# Universal Basic Income for Humanity by Santiago Siri | Devcon Bogotá

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2023-10-09
- Duration: 31:39
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-zZJz1gBNxLI
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZJz1gBNxLI

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/6/universal-basic-income-for-humanity/

On 2021 the Proof of Humanity protocol was released alongside the UBI token reaching almost 20k humans receiving Universal Basic Income. This talk will offer direct testimonials from users on how UBI has impacted their lives. We will demo how Proof of Humanity v2 will support the use of Soul Bound Tokens and reduce costs using Layer 2. Also we will explain how UBI v2 extends its streaming features allowing real time money and how we can create regenerative economics for it as a community.

Speaker(s): Santiago Siri
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Opportunity & Global Impact
Keywords: UBI,Identity,DeSoc

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 6 was held in Bogotá, Colombia on Oct 11 - 14, 2022.
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## Transcript

foreign [Music] so what happened what happened since the last Defcon in 2019 three years ago in Osaka do you can see a picture of me there with Fede the CEO of cleros amazing guy good person we were talking about back then is proof of human possible you can see the slide there back in 2019 is a proof of human possible we were wondering if we were able to do um a protocol that would be able to formalize human identity on the blockchain and that would bring us as you can see on the list there democracy Universal basic income portable credit a lot of very cool social applications so what happened since 2019 everything happened because a lot of the things that were theoretical that were just a speculation about how we could do a social identity on the blockchain or how we could do Universal basic income became a reality we have the proof of humanity protocol and the universal basic income token which is the very first application built on top of proof of humanity so today I'd like to share with you a lot of the very interesting lessons that we faced in these two years building this called contributing collaborating open source which is the beautiful thing about building things as a community and to share some of the lessons that we learned in the process so a brief recap of what proof of humanity is it's a protocol you can generate a brief video of yourself you get vouchered by another human stake a deposit for three and a half days if you get challenged you go to a Clarence arbitrator if you if not you become a verified human on the blockchain and we are starting to see social applications like Ubi the very first one lens protocol has integrated with proof of humanity seismo is doing zero knowledge and FTS for proof of humanity bringing a privacy layer on top of the Civil resistant registry and it's amazing we have I think around 17 000 humans verified on proof of humanity as of today why is this important if you look at this at the world bank statistics they claim that out of the 8 billion people that were on this planet almost 1.5 billion lack an identity and this is a very common problem especially here in Latin America if you go to some of the poorest neighborhoods you will realize that a lot of teenagers a lot of kids they don't have any kind of identity which means they don't have any kind of access to services to Goods to to the state protecting them so it's a huge problem and if you look into the conflicts today we have almost a hundred million refugees in the world these are 100 million people whose right to an identity is being rejected so an important thing that we have to take into consideration when we build these systems and when we think about decentralized identity is that we need to make these systems resilient enough so they don't discriminate users so they don't marginalize users and leave people outside of the door we are fighting big brother and we need to understand that in order to fight big brother we need to understand that in the web 2 era and in the web one era the void that the web protocol has in relation to Identity was captured was captured by Facebook and the big tech companies in the west and was captured by the Chinese Communist party in China and this has led to the modern forms of surveillance capitalism where our privacy has been jeopardized and is now in the hands of a handful of Corporations so making sure that we're able to think about identity in a decentralized way and no big brother whether whether that big brother is myself Clement or Cletus or any private organization station or the state or any entity that can geopolize a right to identity is a very important fight so this is core to to at least in my view to many of the decisions and to many of the political choices that we have made as a doll so the main question I've been hearing since I arrived to Defcon that everyone asked me is what's going on with with the poh drama well we had a democratic summer kind of analog to the D5 summer that we saw a couple of years ago with a with with the rise of D5 protocols but with proof of humanity we have the virtue that it is the most democratic Dao in existence I would even go as far as to say is this the most precious democracy we have in the entire internet because the proof of humanity protocol allows for formal verification of human identity we can do one person one boat and this has led to a very active a very engaging now where all of our decisions are done democratically which is a big difference with all of the other Downs where you do token