The world’s most popular websites can be used for free. Why shouldn’t this also apply to cryptocurrencies?(source: Data is beautiful)

Introduction

The term cryptoUBI is the abbreviation of “cryptocurrency” and “Universal Basic Income”.

In general, it can be said that a cryptocurrency is a CryptoUBI if most, if not all, of the newly minted coins are handed directly to the users, regardless of how much hashing power they produce (proof of work) or what proportion of coins they own (proof of stake).

Instead, cryptoUBIs use a different approach called “proof of person”, and although there are numerous projects with interesting approaches, it hasn’t yet gained much momentum.

Projects overview

There is quite a large amount of cryptoUBI projects being developed, this Bitcoin talk thread lists 24 of them.

I divided them into four categories based on the proof of person mechanism they use.



Category 1: uses a web of trust eg. Duniter.

To be validated, users must first be certified by existing members.

When a certain number of certifications are achieved, the user becomes himself a full member of the web and can also certify other users.

Web of trust have already been used to link PGP keys to identities in the past but are slowly fading out.

This solution has the advantage of being very decentralized but the disadvantage of making it very difficult for new users to join because they’ll need to find 5 existing members willing to certify them.

Category 2: uses the NFC chip of machine-readable travel documents such as the passport eg. UBIC.

This approach takes advantage of the digital signature that governments include in the NFC chips contained in biometric passports and that is unique to each of them.

The validation consists of proving knowledge of this signature, which makes this approach very secure (only a state actor can break the system). Pseudo-anonymity is provided, which means that only governments can deanonymize users.

The main disadvantage here is that many people still do not have a passport and some passports are not yet compatible with this approach.

Category 3: uses a Turing challenge eg. Idena.

Turing challenges are meant to be only solvable by humans and not computers.

This approach is that all members of the network solve a Turing challenge at the same time, making it difficult for one person to create multiple identities.

It provides good decentralization and anonymity but it can be very time consuming and unpractical to maintain the identity alive.

Category 4: uses SMS validation, ID scans, selfies, videos … eg. Manna, SwiftDemand, Gooddollar.

Usually this kind of cryptoUBIs uses SMS verification and/or selfies to prove a person exists and is unique.

This approach has the advantage of making the registration process fairly easy and quick. Most people have already used SMS verification and know how to make a selfie, there is nothing new they need to learn.

On the other side this kind of approach should not be considered as particularly safe, buying fake SMS verifications is common and there are websites that are specialized on providing such services.

The same goes for selfies, because generating faces of individuals that don’t exist has never been so easy, just take a look at https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/ to convince yourself.

Comparison

I decided to compare the different solutions according to five criterias I believe are important for the success of such a project:

— Security

— Scalability

— Accessibility

— Decentralisation

— Anonymity

Webdiagram comparing IDENA, UBIC, DUNITER and MANNA

Note that the scores I attributed to each project are subjective and originated from my own assessment.

Conclusion

So far no cryptoUBI/Proof of person cryptocurrency has reached a significant acceptance or a significant valuation.

In retrospective, Dentacoin a coin that rewarded people for brushing their teeth reached a valuation of well over a billion dollars in early 2018 and that’s no joke.

At this time no serious cryptoUBI/Proof of person cryptocurrency was available and that may explain why they hadn’t their moment of fame yet.

CryptoUBIs have been pretty much under the radar so far, and this despite the very good quality of the projects involved.

UBIC, Duniter and Idena are based on their own code base and are not just another cloned alt coin, even better none of them ran an ICO.

It is hard to make prediction, but I would say that the success of cryptoUBIs pretty much depends on how the entire industry will be doing this year.

If Libra comes out this year as announced and we could have another 2018. If this is the case, chances are good cryptoUBIs might very well take off because it is likely that people will be looking yet again for cheap alternatives to the biggest coins and there is just nothing cheaper to get than a cryptoUBI.

All the most popular internet websites such as Facebook, Google orYoutube are free to use and yet they are some the most valuable companies of the world.

I don’t see any reason why this shouldn’t apply to cryptocurrencies as well!