Bitcoin Forum

As governments are gearing up to have COVID-19 apps ready for contact tracing and diagnose attestations we, the public, are afraid these apps will end up compromising our privacy.

Privacy
In the blockchain communities I'm active this is a very hot topic. We should not just sit still and wait for the usual suspects to force intrusive apps on us. What we can do is carefully craft the alternatives which are designed for privacy and self sovereignty.

Open Source

The international team of The Verus project resides partly in The Netherlands and decided to extend the blockchain driven self sovereign digital ID VerusID with COVID-19 specific functions. To be clear, the whole Verus project is 100% open source.

Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport
As I became enthusiastic about this effort I helped the project to apply to the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport for the what they call "market consultation".

So good news! There is at least one 100% open source app in their market consultation.

Read more at:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/covid-19-app-without-compromise-bart-van-maarseveen

This sounds like a gimmick for me. Whatever how many apps that will be created (plan) by them for covid or to fight covid and what we need is a vaccine. So many countries have already announced to lockdown and this enough to prevent the mobility from their civilians and the tracing app will not be used again.

This doesn't make sense, how will a app serve as a cure to covid 19? Sounds like an hoax, I don't have interest in this type of claim because it's stupid to begin with, what we need is real cure or vaccine to get rid of this harmful, life taking virus

I don't know, every time that I heard about Covid-19 crypto related projects, it sounds like a scam to me because of the previous projects that we have seen who turn out to be scam after all.


This is what I'm trying to drive out, do we really need blockchain app at this point?

Every government and no-governmental organizations have their own tracking, and this might compromise security and privacy as well. What we need is vaccine to help the spread of virus and not just Covid-19 theme apps, just saying.

Why everything must relate to blockchain? The purpose of this can be done even by database and not even needed crypto for that matter.

It seems people are just really wanted to create more business venture and they just putting up the issue on covid19 to make a proposed project where in the end there is a hidden agenda of profiting to people that will like the idea.

We can already seen some tracking site for each province, region, city and country. Even whole statistic can be noted on WHO website and many related news update. No need for private sector to involve with this. Government can do these things and not needed solicitation from firms who has agenda.

As you say, I'm also having the same thought. There's no need to integrate in crypto with these covid-19 projects. They are already useful as they are aiming to trace back people that a victim conversed with.
I don't feel any sense of urgency for these projects anymore. They have to let this one depend to the resource people that's more knowledgeable how to handle the situation.

In my country the government has also launched an app that is able to track you completely. It is a privacy. Issue no doubt about it but, you need this app for the time being to keep you safe whenever you are going outside.

Later on you can discontinue this app sune things have become normal.

I use an android phone and most phone come with dual numbers, for registering you can use the number which is not your primary one and later on you can discard it if you still think they can track you using the number.

I wish anyone could fund and contribute to the development of things like this.
Am abit suspicious of projects that are not built from start to finish by the people. This is why I tend to trust well decentralized project built in Crypto space transparently and without unnecessary restrictions.

I can understand the use of this covid 19 app, will the app be able to detect those who are infected or what? It sounds like a trick to make people send money all in the name of donation, I don't trust this move a bit

This does not happen. Initially, cryptocurrency attracted everyone with anonymity, smart contracts and a minimal commission. If you remove the anonymity. That will leave a large part, because we don’t even know who Satoshi is, and some wise men want to remove anonymity. I agree that there should be transparency, but it can be anonymous. I think nothing will change, otherwise it will turn the attitude towards cryptocurrency.

We can hope that the project is really working for humanity and to help people to prevent the Coronavirus. We need to wait for a while until they give more explanation about the project, so we hope we can understand what the purpose of that project is. But I wonder how the apps can know if someone is infected with the Covid-19 and someone who is not infected because if we only need to scan, it doesn't prove anything because if we want to know if someone is infected or not, we need to test our health first so the result will come out.

An app for contact tracing is not what's needed at this moment be it secured due to blockchain technology or not what's most needed at this time is a vaccine, a cure before everyone dies of the virus.

Creating a contact tracing app doesn't mean it should be built on block chain technology, whereas am still wondering how this is going to work.  We need aggressive research now that will come out with a lasting solution to the pandemic.  Another view of mine is that, this might be another news from potential scammers!!!! Just thinking anyway.

The thing is to know if it's a normal person or aliens that are making this assertion, how on earth can an app be a solution to a virus that placed the whole world on lockdown?
Some people are not smart one bit

This is just an app trying to rely on the epidemic situation to advertise and make money. I cannot think of an application that can combat this epidemic.
All we need at the moment is a drug that can combat corona virus, which will require great effort from scientists around the world.

I read through the LinkedIn article to see how essential is the verus app to curb COVID19 spread (since that's what the world actually needs right now), but I couldn't fatom it out. By the way, I will like to know how decentralization comes in here for data acquisition as postulated? Maybe I'm yet to pick the vital features of the app but I think a lot more need to be done for it to be of high relevance to combat COVID19. More research should be done on vaccines and also if the app can be linked to research labs, that way  application will be more feasible.

Ok, I can understand the skepticism there is always a lot of scams out there but as far as I can tell this is not one of them.

This is actually being build DEX by several community members around the world and its 100% open source!

Its being led by a world-class developer in fact he's one of our internet founding fathers!!

Michael J Toutonghi  --  https://thedailychain.com/the-verus-review-with-mike-toutonghi-2/
Lead Developer

Former Vice President and Technical Fellow at Microsoft, recognized founder and architect of Microsoft's .Net platform, ex-Technical Fellow of Microsoft's advertising platform, ex-CTO, Parallels Corporation, experienced distributed computing and machine learning architect. ( from: https://veruscoin.io/about )

jl777

jl777 is the lead developer of Komodo, Supernet, Marketmaker behind Barterdex, and a lot more. He's one of, if not the most productive devs in crypto. He's also one of our trusted advisers, and has added an invaluable technical and crypto-veteran perspective to our decision making.


