Ask HN: How would I send 1 dollar to everyone on Earth?
Let's assume that:
* I am a billionaire with 8 billion dollars on my bank account
* There are 8 billion humans on Earth
* Around 6 billion of those humans have a bank account
* I would like to send 1 dollar to every human on Earth
Some challenges that I believe I'd face:
1. Getting the bank account numbers of the people who already have a bank account
2. Getting 1 dollar to people who don't have a bank account
3. Verifying that I'm not sending 1 dollar to the same person several times
4. Building or finding some kind of service that makes sure I don't have to do 8 billion manual transfers
5. Making sure I don't break any international laws in the process
6. How do we handle children?
1. Create a website where I promise to send money if you send me your bank account -- doesn't sound shady at all.
2. Use the same website to also allow people to send their address instead of a bank account number, and then simply send 1 dollar through regular mail? How would postal services in poor or corrupt countries deal with this, once they know there are millions of dollars being sent through the mail?
3. No idea.
4. Would a simple script that iterates over 8 billion rows and sends Stripe commands do the trick?
5. Am I allowed to send money to North Korea? What happens if I send money to a known terrorist? No idea.
6. No idea.
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101 comments
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Make a disposable $8,000,000,000.
Or, if you want to distribute it as regressive as possible: burn all your money. This will lower inflation and people will benefit in proportion to their spending.
It may not be as regressive as it appears at first blush: the impoverished hold cash as a greater proportion of their net worth than many of the wealthy.
(maybe you can even do that cheaper than 8b.)
Strange for an American perhaps, not for an European, i give and receive payments to my bank account routinely thanks to my IBAN; and it's safe.
p.s.: can you send money?
Reducing 8 billion problems to 195 problems.
Additionally, some further improvements are possible. Eg. Redirecting to the EU, instead of associated countries.
Either way, some of that money will always end with different people ( banks or persons).
25% overhead fee would be the extreme minimum due to the small amount per person.
There probably isn't a systematic way to get a dollar to everyone on earth. A mechanism which which works in the US won't necessarily work in India, Western Sahara, or the Netherlands. The best way to find a mechanism suited to local conditions is to get people with local knowledge to select it.
I'd be interested to see the proposal for North Sentinel Island.
Send an physical envelope with 1$ for every address in the countries that are not banned in your jurisdiction, assuming x people per household.
Not everybody has an address, and other errors (how many people per address, cost of postage) but I think this would have less errors, would be cheaper and less prone to abuse than any alternative I can imagine.
Another option is providing the value for that money to everybody by doing something with it, and saving in all the logistics.
One last option, that requires government cooperation. Give 1$ to everybody after they vote.
Note that it was months ago, now it's probably even worse with all scams being exposed and general downturn of the pyramid schemes.
If you are willing to miss some people this is likely the best solution possible. Establish a very large NGO with offices in every country in the world. You'll need enough people to cover the entire planet at the same time - and then setup desks where everyone can come in, get their dollar, and get their left hand stamped with an ink that cannot be washed off in less than a day. This is what countries do to prevent duplicate votes.
And this won't get everyone, but it should prevent most duplications.
This reminded me of what the non profit Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) is trying to do with Anchors around the world.
https://stellar.org/blog/stellar-anchor-basics-webinar-recap
You'd also run into the opposite problem in some countries like the US; I don't know if I could be arsed to walk down the block for a dollar. Maybe if it was a cool limited-edition dollar coin or something.
https://www.dvidshub.net/image/3237/elections-iraqi-man-prou...
I think the lowest overhead way would be to set up a couple thousand booths around the world simultaneously where people could come to get their dollar in exchange for staining their fingers with “election ink”. Would make it pretty difficult though not impossible to double dip.
Edit0: Also, I just realised, many poor people do not have means to exchange dollar into their local currency. So sending them 1 dollar through post is going to be a waste.
Edit1: Most countries will not allow this due to hawala which creates black money.
Even if you had $30 billion, and your goal was to guarantee the distribution of only $1 to everyone, it still wouldnt occur with all the excess.
When you factor in corruption, fraud, inadequate infrastructure, and vague defining of the parameters.
Just think of the edge cases to understand why this couldnt be achieved:
1. A subset of the population will ACTIVELY reject your attempt to give them $1, as they will consider it spam, anti-god, conspiracy or one of hundreds of other reasons (look at recent world events to see that there is always a % of the pop on the other side)
2. A subset of the population will ACTIVELY attempt to fraud you for extra money. Claim multiple times, or claim on behalf of other people (their dead grandmother)
3. A subset of the population will ACTIVELY use corruption for extra money. Consider state actors such as North Korera, or third world countries with poor controls
I could go on - but those 3 reasons alone are enough edge cases to start with.
(Or getting a buck into the hands of every Sentinelese)
I mean, that's probably fairly easy but whoever does it better be really committed to this project.
