Hello Encointer community,
Back in 2017, I did a failed attempt to establish a similar (to Encointer) system to Dash cryptocurrency.
—vote history
Would you like this proof of individuality to be implemented in Dash?
end of vote history—
Read here for more information.
The initial idea was announced to the dash community at 2 Sep 2016, but it is older than that date.
I am glad I discovered Encointer community!
I am a member of Dash community, and I hold a masternode vote (I am a vote delegator).
I am here to discuss with you the possibility to add a proposal to the dash budget system, and if voted, to give a dividend of dash to the Encointer community members.
You may contact me here, or in my personal site.
I repost here the description of the proposed system in Dash community:
From:Stupids and Spies bought masternodes in order to stop governance. | Page 2 | Dash
You are among ordinary people who are not masternodes, and who may attend the same meeting in order to get their universal dividend. There is not ID card or Social Number required. And it is totaly safe, as long as you do not advertise eponymously (in your everyday life or in the internet) that you own a masternode . But even in the case you did the mistake and everybody knows that you are a masternode owner, the cryptoparty procedure allows you to appear masked, so you are safe that way (as long as, of course, you are not the only one masked and there are many other masked people that attend the same cryptoparty).
You will not attend the cryptoparty with your private keys! You participate by having several empty_wallets (their public keys) printed in QRcode. During the cryptoparty (which takes place in a closed door room where nobody is allowed to leave until the procedure ends) everyone puts one QRcode wallet in an envelope and then the envelope into a physical ballot box. Then all the wallets are extracted from the ballot box, they are counted, scanned, added in a digital list, and their number is expected of course to be found equal to the number of the attendees. If someone objects that the list of wallets is not equal to the number of attendees, or if he claims that his wallet is not into the list, then the voting is repeated, and until nobody objects (due to the possibility of voting repetition, everyone should have more than one printed QRcode wallets pre-created, so that he can re-vote in case an objection occurs). Finally, when there is no objection, everyone receives the final list of the valid wallets, the door opens and the cryptoparty finishes. All the wallets that are contained in the final valid list, can be considered now as a proof of individuality, that can be used online in the internet. And as long as every single attendee is allowed to object, this is considered as a decentralized (and unanimous) process, isn’t it?
For even more decentralization, many similar cryptoparties may be organized in several towns, as long as those cryptoparties are absolutely concurrent , and a web of trust among cryptoparties is established so that all the wallet lists of all the cryptoparties are recognized as proof of individuality. A web of trust among cryptoparties means that all the attendees of a specific cryptoparty sign whatever else cryptoparty they trust it is legitimate. This multi-signature may occur immediately after the creation of the final valid list of wallets, and just before the door opens.
Having your proof of individuality (I remind that you put it into the ballot box, so it is anonymized), you can now claim anonymously in the internet your masternodes, by signing the dash addresses of your masternodes with the private key of your empty_dash_address which you put in the ballot box, during the cryptoparty.
From: Proposal: Legal (Sept) | Page 2 | Dash
You will not travel with your private keys!
You will travel with a public key of your choice, printed in QR code. In the assembly, you put this printed public key into a physical ballot box. Everyone who attends the assembly do the same. Then the printed public keys are counted and expected to be equal to the number of people that attend the meeting. Everyone leaves the assembly having the list of all public keys. Those keys are considered now as a proof of individuality, that can be used for now on in the internet in order to prove that you are a real person. Many similar assemblies can be organized in several towns, as long as those assemblies are absolutely concurrent, and a web of trust among those assemblies is established. Having this proof of individuality in your hands, you can now claim in the internet your masternode votes, by signing the public keys of the masternodes with the private key of the printed public key you put into the physical ballot box.So there is no fear for someone to steal you in the assembly. If you are afraid that someone may kill/arrest/kidnap you in the assembly, then you can give the printed public key that is about to be put in the ballot box to a lawyer, and send him to attend the assembly on your behalf!