David Dawes
Developer

Decades of experience delivering successful products including real time financial engines moving billions of dollars in international remittances. Dave taught Mike assembly language over 30 years ago and has ensured that Verus enhanced Agama can be used on all platforms.

Asher Dawes
Developer

Automation wizard extraordinaire, Asher keeps the Verus builds and backend test systems on track - Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android soon - Asher works tirelessly to automate builds and testing using github, gitlab, TravisCI, scripting and more as needed.

and more at https://veruscoin.io/about

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As far as I can tell some of Komodos DEV are helping too. https://komodoplatform.com/about-komodo/

Look at the guys LinkedIn page he works with Komodo


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More info From Verus Discord
https://discord.gg/VRKMP2S

allbits 04/14/2020
@miketout (Lead Developer)  in a previous update you wrote
"a decentralized bridge protocol to other blockchains (PBaaS or external) to enable BTC, ETH, USDT or other currencies to be imported, exported, and represented in the Verus network."

I've been thinking about this a lot as it seems so amazingly ground-breaking.  Do I interpret this correctly, that I could send btc to a certain address, that would then cause that btc to be represented in the verus network at a verus address that I control? And then, from there, I could send those verus-network-represented "btc" to another address in the verus network and, eventually someone else who received those "btc" could send them out of the verus network to a btc address of his choosing?


miketout (Lead Developer)  04/16/2020
@allbits yes. we need to get PBaaS out and then yes.
Also, in case people haven't seen, Bart Van Meersen did a nice writeup on the COVID-19 app work in progress. PBaaS testnet is coming next, but this app is being developed for mobile as well. We have space for a couple more strong developers to contribute to the app work and speed release if anyone is interested.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/covid-19-app-without-compromise-bart-van-maarseveen

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They are looking for Developers if you can help join there Discord https://discord.gg/VRKMP2S

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As far as I can tell they are well financed too!

Nicholas Lyons
Advisor

Founder VALU & Arkeytyp

Raised over US$92B in the Public and Private Equity Capital Markets. Director of Equity Capital Markets Syndication Robert Fleming. Head of Technology Private Placements Robert Fleming. VP Financial Sponsors Group ECM, JPMorgan. Head of UK Institutional Advisory PFG, JPMorgan. Co-Founder of Crescent. Technology & AdAstra Bayesian Machine Learning Systematic Hedge Fund (Sold to Aspect Capital). VALU & Arkeytyp is the third company Nicholas has founded or co-founded.

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Here is the info I can find so far but we may see testnet this week.

For a human being thinking ,no any body wants covid  -19  live in the long time  in the world.  Many countries are working to  the  fight with Carona virus.so my opinion is that working on the same project stand in the long time in the market. So it's topic is unnecessary project, l can say it will  be  wastage of time on this project. I think so.

I'm just thinking if the app is for affected people to fill in their data or what really. The government shouldn't be thinking to adopt blockchain now as they have not adopted bitcoin before now. I wish that the vaccine is produced anytime from now so that the world can have peace again at least.

each time there's a crisis like this, people come up with different theoretical gibberish too woo unsuspecting victims. While the world waits for a cure or vaccine, the only approach to flattening covid19 curve is by social distance and by observing all health and hygiene guidelines. Not via crypto

New Update:

From:https://twitter.com/apataskforce/status/1252941995020029953?s=12


NYS Asian Pacific American Task Force
@apataskforce

Assemblyman Ron Kim with co-host Nick Lyons invite you to a town hall meeting to discuss antibody testing, attestations & civil liberties.

Speakers: Dr. Bollinger, Dr. Hockett, Dr. Fuerst, Subramaniam, Toutonghi ( Lead Developer of Verus) , and Clippinger

5pm EST - Today, April 22
https://www.facebook.com/apataskforce/live

People should focus on obeying the instructions, like to stay at home because it's a simple way to help to prevent the spread of the virus. It's typical for people to seek an alternative way to traditionally make profit, even if it allegedly involves the agony of other people. Greedy people won't see the situation as different from any other days because they however think that the circumstance can be beneficial for them.

 lead dev Mike Toutonghi is live right NOW in a New York State Asian Pacific American Task Force virtual town hall meeting, to discuss The Gold Standard of testing, privacy respecting contact tracing, and #VerusID-based COVID-19 attestations! Tune in at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMnNi8LBJn0 to watch

We all expect the vaccine to appear as soon as possible, but this requires great effort from the government and scientists.
In the current situation, everyone should follow instructions from governments and doctors, it is best not to use such applications.

This really doesn't make any sense to me, how could a app serve as a cure to Covid -19 . Why everything must need relate to blockchain ? Blockchain and COVID-19 pandamic are two different things . Blockchain its a technology not a cure .We can't add up these two aside . What we do need right this moment is a cure or vaccine to get rid of this harmful COVID-19 virus. In my opinion i don't feel any perfect reason of urgency for such kind of  projects .

So you want to say that open source is the only advantage of this project? Personally, I think it is better to pay attention to already working platforms that are more likely to benefit in the fight against coronavirus: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5242433.msg54271446#msg54271446 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5242433.msg54271446#msg54271446)

Our current effort is only to stay at home to avoid being infected by co-19 what the government rules must obey because now it is trying to find a vaccine that might be working.
One thing is that we expect the economy to return to normal as before.

All this things doesn't seem like what will work. At this stage now the world needs a cure than contact tracing. If everyone can have access to a working cure then there won't be need for contact tracing.