For example, North Korea. The government would insist on running the distribution itself, and because they are always in dire need of foreign cash, most or all of it would be diverted to some other purpose.
How can I get 1 dollar to as many people as possible, while spending the least amount of money on transactional costs or fighting fraud/corruption?
I think all of the edge cases you named above can be dealt with given this new requirement. Some fraud and corruption will happen for sure, just like with any financial transaction anywhere in the world. I would say that fighting fraud/corruption is only worth it, if the cost of fighting it is less than what you'd lose to it if left unchecked. A dead grandma will be too expensive to disprove, but someone making thousands of fake personas must be detectable somehow, such as re-using the same bank account or adress a thousand times.
So by sending money to everyone in the world you would create problems for a huge population of immigrant workers.
Also once you achieve your goal, global chaos will ensue.
If you give $1 to everyone on earth, in some countries, you'll pay for an extra topping on your pizza, and in others you'll allow people to eat for one or more days.
You could invent something.
Perhaps it is just something you say that brings wealth to the world. Ideas can (rarely) have bare value, and can travel around the world in a day.
If you make "improving the lot of every single person by a dollar" the centre of your life philosophy, you'll reap that back many times over.
Still, it's possible the low overhead and fraud risks of burning money compared to distributing it might make it a more cost effective way to equitably distribute the $8 billion globally than any other route.
Modern finance is unfortunately more complicated. Burning money doesn't necessarily have any impact on the value of money.
Except it wouldn't evenly distribute the value and most of it would go to rich people.
[0] https://www.wfp.org/cash-transfers
#3, that’s a good one. I started a long-running job like this and it failed in the middle after sending money to N people, and Airflow or L1 support just mashed restart. Now the first N people who got a dollar before the job failed each get 2 dollars (or 3 if mash retry again). Now you ran out of money, or you treated the last M people unfairly. (That’s how I learned “idempotent”.)
One solution is to keep a log of the people you sent the money to and do a left outer join with the people_to_send_dollar_to table when the job starts. Then you filter out anybody in the people_we_already_sent_dollar_to table in your query so your job never iterates over them again.
But now it’s worth thinking about if you succeeded sending somebody the dollar but they failed receiving it (it got stolen out of their mailbox or it fell out of the delivery truck). Do we need people to tell us when they received the dollar and resend it periodically until we get the confirmation message? What if we never get the confirmation message? Is this the 2 generals problem? What if some people never confirm so they can keep getting dollars in the mail?
Is the answer cryptocurrency?
There is a chance of the same person opening multiple account. Integrating with one bank at a time will help not to do manual transfer and build a centralized database for verification simultaneously. There is no time limit here, I assume this is fine.
How about the rest, the unbankable? Via country social aid. There is a high correlation that the unbankable is similar to under poverty population. With social aid, it will reach them. Cross-check with the central database for verification.
Now, what if the 1 dollar doesn't need in the form of physical money? There are so many alternatives to this. I said, follow on how people spend money.
You can use it to pay each Taxpayer all countries, pay the debt of each person in the bank, and subsidize commodities that the unbankable population consume: data, rice, bread, electricity, vaccine and others thing that people spend. So, understand how unbankable people spend and receive money.
There is a cost of distribution. My rough intuition is probably around 30-40%, if we are looking for precise in-person equal distribution. Yes, that is really expensive, even more for unbankable, because most of them will receive cash.
Thank you for the question @paulluuk. This is a good brain exercise and seems like consulting interview question for me hahaha
- Create a verification platform tat verify Bio-metrics of the individuals, it can be do with blockchain too. Challenge: A lot will refuse due to concerns of having a db of every..single..person on earth that can be used in a lot of evil ways.
- Create your decentralized currency or use an existing one, you can't easily distribute that money going through the usual banking system with all policies around that, either sanctions to a whole country, or even within the country itself as some individuals have their bank account restricted to start with, so no banks. Challenge: all the challenges that comes with Defi crypto, and the challenges with the the fact that there are people who doesn't even know the crypto exists let alone using it, some don't even have access to technology at all.
- Create a referral-system-like where people are encouraged to bring in there friends, family, others in the villages, etc., that will spread the word faster and more efficient as you only need to convince few and they will be your ambassadors on the ground, but also they might take care of the no-access to tech (or lack of knowledge) with others. This also can be used to have a hybrid system where ambassador1 get paid for X individuals and then they pay in local currencies, need some sort of verification mechanism to ensure they actually get paid too.