“Proof of individuality” is a term identical to the term "Proof of Personhood", while “Universal Dividend” is similar to “Basic Income”.
The novelty of the above system is that it unites both the wealthy people (which own either a lot of money or a lot of votes) and the poor people in a single assembly.
The poor are incentivized to participate to the meetings because of the basic income, and the wealthy for recognizing their individuality and thus claim their voting power.
The wealthy people are protected in these assemblies because they do not present any ID, the meetings can be masked, and finally whoever remains a wealthy/known/unmasked person who is afraid to attend, he can indirectly participate to these meetings by hiring a representative (a lawyer, a delegate e.t.c.) who will transfer his acquired proof of personhood and his basic income to the wealthy. The representative will obviously be paid back for his service, a tip bigger than the basic income.
The proposal will ask a portion of the Dash Budget (4592 Dash per month) to be given to the Encointer community.
How much this amount will be, I suggest it be a voting issue, masternodes should be allowed to vote the numbers on that.
The proposal fee is currently set to 1 Dash per proposal. If we dont ask a fixed portion from the budget and we allow the masternodes to vote the numbers about the basic income that will be offered to the Encointer community, we will need at least 3 proposals + 1 proposal for the confirmation of the voted number (total 4 dash).
Also another difference between the Encointer’s system and the Dash’s proposed system, is that the basic income does not refer to a local coin (or to a local circular economy), but rather to a global coin. It refers to a global coin that is already active in the market and has value, it refers to a global coin whose owners decided to fix the initial space-time asymmetry error.
The idea behind is based on Duniter’s space-time asymmetry concept.
Read here or here or here or here or here, for more information.
Beware, in case you decide to transform Encointer’s mission and ask to the polkadot-kusama coin to fix their own space-time assymmetry error. You may end up banned , like me in dash.
So you have better ask other coins to fix their space-time assymetry error by funding Encointer community (you may ask it from the Dash treasury as I proposed you, the Dash community has a 7 years preaching history and may be more receptive to the idea of fixing their space-time asymmetry).
Encointer’s survival currently tightly depends on polkadot-kusama council who may reject and cease encointer community, in case you start talking to them about space-time asymmetry issues.
Thank you for reaching out to our forum. You have posted a lot of content which I still need to wrap my head around. Let me just answer selectively - for now - to just what caught my immediate attention:
Thank you for your answer!
Exactly that. I think we share a similar vision.
Thats great!
Dash crypto bridged to your faucet is a really great idea!
I can help you implement that, because I have some knowledge of the dash technology.
On the other hand I suspect that the Dash community (if they decide to embrace the Encointer community and give a basic income to you), they will give more dividend in case the Encointer community members hold Dash wallet addresses (in parallel to the polkadot-kusama wallet addresses).
This could be implemented by allowing every Encointer member to sign (by using his/her kusama-polkadot address) a unique dash wallet address that will be used as their dash proof of personhood.
Thats great! This seems similar to what I said above ( to sign the Dash addresses by using your kusama-polkadot addresses)
ils croient,
ils voient,
ils boivent.
So the plan is
What do you think? Ideas? Suggestions?
I think on the technical side, there’s a very clear way forward with a few design choices yet to be made.
Before we go there, I’d like to establish what the goal of this partnership is for each stakeholder. Let me sketch my view on it:
While the Encointer association (which I represent here) has no way to prevent anyone form granting DASH dividends to members of Encointer communities, we have to consider the possible undesired impact of such a dividend should we be actively involved. Above, you suggest 4592 DASH for all Encointer community members. This today is more market value (~200k$) than the current market cap of all Encointer communities combined (~40k$). This means we would create a significant incentive to join or create communities where the local community currency is just a byproduct and may get no attention at all (no real value from acceptance points will be backing the currency).
This - by itself is no show stopper as it still contributes to some of our goals, i.e. the basic income/dividend.
One caveat may be that existing communities have no incentive to support new communities (or inviting new members within their own community) because they would have to share the dividend. Such a counterincentive could cripple the Encointer network as a whole. This could be prevented if we could define a per-capita dividend to be distributed instead of a fixed amount.
