> Proof of personhood for crypto could enable verifiable UBI for the world.
This kind of statement breeds skepticism of crypto. Does anyone think "proof of personhood" is among the top 25 barriers for verifiable UBI for the world?
This kind of statement breeds skepticism of crypto. Does anyone think "proof of personhood" is among the top 25 barriers for verifiable UBI for the world?
Now imagine a true, global UBI. It's difficult to imagine today, but perhaps in the future as a species we could agree that all people on Earth have the right to a minimum standard of living. Administering a global UBI across all nations would be impossible with technology we have today. The concept is near science fiction, but it is exactly the type of problem Worldcoin claims to be working towards.
Funny how the promise of crypto was supposed to be about decentralization, yet efforts like this are pushing centralization.
Consider in one case, there are 12 currencies in use which are issued according to the choices of 12 authorities, while in the other case, there is one currency in use which is issued at a fixed schedule. In the latter case, there is a single system instead of 12, but there are no central authorities who can continually choose how much to issue.
Similarly, consider 8 payment processors who are each run by companies which have authorities, who decide what rules they establish for what kinds of transactions they allow, contrasted with one payment processor which has no authorities who can forbid (as part of the payment processing) transactions.
You might call “Everyone speaking lojban” “centralized” because it is of the form “for all x, f(x)=y_0 “ , but the hypothetical of “everyone speaks lojban” doesn’t involve a central authority.
The rub is: what to do about newly born humans, and about death? Worldcoin is far from solving that problem, and probably won't even if they succeed, since by then numerous actors (including governments) will have gotten involved.
The main obstacle is that there is just not enough money for everyone. There is absolutely no problem to prevent fraud by checking government-issued IDs.
This argument sort of reminds me of Reagan-esque "welfare queen" talking points.
Proof of personhood doesn't solve that.
> claiming on others behalf (obvious ID theft/fraud)
Proof of personhood doesn't solve that. A government assigned wallet is merely a different target than a bank account number.
You could look at their operational overhead, but I don’t think it’s high enough to justify the assertion that global UBI would be impossible. But I also think the concept of a global UBI, beautiful though it is, skips out some evolutionary steps that are necessary. It’s entirely possible that a better end state is that each nation implements it’s own UBI program. And that is definitely doable with non-crypto.
- political will
- perceived lack of funds
Without the political will, this will not move. In America, we don't even have the political will to fund a social safety net on par with other industrialized nations. I would bet my money that no American living today will see UBI in America.
I lived for 35 years in Finland, and the government there has absolutely no problems verifying who’s a person. If Finland wanted to implement UBI, it could start sending money to resident citizens’ bank accounts tomorrow. Paper checks and other American-style 19th century banking relics are simply not a thing.
Nobody needs crypto or a VC-funded eyeball scanner to get there, it just takes political will.
Tax refund fraud is a big problem, and the IRS, DOJ, etc have put a lot of effort into limiting it. Numbers are hard to find, but in 2013 it seems there was $30 billion in fraud, or around 10% of all refunds, with about $6 billion unrecovered.
That's not to say that fraud should no be investigated and prosecuted. Just that it's important to accept that you will never get fraud to zero and there will always be that one guy who's collecting benefits for a bunch of made-up identities.
If you told somebody who supported UBI that it was going to cost $1.1*X rather than $X, would they stop supporting it? If you told somebody who opposed UBI that it was going to cost $0.91*X rather than $X, would they stop opposing it?
That number also includes people who got scammed out of their tax refund by third-parties. Worldcoin would not prevent that; if anything Worldcoin looks exactly like one of those scams.
This is a common misconception. It's a political battle regarding the extent to which the government is permitted to tabulate and link the various details of people's lives.
> could start sending money to resident citizens’ bank accounts tomorrow
That ability implies keeping and regularly querying detailed information about individuals that many here aren't comfortable with.
> Paper checks and other American-style 19th century banking relics are simply not a thing.
The system isn't as bad as you seem to be making out. Using a credit card without a chip is effectively the same thing. It's simply a claim that a numbered account has agreed to transfer you funds. Lying about that is fraud and your financial institution will have identifying details about you.
I think crypto is still a solution looking for a problem, but let’s not pretend that fraud wasn’t a massive pre-existing problem for humanity.
I can go further: a political environment where people are concerned about "fraud" in rescue money being distributed is not one with the political will to enable UBI at any meaningful scale. The two perspectives are largely incompatible.
In any case, I'm not sure crypto would be my first stop for fraud prevention.
Source? I find it hard to believe.
Governments could have prevented fraud but it would have been at the expense of speed, or it would have come at huge cost. Governments chose fraud as the cost of operating a fast and cheap system for distributing money to people in need.
We should consider a more traditional social security program as a point of reference for fraud levels, and for those, the most cyclical estimates of fraud in most western countries are a few percentage points — and that fraud is traditionally misrepresentation of circumstance… not identity fraud.
It did not.
> I’m not sure where PPP falls on the spectrum,
You should not use it as an example especially if you don't know how efficient it was.