Decentralized Basic Income & ZK Proof Identities - Hakwan Lau

um it is happening but now the problem is i explained to you very briefly uh and tell you to read the paper about where the 20 come from but if you really bring it to your parents and your grandmas about this and try to install this like phone app for them yes it is very easy to use but they're still mostly going to think it's a scam right they're not going to know what is sticking fees and what is 2x collateral they're not going to buy that so in trying to do this trying to do this exercise of really trying to explain to them what it means as my job is an academic i end up using this analogy so the analogy is if you put money in a proof-of-stake network to allow sticking then to allow the validators to do the job in a way it's a bit like you are you're investing into a banking infrastructure right so so bankers make a lot of money on wall street and why they make a lot of money well they have the money in the in the in the institution which allows them to do this banking job so in defy essentially if you have ten dollars you're a ten dollar banker if you're a hundred dollar you're a hundred dollar banker so the the twenty percent rate essentially is the bank is cut right so you actually earn that money because you're making by by delegating to to validators to do the job you're facilitating the efficiency and security of a banking particle so you're actually contributing so the 20 is not given to you for free you are actually playing the banker's row so you deserve the bank is cut and of course we know the bankers don't don't stick the money but they eat a lot of steaks they breathe a lot of oxygen and they eat animals that also breathe a lot of oxygen so you can think of it not just as a money you deserve you're also doing it in an environmentally friendly way because you're replacing part of the banking industry that is highly energy inefficient and highly bad for the environment they fly a lot in those buildings whereas you are doing it in a way that is energy efficient so all that is very well uh but you might think well i'm talking about these 20 fixed income and we know that fixed income 20 may not be so good anymore because of inflation right so if i tell you the ust would be the money that you're doing on anchor is packed to the u.s dollar but who knows where the us dollar would still mean the same thing in 10 years so i was trying to say that it would be sustainable for the long term and that's one reason why we are also partnering with fracs these are my friends from la they have the one of the top 10 biggest algorithmic stable stablecoin now and sam from frax always promised that when they hit a certain market cap they would start doing this stable coin that is not packed to us dollar but packed to purchasing power so they're basically creating a consumer price index and then their stable coin is actually packed to that real purchasing power so it's inflation adjusted right so we have another on-chain project called oni that is we're doing the same thing it's more native to our one it's collateralized by our one token so with this token and the kind of twenty percent you what happens is if you think you can survive on let's say twenty thousand dollars a year you think twenty thousand dollars is a good basic income it's not great but you can probably survive with that that means that you only need a hundred thousand dollars as a one-time down payment one-time endowment and assume that the 20 rate would sustain then you don't have care about uh inflation you get 20 20 000 worth of real purchasing power and that lasts as long as the you know the crypto uh space it will continue to have proof of stake networks essentially if you don't think 20 is good okay you might add a little bit right so you might assume that it might drop to fifteen percent you might think twenty percent twenty thousand dollars purchasing is not good enough okay maybe you need two hundred thousand dollars but two hundred thousand dollars certainly sounds like a lot more manageable than funding someone for life right i mean with these systems you're actually talking about about price that seems to become more approachable now i know that i promised to talk about you know dbi but end up selling your financial product it seems a little bit of slack of hand i understand that i this is not true upi but with this product and up to this point i think we can see where the path forward could be now it's not very inclusive right you need to have some money down you need to put on put put down two hundred thousand dollars which some of you have then you're sorted for life you can also you can also give that to someone else right so it's uh it's very nice but maybe we can talk about how we can actually cough up or find find that money in the first place to allow a lot of people to benefit uh as many as we can and the idea is well basically as an authentic real person you're worth something uh economically i'm not talking about in the tree hugging you know kind of blue sky kind of fashion i'm talking about economically you're justified to to to deserve some money and the the argument should not be too unfamiliar to to us in the ethereum community right we talk about quadratic rotating protracted funding i mean at the bottom of it what it means is basically this right if you if you don't need to care about who people are and just want some sort of funding or voting the easiest thing to implement is one dollar one vote right so i don't need to know who you are i don't need to know whose account is it if you if you want to fund this project and give me the money or if you want to vote something then it's one dollar one vote so the people who have more stake can vote more but we don't like that we don't like to we don't hate the whales but we don't want them to basically run everything we think oligarchy is intrinsically not so good and so on the other hand we have one person one vote and that's why kind of quadratic voting and project funding essentially is about we try to make the smaller users uh give them a bigger voice right but the problem is now the whales are also very smart so if i'm if i were a whale i would now split my 10 million dollars into maybe 10 million accounts or one dollar each then i can get the projected boost right and right now there are some ways to stop people from doing that but but maybe not ideally not ideal enough so essentially ultimately we would like to have uh really respect the uh consciousness of each person because if as a human being unlike a bot uh we even a very sophisticated bot that can you know create all these social history a person is intrinsic in that you do not like to be screwed over right if if the central authority really implements something that is really against your interest at some point you will not turn in blind you will stand up to it and i think that is something that actually is not just noble and cool but it's actually