humans in the network it will increase the cell pressure maybe you don't sell after the first month but after two three four months you've been accumulating this uvi and you'll be tempted to sell that in exchange for some dye or some heath or maybe for some other good that you might be interested in trading with the price of uvi so this creates a lot of cell pressure even though our actual issuance is just a fraction of the issuance of dashcoin dashcoin has insane inflation 10 000 dosh every minute forever or something like that and they have an insane market cap nonetheless which of course we're trying to reach

elon musk or some influencer to pump the price but even though elon musk is a supporter of ubi he hasn't paid attention so i'm talking to you elon pay attention to us we need you stop doing this with dog coins and support ubi come on elon you can do it so please retweet and bother elon musk as much as you can so he eventually one day wakes up and and helps something that has a social impact uh for once um but of course but back to the situation that we find people selling selling selling how do we deal with that how we can reduce supply how can we increase demand

so this is one of the challenges that i think any ubi coin will face uh and the interesting thing is that we are having very interesting debates around it and very a lot of competing ideas in the community of how to make this possible and complementing these ideas um one of the ideas that i liked about it that i liked and it was suggested to us just a few weeks after we launched is why don't we pursue some kind of endowment model kind of like what the ivy league universities like harvard princeton all of the great american universities do where they have basically a fund with half a billion dollars or a hundred

million dollars and they generate an interest over that fund 10 percent a year five percent a year and it's only with the interest generated of that endowment that they are able to fund the activities that the university does every year uh so couldn't we do something like that uh but for ubi and this was actually suggested on a tweet and someone replied to that tweet yeah we could do that why don't we start leveraging defy in a way we can start building a model an endowment model for ubi in the same way in a similar way to how the endowment model of the large american universities work so

a developer from the iron finance community came who is an expert on the on the vaults and the smart contracts in connection with iron and he started building a vault specifically for uei that will use the interest that will use the yield to buy uvi tokens and burn them automatically so this was a very interesting idea that emerged out of the conversation on social media on twitter and the a developer started working on it right away emiliano bonassi from wiring brilliant guy so this is an interesting alternative for anyone that's holding

right now we are doing it with dye and there's a new one we just deployed a few weeks ago actually last week for weth for a rap ether so if you are holding die or you are holding if the if one is still not integrated to the user interface but we will do that hopefully after ifcc but you can do it with dye right now and you don't know where to keep your dye or maybe you have it in some weird period defy service but you might want to use it to help society in some way or another you can put the die on democracy.earth where we are featuring these faults at least we have the interface for these vaults and the the dye will generate an interest

over time and half of that interest will automatically go to buy and burn uvi um so investors get to make their money they get some yield on their on their assets um ubi reduces its supply uh you know helping to create a dynamic that builds synthetic demand for it and hopefully reach an equilibrium in price that can be sustained over time um so right now we launched this vault just probably a month ago this is a very young project so we have a long way to go um the vault right now has a deposit limit of 1

million die so there we need to raise 700 000 dollars in order to meet that deposit limit right now we have 225 000 dollars in the in the vault uh right now in just a few weeks generated a profit of 300 300 or 320 dollars half of that deposit went to a buy and burn uvi and the other half is distributed among the owners or the shareholders of the vault so what this means is that we need to generate we need to have a lot of liquidity into this or a lot of total value locked into these vaults

and we estimate that if we are able to say you know this is a back of the envelope calculation but if we are able to get 10 million dollars worth of die or heath into these vaults we estimate that we could burn around half a million dollars worth of uvi every year if we get a hundred million well probably we would be able to burn between three million and five million dollars worth of uvi every year so this is a mechanism that helps to reduce the supply that helps to burn uvi to remove that uvi from the market and to bring some demand pressure that will help sustain the price over over the long term so anyone that's holding it or die

or wrap bitcoin or any token potentially that's feature in in wiring and we're actually actually talking with other projects in the ecosystem as well by buying and burning ui with a fraction of the interest generated we can help sustain the value over the long term so i invite you to join the the proof of humanity and the universal basic income communities on on on online we have a discourse forum where we are debating the different proposals we have a snapshot voting page where you can vote for those proposals you have to be a verified human to engage in our community

the proof of humanity now is actually the very first democracy on ethereum it's a liquid democracy so we have both delegation you can delegate both to someone else if you don't have the time to spend on the on the activities that the community is debating but it's a democracy where because we have proof of humanity we can actually do one person one vote and we can implement interesting forms of quadratic voting quadratic funding and create a much more fair system of governance that takes into consideration the views of all of the stakeholders and not just the whales and of course our telegram channels are an

interesting thing about proof of humanity is that actually the telegram channel in spanish is larger than the telegram channel in english which means we're reaching the you know probably the population latin america is is is very exciting and interesting in this project because a lot of the users that we have on boarded to ethereum it was their first time using ethereum and they got interested because of the project in relation of ubi and proof of humanity so it's a nice first approximation to users of to ethereum in latin america um so if you paid and didn't pay much attention and you were looking

