SOIL: BITs

What is the most valuable ledger today? Is it Bitcoin? Our societies are built on ledgers, be it bank statements, land deeds (or their big brothers national borders), or what I think is truly the most important Ledger in existence today - the combined Patent archives, coupled with Peer-reviewed research. These archives hold the key to everything we use to improve our lives.

And while these came to be as a marvelous example of decentralized incentives, they still run on the original 19th century computational platform - the Bureaucrat. What was intended to bring innovators and inventors out of their notebooks and labs, is now hidden beyond fees, lawyers and paywalls. Worse yet, stifles innovation and hinders developing countries in catching up by litigious patent enforcement.

During the Fund7 Voting period, we will celebrate the 21st anniversary of the so far biggest crowdsourcing project in history - the founding of Wikipedia on the 15th of January 2001. This project has single handedly shown that masses of not even particularly motivated people simply outscale even the best experts. And while it is by no means perfect, it improved global access to information immeasurably. Powered by just vanity and idle time.

What I'm proposing is updating the underlying platform on which our Knowledge Ledgers run from 19th century to Cardano. And realign incentives from litigation to cooperation, where everyone is able to contribute to the Scalable Open Innovation Ledger.

This platform is built on 2 principles - Everyone's Time is valuable and Everyone has a right to use the best known technology to pursue his dreams.

Rough outline of execution:

1. Create a token (BIT - Basic Income Token) that is issued to everyone at a constant rate (with proper PRISM credentials)

2. Create an open ideation platform (SOIL - Scalable Open Innovation Ledger) where people can burn / lock this token to claim ownership of ideas.

3. Integrate with E-Commerce platforms, crowdsourcing semantic analysis of all products. Each time a product gets sold, a fee is distributed to all owners of IP associated with the product.

4. Watch how this replaces current IP laws with a collaborative Wikipedia of actionable knowledge, while funding a global basic income!

Why Cardano:

Atala PRISM is an important step towards mass adoption of Cardano. While blockchains are usually associated with privacy, there are many applications where having a public identity is beneficial, even crucial (academia, reputation..).

There are already projects trying to reach mass audiences with this approach, but I think Cardano is uniquely positioned to make it work.

Cardano has for years put emphasis on reaching out to developing countries, and enabling participation for everyone with low fees and technical excellence. With an accessible DID, many new users will have a chance to discover other services in the Cardano ecosystem. But not everyone will have access to spare Ada to use to pay for transactions or other services.

First step:

My solution is to create a simple token, BIT, that is tied to every verified unique Identity on Cardano. Every user can mint this token at the same rate. And once possible, can use this token to pay for supported smart transactions without needing to spend any Ada. This incentivises new users to regularly interact with the platform, and look for new applications that support this token.

This also serves as an incentive for Identity providers to establish a common standard for physical ID, as users will be motivated to register for other services if they simultaneously get registered to receive this virtual income for free.

Success Metrics

This is an experiment in market based basic income and incentivised collaboration. The token has no intrinsic value, except the guarantee that it can be minted only by real people at an equal rate for everyone.

3 Months: While Atala's solution is not public yet, I think we can manage to have a working prototype in this timeframe. The full solution will require Babel fees and support from SPOs, but it will be usable by users who don't have issues spending Ada.

We are taking part in the EU : Africa The Journey 2021 Hackathon (9.-12. December 2021)

https://eventornado.com/submission/scalable-open-innovation

6 Months: We will be reaching out to DID providers in and outside of Cardano with this value proposition. Other projects should start adopting this token.

This will be an Open Source project, with an active repository on Github (probably).

12 Months: Hopefully by now, public blockchain addresses will be widely recognized and used not just to accelerate onboarding of new users, but make inroads to academia and infiltrate peer review systems.

Budget: $5000

I hope to start developing full time for the Cardano ecosystem, on this and related projects.

This would cover the costs of living for my family for up to 3 months here in Berlin.

I plan to develop this further in following funds, looking for more interested co-creators to bring real people on the Cardano chain!

Launch dates:

Blog, detailing progress and challenges: by the end of 2021

Public presentation with space for each verified person / project: Q2 2022

Stake pool / Alliance enabling verified users to participate: Q4 2022

I was way too optimistic before :)

**Unsuccessful F6 attempt:**https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/BIT-Basic-Income-Token/367219-48088