EDIT: this is the announcement thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3021063.20This is a Pre-announcement for a cryptocurrency that is still in development and that aims to distribute it's monetary units following a universal basic income scheme.
Every individual that successfully verifies his passport using NFC technology will be granted a small reward in each block that is issued on the UBIC blockchain.
Such a procedure can be done easily using almost every recent smartphone.
At least two other projects are already trying to implement a similar currency system. However they both rely on a web of trust to prevent sybil atacks.
There are currently 3 solutions that are explored in the crypto community to solve this kind of attack:
- The web of trust as used by Circles and Duniter
- Proof-of-Individuality tokens as described by Johan Nygren
- Using the the digital signature contained on every biometric passport as suggested by Mike Hearn
All of them have their downsides but I believe the passport solution is the more practical and the most secure one. I've already achieved to implement it in C++ by using a non-transferable proof of signature knowledge. This kind of proof can be computed on both ECDSA and RSA signatures and is much smaller and faster to verify than SNARK.
However because the non-transferable proof of signature for RSA is "hackier" than the one for ECDSA the first versions of UBIC will only support ECDSA signatures meaning that it can only be used by individuals holding following passports:
- Switzerland all valid passports
- Germany all valid passports
- Austria all passports issued after 2014
- United Kingdom all passports issued after 2016
- United Arab Emirates all valid passports
Brazil also uses ECDSA but doesn't issue a new Document Signing Certificate every 3 months as required by the ICAO. This is why there is no way for UBIC to estimate when the passport was issued and if it already expired.
To make it as fair as possible there will be one currency for each country but running on the same Blockchain. If you hold a Swiss passport you will get some UCH the swiss unit for the UBIC, if you are German you will get some UDE and so on..
A vast majority of the monetary supply should be distributed to the end users. Much smaller shares will be allocated as rewards for securing the network and development.
To give the currency value and avoid hyperinflation the supply increase will be constant with perhaps a little increase about 0.2 - 0.5% every year. Monetary units will be distributed on a continuous basis. The end user reward will be shared like a Pie, if the end user reward for a block is 100MU and there are 5 users each will get 20MU, if there are 100 users each will get 1MU and so on.
There shall be no premine.
Consensus could be achieved through POW or proof of something else. Nothing's Carved in Stone.
If you want to contribute just send me a private message, I appreciate any help.
In the following weeks I'll start to make the current work available on Github at:
https://github.com/ubicorn
