Dividing Abundant Fruit
BUBIWOT is end-stage foundational social infrastructure
The friction of the old world—passwords, banks, courts, and paper IDs—is collapsing into a single point of trust: your relationships with other people. We can now build social and economic systems on a global, digital foundation that is as intuitive and secure as a handshake with a friend. This isn't an upgrade; it's a phase shift for human coordination.
For centuries, we've relied on insecure, centralized proxies for trust—a government ID, a bank password, a courthouse seal. These systems are failing. They can be lost, stolen, forgotten, or forged. The result is a world of systemic vulnerability, from personal account lockouts to national election fraud.
BUBIWOT is foundational social infrastructure in three parts:
Pillar 1: Unbreakable Identity: Your identity is secured by a web of trust formed by your real-life peers. Account access and recovery aren't based on a password you can forget, but on cryptographic attestation from the people who actually know you.
Pillar 2: Universal Access: This identity becomes your passport to the digital and physical world, replacing insecure documents and enabling everything from voting to data authorship, routed through a decentralized, censorship-resistant protocol.
Pillar 3: Economic Agency: This identity is your key to a new economic paradigm, secured by Bitcoin. It entitles you to a Universal Basic Income, providing a baseline of economic stability and the freedom to participate in a hyper-accelerated capitalist future.
At the time of this writing, I’ve recently shared the 10th iteration of the BUBIWOT protocol ‘litepaper’ in Notebook LM here; ‘Bitcoin UBI Web of Trust’ is a protocol designed to unburden humans from unnecessary socio-economic vulnerability- including default poverty, disinformation, and perhaps most notably, violence-based economic capture such as ransoms (wrench attack, esp.).
Technical documentation can be found at that link and BitcoinUBI.com, while this post is a casual introduction to BUBIWOT concepts and rationale.
money is actually social credit and relationships are accounts
mutual attestation designed to model IRL trust and build the digital primitive of a user’s ‘trust-minimized web of trust’.
BUBIWOT economics, economic trends, practical UBI implementation
1. relationships are accounts
Caveman Grug hunts and shares, expecting others will share later. This is implicit social debt, a proto-money.
Cavewoman Glenda prepares a stew to pay her debt- a trade that results in a positive-sum outcome, the rational result of a recurring prisioner’s dilemma.
Stew thief Sammy gets a swift *bonk* from Grug-
When the participants are the system, the system adapts with perfect parity- the social contract is implicit. Implicit protocols are adaptable interactions developed to achieve regular outcomes, such as a wave to signal ‘hello’. Participant + implicit action = adaptable protocol.
Societal protocols such as banking and voting specify explicit participant behavior. Explicit protocol definition requires effort/time/energy/cost; the more sophisticated/impactful the protocol, the slower the system adapts.
40k years later, Caveman Grug sits upon a rock and contemplates modernity’s systematic failures to postulate a root cause;
Andy faces poverty as automation increases
Brandy can’t afford treatment, and doesn’t qualify for insurance
Candy’s daughter will struggle to inherit any estate in probate court
Dandy watches the news and thinks:
‘Who, exactly, recorded that video? Is that real or AI?’
‘I’m not even sure my vote counted…’
‘Who, exactly, paid for this research?’
‘Did that law get passed?’
Emmy’s internet blocks political and educational resources
Ferg’s government imprisions people for sharing information
Gina’s bank account was compromised-
The transfer recipient is unknown
The transaction cannot be reversed
Her personal information and identity documents were exposed
Her identity documents were used to fraudulently borrow money
Hari lost his private keys
Iggy forgot her most important password…
Money. Information. Accounts. Problems not found in the natural world… these result from poor system design- abstracted/ephemeral/inhuman counterparties are nigh-un*bonk*able... How could we do better?
An answer to next-generation security and last-generation security, hinted by the access control mantra ‘something you are, something you have, and something you know’…
Your friends recognize you at a glance, comparing their memory to your identity. Their knowledge of you is your reputation-
Caveman Grug is learning Rummy at a table among friends when an evil-stranger-bot rolls up and announces, ‘I’m the real Grug, and I’ll be taking this seat’- firmly gripping the back of Grug’s chair.