But more importantly, we need to be very careful about the security assumptions of our sybil-resilience mechanism: We assume the majority of a community to be honest. This assumption is realistic if the pains of cheating are felt and observed within the community itself: A community currency which can be cheated will just lose its value and disappear because the stakeholders can themselves observe the cheating happening and no one will accept that currency for payment. However, with the main driver being a community-external incentive, I’m concerned about this assumption because the giving party (DASH network) can’t really observe the honesty of all receiving communities and their members.
IMO, the proposed setup conflicts with Elinor Ostrom’s rules for managing the commons, specifically these rules:
4. Commons must be monitored. Once rules have been set, communities need a way of checking that people are keeping them. Commons don’t run on good will, but on accountability.
5. Sanctions for those who abuse the commons should be graduated. Ostrom observed that the commons that worked best didn’t just ban people who broke the rules. That tended to create resentment. Instead, they had systems of warnings and fines, as well as informal reputational consequences in the community.
Instead of distributing a stash of DASH to all members of Encointer communities, we could consider to back community currencies with a DASH reserve.
Encointer features democracy, therefore a community could jointly hold a treasury with foreign assets (i.e. DASH) and the community could democratically decide how to use the treasury funds. In practise, this could serve as a security for acceptance points who may in the beginning accumulate CC and take a lot of risk.
In Zurich, for example, acceptance points have jointly founded an association that aims to further economic cycles and may de-risk individual businesses. Such an association could be a candidate to claim treasury funds.
While this approach doesn’t suffer from false incentives for individuals of honest communities, it still incentivizes collusion: Creating fake communities to get DASH
Currently, this risk is minimal because the Encointer association acts as an authority on who may start a new community. But - in the spirit of decentralization - the network has to transition to an unpermissioned web-of-trust. And there, the above is a risk
Thank you for you answer. I will reply to your reasonable points soon.
Let me answer to your above quote first, to clear the misunderstanding.
I am not suggesting 4592 Dash for all the Encointer community members. I am suggesting for the Dash masternodes to vote the numbers and decide what the dash basic income for all the encointer community members should be. A number between minimum 0 dash and maximum 4592 dash.
So 4592 dash is the best scenario, there is also the worst case that is 0 dash. And we have all the numbers in between. The decided number, that will be voted every month by the mansternodes, MAY PROBABLY VARIES EVERY MONTH. The monthly decision of the masternodes on how much dash will be given, depends on the number of individuals that participate to the encointer community and on the trust the masternodes have that the encointer community operates according to the specification and does not cheat.
In order to understand how “vote the numbers” works, look at the application I created here, or look here for the outcome of 4 proposals that are assumed to be numerical ones (they are not, but just for the sake of the example).
“Vote the numbers” is not a technology directly supported by the dash core team (although the main developer of Dash is a proponent of it). It is rather an add-on that I created, an add-on that can easily fit not only to Dash but also to any other coin that is governed by yes/no type proposals or referendums. This add-on fits even to the governed coins that have not implement yet any “vote the numbers” solution (like dash), it fits even to the governed coins that their core team strictly refuses to implement a “vote the numbers” solution but their community members strongly desire that.
The basic idea is, if you allow someone to vote a yes or a no, this person can also vote all the numbers, at the cost of many proposals. Because yes/no is similar to 0/1 (or 1/0 depending on the defined semantics), so we can use the binary numerical system.
In dash the masternodes are allowed to vote yes/no/abstain, so we have a base3 number voting system. Dash masternodes can also be allowed to vote by using the base4 voting system, you can look at the relevant app I created here. The explanation of the theory about “voting the numbers” is here.
I never write complete articles, I prefer to talk to forums. So if you want a summary of a similar to mine idea (a close variation), you can also read the article of PIETRO SPERONI.
Let the DAO decide “how much” – Pietro Speroni di Fenizio, PhD
I think “vote the numbers” has been clarified, so soon I will answer to your rest points.
