Last page of the german E-Passport

I decided to do this “Explain like I’m 5” about UBIC because I have the feeling that many people don’t understand what it is about.

But first of all let’s explain Bitcoin through the story of the Bitcoin bank.

In 2009 the Bitcoin bank printed a lot of bitcoins and wanted to give them away to computers so that they could do payments with each others. Previous attempts to do such a thing had already been done but each time some people claimed falsely they owned hundreds of computers.

The Bitcoin bank couldn’t ring at each door and verify if these computers existed so it came up with another solution.

The Bitcoin bank would send a complicated math problem which would require a certain number of computers to solve. If you claimed to own 100 computers it would send you a problem that would require 100 computers to solve.

In 2018 the UBIC bank opened and it also printed a lot of UBIC coins to be distributed, but instead of giving them to computers it intended to give them to people.

The UBIC bank would face the same problem of computers or robots claiming to be persons and it couldn’t ring at every door and verify a person’s existence neither.

So UBIC came up with another solution, it would ask people to send a photocopy of the last page of their passport.

This page doesn’t contain any personal information so that UBIC wouldn’t know who the person that sent the photocopy is, but it would know that this person has a genuine passport and because every passport print is unique and has security features it is impossible to send a fake photocopy nor to send the same photocopy again.

Of course this is an oversimplification of how UBIC works, in reality you don’t make a photocopy of your passport, instead you scan the NFC chip it contains, but the concept is exactly the same.

If you feel motivated enough you can read the UBIC whitepaper.

If you want to try it out you can download the UBIC wallet app on the play store.

Conclusion

Bitcoin is a system that pays computers and UBIC is a system that pays people. In Bitcoin’s case the payment of computers caused an exponential increase of computer power dedicated to mining, which even caused some graphic cards to be completely sold out.

UBIC places the incentivisation from mining to joining and therefor could very well have an exponential growth of participants.