boating and they are essentially plutocracies where the largest whales the largest holders are the ones who are ultimately the decision makers democracy helps to put users to help to give users power not just as developers not just the investors but the users have a voice in a democracy and that's The Virtuous thing about it a brief recap of the Dao one person one boat allows to delegate the vote you can do vote delegation we have quadratic delegations that help Empower minorities over delegate whales and we have three phases of deliberation for proposals these are the basic rules quadratic delegations has been a recent Improvement due to a farmer of delegations that we identified in it now and it's a very interesting experiment on how to make a resilient democracy on the blockchain so that's democracy work which is a big question you know making Democratic systems uh something that I once heard from a an old activist a former president of Uruguay Pepe Mujica he once said to me that democracies always a work in progress democracy is not an absolute totalitarian idea like all the other ideologies out there it is the one exception it is the one idea about how we think about the ideas and it's in constant Evolution and democracy is constantly evolving and adapting why it's important that we make Democratic decisions ultimately high risk decisions require a high level of legitimacy the higher the risk the higher the need for legitimacy decisions sometimes are not easy choices obviously we don't go to a vote to make technical choices that are no-brainers those decisions are not high risk are basically you know you don't go to a you don't do a democracy in order to build an airplane you just trust the airplane Engineers to make the decisions for that you go to democratic votes for the decisions that are facing conflicts of interest for decisions that have multiple parties with different points of view and this this represents very high risks for the outcome of the governance of Adele or for the governance of a protocol or for the parameters of a given system so high risk decisions require High legitimacy there's a recent article I highly recommend it uh there's a QR code if for those of you who want to to actually read this Dows are not corporations and it's vitalik uh basically explaining the nature of how uh Democratic decision-making can be very helpful for specific types of decisions in organizations and he gives this very good uh analysis of decision types where he claims there are concave World Views and convex World Views basically this chart is option A and option b on the x-axis on both charts and there are concave decisions are decisions that usually are much better when there you can negotiate between option A and option b and the best point is is this point in the Middle where you reach common ground and these decisions concave decisions are much more compatible for Democratic decision making because in democracy you have to negotiate convex decisions on the other hand convex decisions are decisions where it's obviously A or B should we vaccinate everybody or should we shouldn't vaccinate everybody there's no middle ground in the middle in this type of decisions so it's obviously one or the other and these are convex a convex worldview in the argument of italic he argues that technical choices are most more often than not convex decisions but a governance decisions what he calls Sovereign decisions are usually concave World Views and these are much more compatible for Democratic decision making so in order in this 20 months of existence almost two years we had a total of 88 voted decisions which consists of 72 what we call hips Humanity Improvement proposals and this has three phases uh the hips go through a process of three phases where there is a forum post a signaling boat which is kind of reaching Quorum if it makes sense to vote this or not and a binding boat which is makes the decision final and binding one interesting thing about our Dao is that democracy actually brought engagement where the engagement of the Dao has grown over the past 20 months since the beginning and we are seeing more and more participation uh as more users engage with proof of humanity and more users engage on trying to have a voice on how we make decisions about human rights on the internet which is ultimately what a protocol like proof of humanity and many others are trying to figure out and the fact that we're trying to figure this out with Democratic decision making and it's bringing more engagement more participation to the now I think it's it's a very good thing usually it's around five to six percent of the registered humans that participate in the Dao um it's uh it might not sound like a big number but when you compare it to the usual participation rates in other dolls it's actually a very decent number the good thing is that engagement is growing so we analyze a little bit of the decisions uh that we took in the Dao throughout the these 20 months half of the decisions we made almost 50 percent are governance decision uh mostly related to the governance of the Dow itself 20 of the decisions are technical decisions parameters operating parameters of the smart contract or a specific decisions related to the technical aspects a six percent were economic decisions uh related to allocating grants allocating funds that the Dow has in the treasury and 22 percent were policy decisions uh which means improvements in the policy that is used to evaluate the human applications on proof of humanity so only the technical ones are mostly convex most of the decisions around 80 percent of the decisions are actually concave decisions decisions that make sense making uh