Cryptocurrency system using body activity data

I don't understand what makes this a "cryptocurrency" instead of just any kind of currency token. I know that it's mostly a buzzword these days but at the very least I'd expect cryptocurrencies to involve some kind of cryptographic proof for transactions.

Here as far as I can tell it's just some centralized system monitoring user/guinea pig activity and issuing some token currency based on an unspecified algorithm. I mean isn't that effectively equivalent to store cards that reward you with store credit when you purchase certain products? Or videogame editors who give coupons to elected Steam users based on their previous purchases? Or credit card rewards?

> [...]verifying, by a cryptocurrency system communicatively coupled to the device of the user, if the body activity data satisfies one or more conditions set by the cryptocurrency system; and awarding, by the cryptocurrency system, cryptocurrency to the user whose body activity data is verified.

I can't continue this comment because the sound of the bullshit alarm blaring in the background is starting to get deafening. Excuse me, I meant cryptobullshit cryptoalarm cryptoblaring.

There have been many attempts at making a useful proof of work for cryptocurrency systems, the problem is that it's not enough for the proof to require work, it also needs to be trivially and "objectively" verifiable by any user of the system and it needs to reference the transaction data somehow to avoid reusing old proofs. If you get rid of these constraints I don't understand how you can claim that it's a cryptocurrency system or even that there is any novel aspect to it.

This is not a "crypto currency system". It's a business method patent for shilling people with crypto when you do something.

The idea of "gamifying" physical actions has been around for a long long time, most notably Foursquare and Fitbit. These guys are just taking that concept and saying "we'll give you crypto instead".

I don't think this is patentable. It's too obvious. Even if it were to be patented, it can't be enforced for anything more than patent trolling.

> The tasks include, for example, but not limited to, watching or listening information (e g. advertisement)

Drink verification can to continue.

A while ago I had this idea for a "cryptocurrency" in which the proof of work would be a detailed image of a small part of the sky at a specific time of the year.

This in turn would be verified by telescopes watching larger patches of the sky, so obviously having a less detailed image of that specific piece, but enough to determine if the detailed image is believable.

Proof-of-Work alternatives that could distinguish between a human and spoofing attempts is an important problem.

This patent is about this problem but it does not put forward a solution. It's probably an attempt for patent trolling in the unlikely case that a feasible genius solution would be found.

Sounds similar to the fictional tech used in a black mirror episode.

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

Great technology. Can't wait to become a bot for a centralised server with a nice carrying admin!

Will this require a chip to be inserted in such a body?

Also, couldn't this be misused to pressure people to do what that controlling system wants them to do?

This looks like it's supposed to be a Bitcoin-like system that sends newly-printed crypto-tokens to users who exercise.

How does the blockchain know who exercised? The user's FatBat device tells a server that the user exercised. The server tells the blockchain who the newly printed tokens go to.

There are some big trust problems:

- Trust the user not to attach their FatBat to a drill to trick its sensors into thinking the user's exercising.

- Trust the user not to hack the FatBat device (physically controlled by the user) so the device lies about how much the user exercises.

- Trust the communication channel between the server and the FatBat can't be proxied or intercepted.

- Trust the server doesn't lie to the money-printing part of the blockchain about who exercised, or how much they exercised.

The closest thing I have seen to this is motocoin, where the proof of work is represented by a procedurally generated game the user must win to mine the coin: https://motocoin-dev.github.io/motocoin-site/Motocoin.pdf

Long dead now, though.

Here's lazy and cynical me makes a guess what it is reading just the title. It's a grabby data mining platform that hoards medical data and gives Stanley nickels in return. Something like Fitbit, but with crypto currency buzzwords.

Incentivising exercise behaviour / data submission to insurers?

"[0002] Several cryptocurrencies exist. Among these, the most well known is a blockchain-based cryptocurrency. Most blockchain-based cryptocurrency is decentralized in the sense that it has no central point of control. However, blockchain-based cryptocurrency can also be implemented in a centralized system having a central point of control over the cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is one of the examples of blockchain-based cryptocurrency. It is described in a 2008 article by Satoshi Nakamoto, named“Bitcoin: A peer-to-Peer"

I'm speechless.