intrinsic to the to the to the to the source of security in a decentralized network so to make it more concrete uh we can talk a bit by harmony uh so we um some of you don't know what we are we can think of ourselves as a bonsai plant version of if 2.0 so we are basically a sharded proof of stake network so we have a lot of technol a lot of tech that is similar to what 2.7 would look like and so one thing that we face as a problem is that the proof of stake is actually very cool is environmental friendly but the problem is we we have to set a certain entry point for people to become validators so if they have nothing at stake and then they can just like go in and validate transactions then what if they just do something very crazy and that would threaten the security of the network so unlike in proof of work you actually invest computational power and time and energy then it's less likely for you to do something that is not in your interest whereas for proof-of-stake the way to go is to actually make sure that you actually we have to put down some stick in the network first so right now they create a kind of entry level requirement that is pretty high we already tried our best to make this level lower we try to use a an algorithm called effective proof of stake but still we'll talk about hundreds of thousands of dollars for you to be eligible to become a validator and this problem is only going to get worse because we know that with serial knowledge proof stateless clients the technology for the technical requirement for being a validator is only going to go down you're going to need cheaper and smaller computers so essentially how much money you have would become a very central bottleneck but i think we can maybe solve this problem by thinking about the the worth of genuine human identity so right now to solve these problems people as i mentioned you can use um your social history social media activity or someone else can vouch for you and and these do great but if you're really talking about security we know that the best security really is government registry right like social security number your passport birth certificate those are much more uh will give you better security and this is a paper that actually goes through some of the analysis and show that if you actually have a real national government identity registry to prove that every user is a real person and no one person can have two accounts on your network this can make a really secure network and some people do that so we can use serial knowledge proof to um submit your identity and make sure that it is you know kind of encrypted within the network but people tend not to feel very comfortable with the idea because still you're trusting a central authority so one proposal here may be that you can do it with the validators so the so the validators uh you have many validators because eventually the technical requirement below so if you're a user in the network you prove your activity in the network you're you're a valuable user and you can choose to ck prove your identity that is ckkyc with a validator of your choice that you think is trustworthy and that validator might be someone you have met in real life and there's some network analysis uh that if we do then we can show that this will make a scale-free network because no no validator would attract all the people to do kyc with them you presumably want to choose someone close to you you've heard of some good reputation that can give you a very secure network so i'm running out of time i'm not going to go into the details but just to give you an insight there's an interesting point here that for us to uh for networks to want to pay people to do these kind of uh identity proof in fact you would think the small networks would have a high incentive to do that because small networks have fewer validators easier for people to cyber attack so actually if anything of these kind would come up it might not come up on really big networks because really big networks are already secure they need they may not care as much whereas small networks are somewhat more desperate so we are more likely to make this kind of dpi happen so i left out all these details because uh we i don't have time but i also learned that as a professor you don't always need the details what you need is to train a lot of really smart people and then they can come up with the details so this is my approach is that we are running a online course on serial knowledge proof with a very strong focus on fairness as well so fairness is one of our key topic uh we've been running it for the past two months so the pilot cohort just started uh my my ceo is down there he uh we were just debating whether it should be a thousand eggs or more uh we we now make it a thousand uh we make it a thousand people this year first this is our goal we want to train a thousand people who can uh program uh we make make products using zero knowledge proof and he's been urging me to add one more zero and i will do that for in a few years uh but this year is thousand first and the way we do it actually is interesting is relates back to the dbi idea so how do we dare to train a thousand developers who are not there the idea is we pay people to to learn to go through this course uh this why do you run through a pilot this is different from a scholarship because a scholarship is based on your past achievement right and this isn't this is much more inclusive you can come with no achievement you've ever made you might not have even finished college or high school but if you can finish a piece of assignment i give you a few hundred bucks so it's off incentive for the future work uh and so far has worked very well uh so within the course of uh two two months if you're really outstanding you can earn up to ten thousand dollars and we also pay our tas a really very generously like assistant professors we are actually committed committing to this 10 million dollars for grants so um so why i talk about this well again small networks maybe we are more likely to do this sort of stuff i should just really wrap up but let me say one last thing which is that there are many other projects that do dbi and they are much more developed they are much more likely upi than we are we don't see ourselves in competition we are beginners but i think one thing i've learned from youth conference is from this great guy griff green who talked about how we should incentivize good this basically i think our approach is similar to other people's but what we really want to happen is we want to make ubi something that is lucrative we want you to even if you're very selfish and very self-serving and i want you to like ubi because it is good for your your network security so i should wrap up so uh chat with me i will be the harmony booth and tomorrow we have another talk um and we can talk about everything else like my my work outside of crypto let's have a beer tonight thank you thank you the coolest professor