with a democratic process so another interesting thing is that half of the decisions had at least 85 percent of voter support this means that half of the decisions that we took in the Dow they had one of the options reaching 85 percent of consensus which is a very high number a lot of half of the decisions had 85 percent of Common Ground people agreeing on that decision whether it's a yes or no and even more interestingly I don't know where I have to point with this 25 of the decisions one every four out of every four decisions actually had a hundred percent of support unanimous voter support this most of these decisions uh are are really interesting because it you know people when they think about democracy they think oh people are going to be disagreeing or people are going to be fighting over things turns out that one out of every four decisions have 100 percent of unanimous voter support on the path to take forward and the fact that we make this that decision with the community rather than from an elite of developers showing their back to the community it's actually putting trust in our users is putting trust in the people that are helping build this together and not in an ivory Tower where you make decisions and you really just don't know what users actually want so uh I have a deeper look about unanimous decisions I thought initially that they were going to be mostly technical choices to my surprise actually the technical choices that had that kind of unanimous support is only 33 percent and most of the decisions around 66 percent were actually concave decisions reaching unanimous support so that's another interesting take that it's not only the technical choices that might get this the convex choices that might get this kind of unanimous support so those are just some numbers about the drama about sorry about the the decisions we made in abstract form but what led to the Dao drama what led to the the fighting and the debating and the arguing that we had improve of humanity well this is an old motto from politics let's just follow the money let's just follow what's happening with the money routes that are within proof of humanity and bottom line is that the role of clarus in the protocol became a decisive Factor on how we think about things proof of humanity is a protocol that was initially created by the clerostim which is an extraordinary team full of amazing developers great people um but ultimately when you start making this protocol subject to democratic governance naturally there will be users that are more inclined to follow the interests of cleros usually obviously people that belong to the clearos community who are pnk holders or who are employees of the company uh or you know obviously the core team of cleros and the community that is native to proof of humanity that came to the project because of proof of humanity are not necessarily to Plato's might have different interests than the very interesting pursues this is an image from Dali I live to your imagination What keywords are used to knowledge to generate that image um so to show some stats we had 652 challenge profiles these are the profiles that are dubious profiles that might not follow correctly the process to do the proof of humanity video of these profiles we had a total of 153 addresses that acted as Challengers of this profiles the record month was 146 uh so uh the profile challenging has led uh to to to the whole game around proof of humanity becoming a little bit uh first thing from being a fair game and I'm gonna dive deep into this by the way on Dune analytics there are some numbers that are wrong we actually checked the data so uh Salva who did the Dune analytics statute should correct some things because of the 652 challenge profiles we found out that you get if you get challenged 9 out of 10 times you will get rejected from the registry it means that if you are challenged 90 chances that you're gonna get kicked out you will not be able to defend yourself and uh that's a not a very good thing for the onboarding process for a lot of the users it's a very risky thing we looked into the 90 of the profiles that got challenged and it turns out that ninety percent of the profiles the main reason why profiles are challenged we have the protocol has formalized a couple of States whether the person is deceased the person died the person does not exist maybe a deep fake the person might be a duplicate it's a civil attacker or incorrect submission the person just didn't follow the steps properly well incorrect submission is 90 of the profits that get challenged get challenged for making an incorrect submission for making a mistake a simple mistake and the problem we have a deeper look even a deeper look into this on into this into these submissions and the the number one reason is incorrect address someone submitted the address and is showing the incorrect address in the video or it's the address in the video is not matching the address from the submission a lot of challenges because of the video size the resolution in pixels of the video you get rejected from upgrading uploading a video eight pixels smaller than what is the requirement uh video artifact no sign address and readable address mismatch facial feature is not visible like Kevin owaki looking three quarters so a closer inspection shows that 90 percent of the people lost their deposit which until very recently was 0.1 if which is 600 500 which is a lot of money especially Latin America where we have a lot of users they got kicked out of the protocol ninety percent of the people got kicked out of the protocol for making honest mistakes honest mistakes so vitalik said it uh in our chats this you lose your deposit if you do it wrong mechanism is Harsh it is very harsh and it's not a good look on web3 it's not a good look on how we are trying to onboard people and give them the right to Identity malicious Challengers exist and they are constantly attacking and taking advantage of the unsuspecting users all the time and we even have a category the a category of users we call both Challengers who are addresses that vouch for someone and then immediately challenge the very person that they have voted for in order to take their stake so we have a lot of malicious users and rejecting tokens if you're doing if you're doing this kind of Mecca mechanism to build a list of tokens or to build a list of objects you know that's fine but rejecting humans for making honest mistakes is discrimination you are discriminating users because they don't have the skills and knowledge or the know-how on how to interact with web 3 protocols so here's a simple very rule very important rule of thumb that I would like to to enforce into our community Justice is not the same as logic more often than not we have in our debates a sort of positivist view on how things should be done oh the person didn't show the the label probably didn't follow the steps properly and it takes a it takes a look around the around the behavior of people which puts logic over justice but Justice is very different from logic Justice Means trying to make a system that is fair that is empathic that is able to attempt and not to punish people for making human mistakes we're dealing with humans we are not dealing with robots and the universe of humans is very different from the universe of robots so some of the most controversial changes that we had to the protocol and the Dao just to give you an example the very first one was the video resolution thing uh people were getting rejected because videos had 352 pixels of resolution instead of the recommended three of the required 360. because WhatsApp apparently crops videos and people were sharing and testing videos on WhatsApp before uh uploading them to proof of humanity people getting rejected for 8 pixels is not very very fair we got a people we have very strong debate about allowing people to speak in their own language believe it or not we have a lot of people opposing to making the proof in your very own language you know a lot of people don't know English so we had to actually fight to get people to be able to do the video proof in Spanish um we had to we we had the telegram groups which were built by the community the community did everything to create not only the official groups but also the groups that helped people to get vouches the groups that help people to learn how to make the video groups that pay for the deposit for users a lot of groups were built by the community only to one day suddenly find them uh being captured by the clearest organization which led to voting official groups on Telegram and Twitter and last but not least we found a user Farming delegations Farming almost 180 delegations of profiles that were delegating to this person the very second these profiles were created which led to a debate around the nature of how we tally delegations we came up with a model of quadratic delegations which incentivizes people to actually delegate to users with fewer delegations and makes delegate whales like myself don't have as much power over the more delegations they get this is a very new idea and we actually won that one with 70 percent of the votes so if we actually grab the top top five these are the top six I think we have here but if you grab the top 10 uh between the cladous side and the GLaDOS native users and the proof of humanity users the interesting thing is that the proof of humanity Community it has begun to win most of the proposals in contrast to the clearest native community and this is interesting because clearos of course they created the protocol they started the whole proof of humanity project in collaboration with many researchers which I was very lucky to be among the very first ones to be contributing and collaborating on this project but no single project ever begins decentralized nothing begins decentralized you have to build decentralization and you have to code the mechanisms for decentralizations over time and democracy can legitimately help decentralize Taos if we look uh today at as of today as of today you know if we look at the proposals proposals started by the community have 79 chances to get approved then proposals started by the creators of the protocol which is the the declaredos community so the community has been able to gather power the users of proof of humanity have been able to gather power and put the the let their voice be heard thanks to democracy democracy decentralizes daos this is what we're seeing in proof of humanity democracy is able to decentralize the power of the elite of developers that might have control over the protocol might want to try to attempt to have control over the Dao But ultimately democracy is a good recipe against neo-reactionaries neo-rectionaries is this world where users have no choice but to choose whether to go to this Elite of developers or to this other Elite of developers it's a federal model where users have no rights only the developers and the elite get to choose how what are the rules of the system what are the rules of the of the protocol and users are left voiceless but if we are democratic if we build Democratic dials users have a voice users are able to be heard and this helps to actually factually decentralize decentralized the power the centralized the the community and empower the users over the elite of developers that might try to control absolutely everything so let's talk about the bright side of life what has led to the growth of proof of humanity you know we were roughly 17 000 users right now it's good to analyze what led to the growth if we look over time since the launch of the protocol this is somewhat how the curve looks of user adoption and the story behind this chart is that we can also look at the history of the price of the Ubi token the Ubi token had two big Moments One is during launch during launch there was a lot of enthusiasm around the idea of Ubi so we had a lot of curious users that were interested in learning about this token learning about proof of humanity and then we had the miraculous day on October last year a year ago when vitalik started buying and burning huge amounts of Ubi and those those the vitalik burn the vitalic burn has led to a lot of users interested in proof of humanity and Ubi if we put the two charts together the proof of humanity being the yellow line and the Ubi price being the green line you know this is not a novelty in this industry price always drives adoption uh price is always an important thing for capturing and and getting users uh enthusiastic about that technology so Ubi is this simple protocol for Universal basic income it's very straightforward very simple rules which requires an effort for the community in order to make this miracle of turning on your phone and getting your basic needs covered happen Ubi is is a token that is streamed streamed in real time to verify humans on proof of humanity it's one Ubi per hour per human or 0.002h Ubi per per second for every human it streams in real time to your wallet there are Ubi burning daps and gains that help burn Ubi and build scarcity into the Ubi model it is composable with D5 protocols it's an erc20 token it can be composed with any kind of protocol and we had in this 20 months over 50 million dollars worth of Ubi transactions happening on the blockchain uh one of the most powerful things about Universal basic income is that it is the very feature that makes proof of humanity something different than being just a web free version of Facebook these are some of the real faces of the people that were impacted by the uh the power of Ubi when vitalik burned his tokens and bought like all of the tokens that were available on uni swap um Araceli here who is an oncology patient and a single mother was able to use the money for Ubi to get help for their kind for her cancer treatment we had a lot of grandparents a lot of grandparents using web 3 for the first time of course it might be their their grandson or it might be a relative that is helping them to use the computer to be on board into proof of humanity but I I really for the first time in my life I'm seeing early adopters who belong to the third age could be our grandparents because they are in on countries like Argentina an alternative like Ubi for the first year it was actually a very real alternative to the pensions that people get from the state we had also users that were able to buy the materials to start building their first house we had users from all over the world that suddenly found in this idea of universal basic income on the blockchain in a censorship resistant Network there's a user from Myanmar Myanmar is going through a dictatorship through a terrible dictatorship and because ethereum is censorship resistant because proof of humanity runs on ethereum we are able to reach vulnerable populations that could definitely benefit significantly from having 50 a month or ten dollars a month or even in you know if vitalik shows up 500 a month or a thousand dollars a month like we had during 2021 so we recently launched ubi.eth you can scan the QR code there has all the resources about Universal basic income about everything that we're trying to do with the Ubi token I'm very excited we're actually now working on the version 2 of uvi that allows to use your stream of Ubi tokens and break it apart into multiple streams and you can delegate your stream to someone who needs needs it the most you can use 10 of your stream for a charity you can start using that streaming capacity novel ways and we're very close to launching this on mainnet um we have applications like the Ubi burner actually any if that you send to Ubi dot is will go straight to the Ubi burner this is an amazing application built by Ruben from Venezuela uh who you know fell in love with the project very early on and it's any smart contract any any uh protocol anything that works on ethereum can connect to the Ubi burning and use a small percentage fee to burn Ubi tokens and we had even this one I really like coming from the clitos community project.if which is a sports betting platform and it uses three percent of the pool of three percent of the price pool uh to burn Ubi tokens um I'll finish very quickly just very quickly just one minute if you are kind enough I'll give you 15 seconds go first recommendations moving forward none of the human Farms got removed during the challenge period challenge period is pointless in proof of humanity proof of humanity needs to be more accessible a high deposit is still a high barrier of adoption people complain about the high deposit it's not very inclusive uh just make proof of humanity work like a token curated registry reward Challengers that detect human Farms those are the real enemies not users making honest mistakes that's a stupid thing to punish and Universal basic income income is the proof of humanity killer that every new proof of humanity registration create organic liquidity and support Ubi which will bring even more users to the protocol perfect something here is the new version of proof of humanity thank you very much [Applause]