You may also follow (and participate to) the parallel discussion that occurs here.
OK, got that. Still it isn’t a per-capita amount but a variable-amount payment which may happen repeatedly over time and should be distributed evenly to all verified humans of Encointer communities at the time of distribution, right? So much of the argument above still holds IMO.
But let me also state: At our current state, we would welcome such experiments and it can’t hurt to have additional incentives to participate in Encointer communities while we still have some limited control over the onboarding. We discussed it internally and we tend to support such an initiative.
You never know the way the Dash masternodes vote.
But I am afraid the masternodes may not agree to give a Basic income to the encointer community in case the encointer community decides not to reveal the number of the individuals that participate in their meetings.
On the other hand, if the encointer community decides to reveal the number of their participants (and their wallets, preferably dash wallet because this may increase the dash basic income the masternodes are willing to offer), then it is very possible that the vote casted by each masternode will highly depend on the number of persons that participate to the encointer community.
So, indirectly through the masternodes vote, the given amount will actually become a per-capita amount.
Thats great! Lets do the experiment.
I also want the encointer community to grow and succeed.
I was always waiting for such a community to appear, and I am very glad that I discovered you.
The number of attested persons per community is public information: See our explorer. Click on one of the communities and check the “number of reputables” number. However, we need to talk about how this number comes to be: It is the number of accounts who have been attested at at least one of the last 5 cycles. This number won’t be safe to use for distribution of DASH: A single attendance should only qualify for a single payout, otherwise you can sybil-attack with 1+4 sybils (the attacker could attend 5 times in a row, but with different accounts). The way we propose to do it is by tracking which proof of attendance has been used already to claim DASH. And that’s how our personhood oracle works. Morever, this oracle improves privacy as there is no linkability between the encointer account with reputation and the dash account receiving the dividend. Users enjoy k-anonymity with k being the number of beneficiaries per payout run (with the same reputation rating, to be precise).
Therefore, I think we should not just sign dash accounts with the encointer account. IMO, the oracle mentioned is a superior solution because of privacy and it also solves tracking of “burned” reputation, thereby improving sybil-resilience
Here’s how you can fetch the number of attested persons per community and per cycle:
Go to js/apps to fetch chain state:
this will give you a list of all accounts with a proof of attendance at the respective cycle index and the specified community (VerifiedLinked and VerifiedUnlinked are equally valid. The difference is an internal thing)
Still, this will only give you the maximum number of human attendances H which might apply for a DASH dividend. I don’t think it makes sense to distribute the dividend to all accounts as they may just lay around unused forever. I’d favor an active act of claiming DASH by the users. Such a claim could look like this:
On UX: This process has to be lean and simple for the reputable user. Therefore I’d suggest we support it in our Encointer Wallet mobile app directly (i.e. using this planned feature), with a recommendation on a super simple DASH mobile app and maybe a companion web-service that helps connecting the two and the oracle
I dont fully undestand what you have just said.
Every month the dash masternodes will be asked whether they accept the decided/voted Basic income amount of the previous month to be shared to all the reputables/attested persons of the encointer community. We cant do otherwise, thats the limitations of the dash budget system. When the Dash platform (also called dash evolution) will be released (we are waiting for it 5 years!!!) we may bypass the limitations of the budget, we may also be able to vote the numbers directly without base3 or base4 numerical systems. But unfortunately currently this is all that we have, and we have to live with it.
So the dash basic income will be a single monthly payout, that I assume will be given to the attendees of the latest encointer meeting.
In that case a single attendance qualifies for a single payout, doesnt it?
Encointer cycles happen every 10d and dash payouts are asynchronous every month. The delay of information is not a problem IMO, payouts can happen based on past data. But I suggest to base payouts on attendances as this is the most secure setup, even if it means that one account can possibly attend (and claim) up to 3 times during the period of one month. The factor of 3 will just represent the confidence level in this account’s unique personhood, so it is merited