A tense second- Caveman Grug notices a player seated across from him lean back as the man to his left explodes with laughter.
This robot may be a different Grug, but reputation among peers is an account that can never be lost, stolen, or forgotten.
Billy Badass had already stealthily drawn his laser pistol 21mm out of its holster, startling the group with an impressively accurate thunder-blast thru the table, instantly disappearing the imposter’s head and causing the cyborg’s offensively odorous, silicon-fiber tinge to fill the air.
Identity among peers enables accountability.
2. attestations build webs of trust
IRL, face-to-face, identity implicitly enables accountability.
Remotely? A system must explicitly enable accountability, and an ephemeral centralized identity validator can be trusted as far as thrown- a Placeistanian passport can be had for $5k.
Your retina is a password that works exactly once before I take a photo for my cringe compilation and spend all your v-bucks.
Self-custody is great, just make sure to use a password manager, make sure your keys are generated offline and transferred across air-gapped systems, backups in triplicate stamped in metal across vaults and hidey holes, encrypted against would-be thieves… good luck, Grandma! (<3)
Let’s agree passwords are an insufficient and outdated design for us apes- lost, stolen, forgotten- peers implicitly suffice to enable ‘accounts’/accountability… but digitally?
CHALLENGE: how can a system use an individuals’ IRL peers digitally in some soverign, permissionless, convenient, secure, decentralized, accessible, redundant, relevant, recent, and verifiable way?
Breakthrough!
SOLUTION: a social attestation, a keyswap, is a ritual performed between two humans in real life- an IRL ‘handshake’ in the form of a phone-to-phone secure keypair exchange is a powerful, multi-layered tool; BUBIWOT participants increase account security and redundancy by regularly attesting.
Billy and Grug pull out their iPhones, open BitcoinUBI.com, and hold the ‘attest’ button simultaneously. Nice! New friend.
Billy privately adds Grug as as one of his ‘guardians’, granting permissions like account recovery, borrowing money, secure communication- guardians are useful resource against malicious actors. If Billy’s hypervisor gets lost or damaged, he’ll meet up with Grug to begin the recovery process-
Each friend and guardian improves account security exponentially, creating a public, verifiable snapshot of mutual trust.
“I like to make sure my friends authorize sizeable transfers- bots are always testing my patience…”, Billy said, holding up 2 fingers to designate the delivery of a couple pints of Guinness. “Let’s play another hand, I’m buying more chips.”
‘May I verify your account?’- Billy whacks the ‘👍’ button on his iPhone, authorizing the Bank’s identity validation request.
Grug gets a push notification-
BILLY WITHDRAWL REQUEST:
50k BAHT FROM ROBOBANK-7-BKK
[✅ ok] or [❌ problem!] ?
50k? - Grug thinks this buys a lot of beer…
[✅ ok]!
Individuals can configure their own account recovery and permission authorizations. Recovering an account may mean meeting up with any 4 ‘close’ friends, or maybe 14 friends-of-friends- a microtransaction for participation optionally incentivizes rapid response.
On a technical level, this is made possible with Bottom-Up Secret Sharing, a clever key-sharding scheme capable of requiring an arbitrary set of peers’ coordination to overcome a defined threshold.
This private/configurable/interoperable access authorization design is specifically intended to defeat the dreaded ‘wrench attack’ in three ways:
security thru obscurity; it is impossible for an attacker to know an individual’s BUBIWOT recovery protocol- it may not be possible to extract value even from a willing participant due to pre-configured transfer settings (i.e., I only authorize transfers over .1 BTC to people I’ve known for at least one month)
security thru cascading access requests- kidnappers may need to identify and overcome the security configuration of N of M unknown peers, and each of these peers may also require any number of unknown, configurable restrictions.
security thru reputation. Identity enables accountability; who wants to be known as a thief? Particularly in an era of superintelligence and durable identity, sins are known and arbitrarily punishable- the digital and physical worlds are connected.
Individuals’ interoperable authorization grants enable external applications to request and pay for authorization and information requests- BUBIWOT and external protocols may build upon this novel primitive of IRL peers digitized as an individual’s private ‘trust group’, coined the ‘trust-minimized web of trust’.
