DIY : The “delegated trust” to Oracles and our open Source Bonnum biometrics scanner.

One of the biggest challenges associated with distributing basic income or Aid in scale is how to choose the recipients.

Governments create entire armies of bureacrats and social assistants, which costs a lot of money, to determine who should receive the benefits or not.

Very often, the bureacracy is corrupt and inneficient. For example, a recent analysis of the brazilian social safety net system reviewed that 5.7 Million individuals were receiving Aid that did not qualify.

Other times, the social safety system is pervertly used as a political weapon. For example the Maduro government only distributes food aid for those who are loyalists.

So, how do we choose who receive the aid or not? How do we make sure that people do not create more than one profile? How do we make sure that the people is still alive and qualifying to receive the benefit?

We thought of a decentralized approach to solving this problem. It is inspired by the EOS Block Producers candidate system and the “liquid democracy” idea that I can delegate my trust and give a mandate to you and withdraw that trust and mandate if you disapoint me.

Within the Bonnum Network, when a donor invests in EOS to a specific region, he/she has to commit 1% of the value they donated in Bonnum Tokens to the smartcontract. For example, the UKAid donate $1000 in EOS to a smartcontract destined to a refugee camp in Jordan. From that, $9990 would go to directly to the beneficiaries wallets, and $10 (1%) would be converted into Bonnum tokens and redistributed for 3 different purposes. $5 would go to a Global Basic Income Fund (more of that in a future post), $4 would go to the Oracles that help choose the beneficiaries and $1 would be burned, reducing the Bonnum Tokens supply consistently.

The $4 destined to the Oracles would incentivize one or more individuals in that refugee camp to apply to be Oracles, which help onboard the people as Bonnum Wallet users, choose the individuals who qualify to receive the Aid, collect their biometric information on a regular basis (for example, every month) to prove that they are alive. For that, the oracles would receive $4 of that hypothetical $1000 transfered.

Spending only 1% on operational costs of every dollar destined to Aid is a much more efficient way to donate than the average non profits or multilateral organization.

In addition, the donors could vote on the Oracles and give them the mandate to choose the beneficiaries. If that trust was broken for some reason, the donors can just withdraw that vote, and no more funds would be distributed anymore from that Oracle. Thus, incentivizing everyone to be correct, because they can lose their future income if they misbehave.

But the problem is: Most smartphones do not have the capability to collect people´s biometrics. So we thought of a device that is low cost, easy to assemble and would run on Open Source software.

The Bonnum DIY Biometrics kit costs less than $150 in its parts, and will work like that in the video below. Please notice that the video shows a paper prototype of the parts and how much they will cost.