into your phones throughout the conference which is something i do a lot of times i'll give you the short version of this conference right now in just one slide this is what we want to do we you know when we think about what systems we're building we talk about all of the incredibly exciting opportunities that are being built by d5 protocols the the profit generating mechanisms that are being programmed into smart contracts all of that is amazing it has changed my life it probably has changed all of your lives but we have to keep uh some sensation of what we want to achieve on the long term with the greater of society and one of the interesting elements of these technologies that we're building is that

if we find reliable mechanisms to prove whether or not someone interacting with this network is a human and we can start building systems that face society why not create the very ambitious goal of making poverty a problem of the past uh so i invite you to join the ubi and the proof of humanity project to end poverty with crypto why not let's try it you know if we are able to achieve that through the means of these technologies then for sure politicians will be a thing of the past as well thank you very much you can troll me on twitter

i don't know you've got time for questions six minutes six minutes for questions so someone thank you for the clapping that's very nice there's one question over there i miss the clapping on some uh on some conferences you get these emojis which is very weird but um with this project humanity um it's not going to be a big issue with it's start to speak it's strange to speak it's not going to be a big issue with um privacy because like the point of the like this wallet you can see actually

every transaction publicly and if the addresses can would be also verified like it's gonna be required to use some like tornado cache bridges or yeah it's a fantastic question actually on the interface we suggest that first you we recommend that you use a fresh account just create a new account on metamask that without any activity and if you need to move funds to that account for the deposit do it from an exchange a centralized exchange that can be used sort of a mixnet or use tornado cash we literally suggest using tornado cash um there's a among the requirements to generate your proof

we are only requesting a video of yourself saying that you are not a human uh no sorry that you are a human maybe for vitalik we can suggest that but uh that you're a human and that you don't have a registry in this register you are not required to use your legal name your real name you are not required to say anything else about yourself we just need to make a system where people can check if there's someone that looks like you on the system and say hey there's a duplicate here or maybe you know that's the only requirement it's and it's the only trade-off that we found that it's reliable in order to check for false positives so in my experience of course i hold a lot of addresses

on ethereum and it to me privacy or how private or how public you are on on the network is a spectrum i know that the address that i'm using for proof of humanity is a public address about myself it's santi.if in my case and that's i just know that at that address okay if the irs comes you know that's me okay i cannot deny that but uh you you we try to provide all of the check marks in the interface for to help users understand that it's very important to use a fresh address and hopefully users will learn about managing like ultimately how we manage how public or how private we are on these networks it's up to us more than anything else but as builders of the protocol

obviously we try to include all of the recommendations for that and if we are going to see the case like some governance has the database of all people are living in one or another countries and they're just getting together and just try to use some technology by face recognition and then it actually not very hard to provide the third database and the people will be recognized by the name and like the all consequences the name banks account if the governance will take their technology it's going to be like in a long-term perspective very like um the interest rate of governance has the wish to take over control the

crypto will increase exponentially if not worse yeah the terminator with the terminator situation of you of course you have to think it from an adversarial point of view we have to take that into consideration and makes plenty of sense but i would say that our faces are public keys in us in to a large extent that have been evolved through evolution over millennia and we are wired as a society to recognize each other through our faces which is you know sadly or you know or you know it's the situation of surveillance we live in today we we are aware of that but uh we have to make a trade off there are

some other mechanisms that we have research in terms of how to make the proof without the requirement of video uh one is the model that idina is pursuing of using turing tests and synchronous tutoring turing test solving parties in order to grant the right to participate in the network uh and the other one is well social intersections but those could be used as a proxy to infer who you are um it's a tricky it's a tricky situation we want to have a system where you can effectively check false positives that you can effectively have certainty whether or not you are interacting uh with a unique human or not and that the decision can check back uh on that regard with proof of humanity

we took on the road of just requiring some a video of yourself the proof lasts for six months so you know you can if there is a way to actually do it in a private more privacy preserving way and we have the certainty that we can check false positives later on in overtime i'm all ears like this is a very tricky trade-off and of course it's something that there have been a lot of ideas suggested to us like have a random phone call conversation with someone that's connected real time and use some you know i hope that that aspect of the system evolves and improves over the years

one more quick question over there sorry is this on i think i know you you're hidden i cannot see your face strong privacy a real real human how do you fund the development of the system how do we fund the development of the system so we have a dao the the proof of humanity though it got a from the initial supply we half of the initial supply went to a liquidity farming program in order to generate liquidity for the token to be able to be traded that liquidity farming program runs throughout the first year and the other half went to the dao and those are the funds that the dow has

to work with in order to do different experiments and and hopefully achieve the different innovations around the protocol um uh that's that's basically how we do it um and you know for example plato's bought a nice share of the of the funds in order to hire people for the protocol to be working on this uh but it's not easy uh it's uh we're still figuring that out in many ways okay thank you very much