Seems easy to game.

This is a digital currency not a cryptocurrency.

Revelations 13:17 So that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.

Patent number is: 060606

Thats a funny coincidence.

I’ve pondered a design like this before—something to replace birth certificates.

Birth certificates are kind of problematic, in that each legal person gets certain rights, and so if you can trick the state into thinking you are multiple legal people (through e.g. identity fraud) then you get a multiple of the rights of regular people—you can vote in elections multiple times, for example; or in states with “negative tax” like Alaska, you can claim the tax credit multiple times. Of course, you can also use N birth certificates to pass through any KYC system N times, to create N entities in said system, against the system’s wishes.

The problem with birth certificates is that they’re a single assertion about a single instantaneous event: they just say “this person was born.” It’s very easy to forge a new one, or to steal+repurpose someone else’s (especially if they’re dead and this fact has never been recorded), because a birth certificate only needs to be “verified” once, at point of issuance.

An alternative scheme would be to have some device that’s constantly doing life-logging of your biometrics (like what’s discussed here), where each segment of unique biometric data the device records translates to one “token” that can be put into any given proof-of-life account.

Such devices wouldn’t have to be constantly uploading data to the cloud; they’d just be recording it and storing it. It’d be up to you to present these devices for data-collection and collation, just like it’s up to you to present your birth certificate.

The key difference with such a system, would be that if you just put on two devices, you’re not mining proof-of-life at double the rate, because the data segment collected by the two devices wouldn’t be unique between them—you’d only be able to earn one token per real human being per period, no matter how much machine-power you devoted to doing so. When the data from the two devices was collated, it’d be clear that there’s duplicate biometric period data, and so you wouldn’t earn a token for said duplicate data.

It wouldn’t matter how you split up and rearranged the tokens generated by the devices. You could hold all your tokens in one “identity”, or split them up across multiple “identities.” But, if you split the tokens up, then each split identity would only have 1/N of the proof strength of the identity of someone who puts all their tokens in one basket.

With such a system, you could literally just have each token a person can present translate to a vote, such that everyone who’s been alive for N periods gets N votes, as long as they can proof-of-life all N periods. (This would, of course, bias toward older people; but you can instead normalize the voting power of each token by dividing by the person’s age. How to prove age? Record the “genesis” token of each device through a trusted timestamping system—i.e. activate each device online. Then the person’s legal age would be the timestamp on the oldest genesis token they can prove ownership of, by proving ownership of the private key that was used to sign the genesis-certificate-request.)

I enjoy the fact that, other than the “trusted timestamping of genesis tokens” part, this system has roughly nothing to do with a shared ledger or “blockchain”; each device can just keep its own independent private log, and the only time those logs leave the device is when the person themselves commands the devices to export them. It’d also be up to you to wear or not wear a life-logging device. But, of course, in avoiding having your life logged, you’d be losing out on tokens for the periods you didn’t log, and so depriving yourself of the things tokens translate into (voting power; federal tax-credit hours; state-public-healthcare-benefit time-spent-as-a-state-resident-proof hours; immigration time-spent-living-in-the-country-proof hours; etc.)

...and of course this is a weird and dystopian invasion of privacy. Attaching ankle bracelets to babies to ensure they get appropriately credited for their own infancy sounds like something out of Black Mirror. I never said it wasn’t. It’s a neat technical solution to a specific problem—not necessarily a good idea ;)

It is a shame the cryptocurrency phenomenon has been and gone, with just these quirky stories popping up now and again.

Imagine if the hype was in full swing now. Blockchain technology would be delivering us from the global lockdown, probably making early adopters rich along the way. HN would be full of stories about how blockchain startups would be solving the pandemic. People stuck at home could be playing the crypto markets 24/7 earning themselves vast imaginary fortunes that would 'pay' for the vaccines to be 'developed'.

Anything's better than today's proof-of-waste cryptocurrencies.

Since we’re talking about gamifying physical actions to produce a currency, I’ve always wondered if there was a way to gamify sexual activity such that you can influence human breeding for collective societal goals. Might be interesting to combine the idea of such currency with dating networks as well to see what happens.