I’ve pondered a design like this before—something to replace birth certificates.

Birth certificates are kind of problematic, in that each legal person gets certain rights, and so if you can trick the state into thinking you are multiple legal people (through e.g. identity fraud) then you get a multiple of the rights of regular people—you can vote in elections multiple times, for example; or in states with “negative tax” like Alaska, you can claim the tax credit multiple times. Of course, you can also use N birth certificates to pass through any KYC system N times, to create N entities in said system, against the system’s wishes.

The problem with birth certificates is that they’re a single assertion about a single instantaneous event: they just say “this person was born.” It’s very easy to forge a new one, or to steal+repurpose someone else’s (especially if they’re dead and this fact has never been recorded), because a birth certificate only needs to be “verified” once, at point of issuance.

An alternative scheme would be to have some device that’s constantly doing life-logging of your biometrics (like what’s discussed here), where each segment of unique biometric data the device records translates to one “token” that can be put into any given proof-of-life account.

Such devices wouldn’t have to be constantly uploading data to the cloud; they’d just be recording it and storing it. It’d be up to you to present these devices for data-collection and collation, just like it’s up to you to present your birth certificate.

The key difference with such a system, would be that if you just put on two devices, you’re not mining proof-of-life at double the rate, because the data segment collected by the two devices wouldn’t be unique between them—you’d only be able to earn one token per real human being per period, no matter how much machine-power you devoted to doing so. When the data from the two devices was collated, it’d be clear that there’s duplicate biometric period data, and so you wouldn’t earn a token for said duplicate data.

It wouldn’t matter how you split up and rearranged the tokens generated by the devices. You could hold all your tokens in one “identity”, or split them up across multiple “identities.” But, if you split the tokens up, then each split identity would only have 1/N of the proof strength of the identity of someone who puts all their tokens in one basket.

With such a system, you could literally just have each token a person can present translate to a vote, such that everyone who’s been alive for N periods gets N votes, as long as they can proof-of-life all N periods. (This would, of course, bias toward older people; but you can instead normalize the voting power of each token by dividing by the person’s age. How to prove age? Record the “genesis” token of each device through a trusted timestamping system—i.e. activate each device online. Then the person’s legal age would be the timestamp on the oldest genesis token they can prove ownership of, by proving ownership of the private key that was used to sign the genesis-certificate-request.)

I enjoy the fact that, other than the “trusted timestamping of genesis tokens” part, this system has roughly nothing to do with a shared ledger or “blockchain”; each device can just keep its own independent private log, and the only time those logs leave the device is when the person themselves commands the devices to export them. It’d also be up to you to wear or not wear a life-logging device. But, of course, in avoiding having your life logged, you’d be losing out on tokens for the periods you didn’t log, and so depriving yourself of the things tokens translate into (voting power; federal tax-credit hours; state-public-healthcare-benefit time-spent-as-a-state-resident-proof hours; immigration time-spent-living-in-the-country-proof hours; etc.)

...and of course this is a weird and dystopian invasion of privacy. Attaching ankle bracelets to babies to ensure they get appropriately credited for their own infancy sounds like something out of Black Mirror. I never said it wasn’t. It’s a neat technical solution to a specific problem—not necessarily a good idea ;)