🤔 What is proof of humanity ?
Proof of humanity is creating a list of verified human beings.
It is a decentralized index of self-sovereign identities. Their social identity system can be plugged in various apps like social media, online voting etc.
👴🏻 Founders
Proof of humanity project is built by Democracy earth foundation. They create tools, organize events and spread awareness to make governance transparent, auditable and accountable.
Santiago Siri
- He was born in Argentina in 1982.
- Dropped out of college at age of 18 to start Evoluxion, a video game company. The company was shut down because of copy infringements in 2005.
- He founded Popego, a research lab for big data research on social media in 2007. Popego was acquired by Brazilian ad-network boo-box in 2011.
- He also started Net Party , a political party – whose candidates would vote according to citizens’ online votes. His party lost elections because he could not compete in Argentina’s corrupt political environment.
- In 2015, he received grant from Y combinator to build Democracy earth foundation.
Pia Mancini
- She started her career by working for Unión Celeste y Blanco, an Argentine political party, from 2010 to 2012.
- Mancini developed DemocracyOS, an online app that allows citizens to understand, discuss and “vote” on new legislation. However, none of the political parties agreed to use it.
- She started her own political party with Santiago Siri in 2012 after seeing the widespread corruption and lack of responsiveness to the public. The party lost elections and could not compete in Argentina’s corrupt political environment.
- She co-founded Democracy earth foundation in 2015.
😌 What problems does proof of humanity solve ?
Proof of Humanity is an online social identity system for humans. It can be used to build apps like:
- Online voting: Citizens are fed up with the corrupt and exhausting voting systems.
Voters have to wait in long lines 👇
Voting system is corrupt in most countries 👇
Apps like democracy.earth enable online liquid democracy using proof of humanity’s identities.
- Universal basic income: Governments all over the world have failed to provide universal basic income:
Proof of humanity streams 720 UBI tokens to every registered human. This has the potential to eradicate poverty and its related problems.
- Governments are unable to do it: Governments are not able to issue identities to their citizens even after spending billions of dollars and hiring millions of staff. People have to suffer as a consequence of the inefficient identity system of governments.
Some Canadian used fake Thor ID to buy weed online 👇
- Proof of humanity issues self-sovereign universal identifiers to humans that is tamper-proof and permanently stored on the blockchain.
🤖 How does it work ?
How to register
Users go through through the following stages to get registered on proof of humanity:
- Submission – Submit all required details.
- Challenge – During this period, the profile can be challenged by other users if they believe it doesn’t comply with the guidelines.
- Vouching – Profile is awaiting a vouch from a registered user.
- Registered – Profile is accepted and registered on PoH. The user starts collecting UBI tokens.
Other users can challenge the profile if they feel it does not comply with the requirements:
- Incorrect submission: This could be as simple as wrongly inputted data (or lack of required data). Not necessarily a malicious submission, but not meeting the requirements will lead to challenges.
- Deceased: The submitter has existed but does not exist anymore. The challenger can provide evidence that the submitter is dead such as death certificate, obituary, public records.
- Duplicate: The submitter is already registered. The challenger has to point to the identity already registered or to a duplicate submission.
- Does not exist: The submitter does not exist. For example, this can be used for videos showing computer-generated persons.
Proof of humanity uses Kleros to resolve disputes.
Universal basic income
The project pays 1 UBI token to every registered user per hour, ie 720 UBI tokens a month.
UBI token must maintain a high market price for it to support humans depending on UBI for survival. The project has taken several steps to maintain high market price of UBI token:
🏛️ Governance model
Proof of humanity is run by DAO, which gives 1 vote to every human. This prevents any big whales from controlling the system. Users can delegate their votes to another human.
Only the proposals that are voted in by the DAO get implemented.
😨Risks & challenges
- Negative feedback loop: The price of UBI will fall as more and more people register on proof of humanity to receive UBI, making it unattractive for new users to register.
- No switching cost: Most people will make accounts on all competing projects to receive multiple UBI.
- No incentives to vouch: Registered users get penalized for vouching for malicious users, However, there is no reward for vouching for a new human. This will discourages registered users to vouch for new users.
- Proof of humanity is built on Etherium, which is an open public blockchain. Everyone will come to know the funds held and spendings once a user registers their Etherium address on proof of humanity.
- New users have to upload video to prove they are human. The project will have to find a way to register accounts for handicapped users who cannot speak or are not mentally stable.
- Proof of humanity is built on Etherium. Etherium’s high gas prices makes it difficult for people to register and vouch for new users.
- Proof of humanity project does not have any ongoing source of revenue. Lack of funds might hamper its development in the long run.
- Proof of humanity can be used to link and record all the activities: social credit, social apps public reputation, qualifications, skills, citizenship etc. This information is stored on open public blockchains and can be used for evil purposes.
💰 Tokenomics
10 million UBI tokens were minted at genesis. These tokens were distributed as follows:
Token Inflation
Additional UBI token is minted every time a new user registers on the network. However, after several years, once every human is registered the inflation will mirror population growth.
The project has instituted following burn mechanisms:
- Several governance actions require burning UBI.
- Interest earned from liquidity mining is used to buy and burn UBI tokens.
Market cap
Ideally, sum of UBI tokens earned in a month should correspond to what the fair market value of human time is.
🧐 Indicators to watch out for
- Google trends: More people are searching for “universal basic income” on google:
- Number of UBI holders is increasing:
- Number of UBI unique receivers(newly registered users) is flat:
- Their Twitter following is growing:
👋 Final remarks
Governments all over the world have tried several times but failed to provide a robust online identity system and universal basic income.
Proof of humanity is tackling one of the biggest challenges faced by human civilization: poverty and identity.
Similar to the “double-spend” problem, solving this challenge unlocks a world of unprecedented possibilities and prosperity.
😊 Do further research
You can continue your research by using following resources:
