DNA as your immutable wallet

Conversation moved per @zawy request.

Someone mentioned this a couple of months ago. The only solution to these problems is to hash our DNA as a public key and give everyone in the world the same number of coins.

Even that wouldn’t work because I’d just collect DNA from strands of hair outside the Salon and take everyone’s coins.

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A hash of their compressed DNA would be the public key to their wallet. Private key needed to spend from it. Anyone can send to it. Businesses need smart contracts so that all incoming and outgoing coins go straight to and from DNA wallets of owners, shareholders, employees, and creditors so that the machines don’t take over.

“Pay to DNA”. I like the idea.

But if the privkey can’t be derived deterministically from the DNA alone
(and we agree that it can’t because free salon money) then how is the
corresponding privkey derived?

What’s to stop me from creating my own address using your DNA?

Then there’d be two addresses with your DNA. Any anyone sending money to
your DNA wouldn’t know which address to use.

I generally like this idea. It’s “isomorphic” to a key management system I
was playing around with using IDchains (think faces instead of DNA) but I
don’t think it’s feasible.

We want there to be a bijective mapping from pubkeys to DNA. But I don’t
see a way to make the mapping injective (without using a trusted third party to bind DNA to a specific pubkey – and that sort of defeats the point).

There’s only 1 possible DNA wallet address per DNA. The same compression+hash algo is used for everyone. DNA itself could be the public key, but it’s a bit long. Need a company to issue new private keys if you lose yours and initially verify the DNA comes from a real person before it can go on the block chain. That mines your 1,000,000 coins. Maybe issue a 2-factor randomizer device at same time. It would not inflate or deflate because as adopters increase, quantity increases.

Too easy to splice / fake / steal DNA

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The private key to spend can’t be obtained or re-acquired without physical presence to an office of the 3rd party company.

Interesting! Are there biometric data not linked with DNA? Which can be OS/standard so any “third party” can produce them, and cannot be inferred with public data / without the person being present?

TPM inserted as close as possible to medulla. Unfortunately that comes with it’s own problems.

No, I do not think there is any other way. There needs to be a for-profit company maintaining the security of real persons’ coins, maintaining accuracy and security of the blockchain. This is different from government, but I admit government would have a target. The “3rd party’s” blockchain is peer-ro-peer so the database is secure and auditable by everyone. The for-profit 3rd party is being paid to have a person look other people in the eye and say “Yep, this is a human. Yep, this is their DNA.” and issue their initial coins and their 2-factor device.

Coin is issued based on being human. Humanity gets to check that the total coins per person on planet Earth never increases or decreases. Your percent ownership of total coin is your percent control of humanity. There is no inflation or deflation: prices would drop as technology improves but wages would be (perfectly?) stable.

Problem: assets tend to accumulate in a few hands due to market leverage, so progressive taxation is still needed to “rob” from rich to give to poor (we call this Democracy). System-wide periodic debt cancellation is what ancient societies used to rob from the entrenched rich (especially when a new ruler came to power) before Democracy invented progressive taxation. Democracy had failed so bad by 2008 that we were not allowed to even revert to debt cancellation to bankrupt the banks. So we invented Bitcoin.

I guess Shawn needs to move these last posts on DNA to something like “DNA as your immutable wallet”.

@adrian @5a1t Maybe there is a way. Your biomeasures are different kinds of “hashes” of your genes (and environment and chance). The following might work because single genes affect multiple systems. Given the right set of biomeasures it may not be feasible to generate a valid survivable human DNA sequence. One biomeasure constrains DNA one way, and another in another way, and so on. But given the biomeasures and DNA sequence the blockchain might prove a given pairing is valid. People would use the set of biomeasures and their DNA to apply to the blockchain for coins and a private key. DNA and private key would generate wallet addresses.

Not to mention that we will eventually be able to modify our DNA. Also some people are natural clones (twins). Maybe human cloning will happen some time ahead as well. DNA-as-a-key does not sound completely future-proof :slight_smile:

Interestingly, since the end goal is a fair distribution to every living human, inflation rate would be tied to population growth. I wonder what sort of impact this would have regarding financial policy and human rights.

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Yeah, I forgot new people would be born. Maybe only give initial coin to those currently alive, with some cut-off date. Wallets would still work, just no new coin. But then wealth would enable more wealth as always, ending in a few rich and many poor until a new coin is invented. ( New coins and inflation are a form of system-wide debt cancellation that enable workers to undercut the value the entrenched wealthy hold. Constant-quantity coin enables the rich to hoard and loan it out at interest so that they can gain even more. It deflates in a slow exponential eventual causing those working and buying to have less and less of the total. )

Maybe the nodes would be tasked with keeping the cryptography updated to remain unbreakable by analyzing new biometric and DNA, discovering the gene dependencies, seeking harder to break biometrics, and solving genetic diseases along the way. In other words, breaking the codes and making new ones harder to break would mean the nodes are learning all the consequences of every set of genes.

If trusted third party companies are involved then we aren’t on the same team. :pensive:

Makes me think of:

My last two posts are saying there might be a way to not use a 3rd party. The key is that each gene usually affects multiple biometric measures, maybe in the same way a prime can be used to generate many different public keys when combined with other primes. Or maybe I should view the biometric measures as a hash of the genes. Either way, there seems to be a 1-way function that can be exploited. You can get biometrics from genes, but maybe not valid genes from biometrics.

Genes causing the expression of biometrics (genotype creates phenotype) is such a messy business (a huge and messy kind of hashing, not subject to strict mathematics and influenced by environment and randomness), traditional cryptography might not be usable. At first it might require a world class neural net to get started, then the blockchain would have to take over as the neural net. The neural net would take all available DNA and biometric data and find all patterns backwards and forwards (genes → biometrics, biometrics → genes) that it can. It would attempt to predict viable DNA from biometrics and vice versa. The vice versa (determining biometrics from genes) is relatively easy, but we are in its infancy. A lot of medical research is doing this because having a disease is a biometric result of the genes. But getting DNA from biometrics could be made very difficult if the right biometrics are chosen. A neural net could predict viable biometrics from DNA, but my thesis is that it could be really difficult to create viable DNA from a correctly chosen set of measured biometrics. The neural net’s job is to discover the best biometrics to use (the ones it can’t crack), and to constantly try to crack it. Successful cracks are rewarded. Along the way it is discovering what genes do as the preliminary step to cracking (it has to get its list of “primes”?).

Since population growth I think is around 2% and slowing, the inflation problem should be small, and even a benefit as I stated before, in contradiction to the usual cryptocoin beliefs concerning fixed-quantity coins.

It seems I am requiring people to apply for their coins using their biometric and DNA data before others get their DNA and generate viable biometrics.

BTW, a 3rd party is always present if the code can be changed at any time after launch. Developers being guided by users is the same as government being guided by voters. Lobbies like the rich or bankers (PoS and miners) that subvert the users’ voting process is the same system we have for the dollar. Observational evidence for this veiwpoint: we seek ethics in the developers in the same way we seek ethics in government leaders.

There is another way to achieve a constant-value coin that is a lot less difficult than using DNA, but does not retain the virtue of blocking machines out of human economics. Let the market-determined transaction fees per coin determine the coin release-rate. If the fee rises there is a shortage of nodes compared to daily coin transaction volume. Additional fees per byte and a base fee per transaction would be needed, but not used to determine the coin release rate. This uses the velocity of money theory. So the developers are not allowed (and not required) to decide the final quantity or release schedule of the coin. The market does. A PID controller would take the transaction fee per coin as the input and the output is deciding the coins per block. If the fees drop too much, it indicates the coin is not being used much and coins per block can go to zero, keeping coin quantity constant. Miners would stop mining and nodes would live off the base fee for transactions. Another controller would take the number of nodes per transaction as the input and drop the base fee and/or per byte fee if the ratio of nodes to transactions got unnecessarily high, which keeps the coin competitive and lean without oversight. The more feedback controllers used intelligently, the more intelligent the coin (and anything else) is.

I am not saying the above is perfectly correct or complete. I wanted to show that some idea like it could create the cryptocurrency holy grail: a constant value coin not based on perception, opinion, miners, or developers.

Intelligent direction (i.e. controller feedback) of permission (i.e. legal tender, aka currency) to use available resources is the basis of all intelligence. Be it glucose and molecules in the brain, energy and matter in economics, or CPU time (kinetic joules=expenses) and RAM/HDD space (potential joules=initial investment) in computing, the intelligent direction of the currency directs the energy and matter for personal profit (growth based on more and more energy and matter coming under control of the movement of the currency). Democracy uses the feedback of votes to guide the taxes which directs the energy and matter in government which a controller on the economics which gives voters what they want. The most intelligence cryptocoin will be a growing, spreading, changing A.I. of feedback controllers (smart contracts directing the coin) that enables the market place that falls under its control to be the most profitable and growing so that the cryptocoin itself can be profitable and grow by riding (lightly) on its back so that it is a symbiotic relation instead of viral/cancerous.

There is currently no feedback from the market place (other than the difficulty) to tell cryptocoins how the coins are to be issued in order to best benefit the market. The arbitrary nature of coin quantity, release schedule, and fees needs to be changed and connected to the coin’s usage and computational power.