3. BUBIWOT economics
People store Bitcoin in BUBIWOT for improved security, features, privacy, and interoperability compared to other Bitcoin custody solutions.
BUBIWOT can’t steal Bitcoin, thanks to Babylon protocol enabling trustless Bitcoin interoperability with the Cosmos blockchain ecosystem.
BUBIWOT captures value network fees, access control requests, donations, and mostly, external interoperability/data requests.
BUBIWOT credits each person with a constant, ever-increasing token distribution; the percentage of tokens held by each person entitles them to an ongoing allocation of protocol fees.
Trends:
the cost of energy trends towards zero over time (and maybe even negative with ‘free’ energy via fusion etc.), so:
the cost of automation trends towards zero over time, so:
the relative value of labor <human, etc> trends towards zero over time- yikes!
global money supply (M2, etc.) increases at an increasing rate, so:
the nominal value of limited-supply assets, such as Bitcoin, increases at an increasing rate
Universal basic income is necessary to promote individual and societal well-being as humans are increasingly economically uncompetitive. Money generally flows ‘up’ to the largest value providers in an ecosystem by default- UBI accellerates capitalism, supercharging the distribution of innovation via economics.
It is possible to build and distribute a fair, global, trust-minimized, permissionless, and unstoppable UBI- built upon Bitcoin- using a combination of existing systems. Consensual. Decentralized. Durable.
Previously, I expected UBI to develop as: less need for human labor → more hunger/crime → more political pressure → gov prints more money to ‘buy more time’…
(some say ‘gov will never give UBI!’ -? Already did, USA/COVID stimulus checks are an example…)
Of course, when new money is created and circulated, all existing money-holders are diluted- let’s call it ‘taxation by inflation’ (rather than ‘theft’- I am upset).
Taxation-by-inflation has interesting properties of instant implementation (compare with IRS retroactive taxation and settlement time, etc), 0-marginal cost of execution, and wealth-curve-flattening.
Cool! Let’s print and distribute to everyone;
Minting/printing/inflation steals value from each unit equally, so larger wealth holders face larger dilution. Create new money and give it to every human. This couldn’t be done before because people cheat when identity can’t be validated. This ‘flattens’ the wealth curve, essentially distributing value from the wealthiest to everyone else, slowly, automatically, and proportionally scaling.
Variable, unpredictable money dilution is disruptive to the individual, businesses, and society; Individuals’ savings are diluted, businesses are burdened by additional consideration, and society’s outlook becomes perversely bound to market timing and nominal representation rather than real value creation.
BUBIWOT was engineered with a constant, predictable, and person-governed token inflation schedule.
Suppose a protocol pays users to join-
The value of the network increases exponentially, but cost is linear.
Imagine it’s possible to distribute that value directly to each participant.
Negative marginal cost rationale: each peer adds exponential value- it is possible to calculate a base nominal participants’ lifetime protocol value-add and instantly begin distributing money towards <optimal protocl growth>, <user incentives>.
It is possible to build an account which cannot be lost, stolen, or forgotten- one that entitles individuals to a public identity, a right to build a reputation, banking, freedom of information, data permanance.
Frustrating American systems resulted in my decade-long, multi-constraint grapple- At 29 years old, it clicked- O Glory! A better world, a fair, empowering, and loving society, inevitable. I am not embarrassed to say I’ve shed a tear at this vision of freedom, of surpassing the authoritarian-
Innovation distribution happens primarily via competition in free-market economics.
Competitive entrepreneurship is enabled via infrastructure that minimizes counterparty trust- banks, courts, laws. In the past, these systems took enormous coordination and resources, ‘concrete’ investment, heh. I think code can enable smartphone holders to govern themselves. Inter-species war may be a resolvable systematic failure.
I’m excited because the future is here, distributed unevenly, and economics/capitalism supercharges that distribution. Not only will we create more amazing new tech, but also it will be distributed increasingly rapidly and affordably. The quality of life for the poorest among us, billions of people, will transform as we are enabled by a next-generation socio-economic protocol, whether BUBIWOT or some superior design.