I would say personally the biggest challenge is having a system/DB that contains every individual on earth.. that would be nearly impossible, and honestly, I don't think it is even a good idea to start with.
https://www.proofofhumanity.id/
My design is basic: create new crypto account at birth and hash genome as key. Fund it day zero with the total lifetime allocation. In this example $1, but why not $1M hypothetically. Distributions are received as a timely allowance. And the principal can be borrowed against. But not put at any great risk. That's passed on to future generations and the cycle begins anew. ;)
The best solution I saw so far for the actual physical distributing is the bootstrapped peer-to-peer exchange that occurs everyday. Where local people find each other over the internet, meet, and connect their devices and accounts in person to swap digital crypto for paper fiat hand to hand. You can't top it. So how do you build trust in it? Raising the consciousness!
What about twins? Do they have to share a key?
Your task doesn't mention them receiving the dollar...
Even you had enough money to cover administrative expenses, people with more than one bank account, or the ability to generate more of these numbers, will get more than one dollar. And don't even think about crypto, that would only add another layer of abstraction to the donation.
As PC says, it's best to direct that money towards maximum impact, than diluting its effect among everyone.
Instead of a regular card-reader that scans a card, this scans as many items of personally identifiable material as feasible (at least 10 fingerprints and/or a retinal scan, maybe a pulse check), stores a hash of the above in a central db to prevent abuse, and only authorizes the vendor to dispense a dollar for unique metrics captured. The physical 'dollar' actually comes from the store/business till using the local currency, and the business then invoices you seperately for every dollar they gave out.
The cost of the terminals would probably come from the millions that you wouldn't be able to send a dollar to anyway, like you said terrorism or other concerns.
Once everyone has a unique ID we create a cryptocurrency stablecoin backed by cash hoard. We create a wallet for every individual person and give them a stablecoin that they can redeem for one dollar. At that point I would consider the challenge more or less complete.
Offer to give the vaccine and $1 to anyone who tests negative for previously taking the vaccine.
In a few years everyone on earth will either have the $1 or will be dead.
Has same effect? Perhaps greater as not only reducing debt but interest the people's taxes had to fund.
Set up an exchange for 1000 tokens to $1000 dollars.
Set an online identity verification service for issuing a token.
Not all tokens will be exchanged back to real money, which means you have money for the online identity verification service and associated bank fees.
So you just need to rent 8b lines in call centers, and make site with 2fa auth with voice recognition, and call all people at once, so nobody could use 2 phones simultaneous.
Second, in every country now possible to go to nearest bank (may be abroad), and there got their dollar, if tell secret code (there are lot of payment systems working such way, or you could create your own for some territories).
Also or for some cases, you could just send to each verified phone sms with money code, for example some crypto, like btc.
That's all, may be you will spend few b for call centers and for payment systems fees, and to establish your own payment systems for some cases.
Children in most countries are not allowed to deal with strangers, only adults allowed, so you could not send money to children directly.
PS North Korea in reality is proxy country, most their citizens are allowed to go to fulltime work to China.
Though people without internet won't be able to claim their money without help of someone with internet and it will be still PITA to deliver them the money.
Somewhat tangential. Some years ago, I was in a meeting where we were trying to solve a really thorny business issue. It was quite a small group but included some of the most knowledgeable people, in the company, on the problem at hand. We couldn't find a solution, even in theory.
As we were breaking up, one of the participants said that, although we hadn't found a solution, it was alright because the new system being built would solve it. The only identifying feature of that system at that time was that it was written in Python. Around the group there were a number of sage nods as they departed the conference room.
Statements like the Bitcoin one, remind me of that meeting. There's pretty much nothing about the nature of Bitcoin that helps this problem. In fact, one of its defining features (pseudo-anonymity) makes it worse than useless at trying to ensure everyone gets their allocation and just their allocation. And yet, with all seriousness, it can be proposed as a "solution". As if it has some kind of magic property that allows it to solve unsolvable problems. Like Python.
There aren't just legal barriers, but language barriers and human locating barriers. Imagine trying to get people to distribute dollars which is an action that has no practical purpose other than amusement. How would you motivate people to participate?
There are islands on this planet that have no concept of international law because their inhabitants kill almost anyone that tries to get on their island. AFAIK international law says attempts to communicate with these people are illegal. Furthermore, we don't know what their concept of value is, nor would they have any understanding of what a dollar is. There is no exchange rate. To these people a dollar is a piece of paper.
That ignores that dollar distribution is poorly defined. Old people die and new people are born constantly. This makes the problem poorly defined since the act of sending is not and cannot be instantaneous.
I would take some of that money and travel to get perspective. If you've traveled for understanding rather than self amusement this question is a non starter.
Use that as an example, get it inserted into the next big trade agreement as a mandatory thing.
Aggregators emerge to pay other people a bit less than a dollar for their prints (upon confirmation of uniqueness), and they leech off some of the money, but they distribute a lot of it and reach people and places I couldn't.
Some new problems to solve are 1. Can I avoid hosting and comparing uniqueness of eight billion thumbprint sets? 2. How do I avoid accepting fake, computer-generated thumbprints? 3. Is there a better alternative to thumbprints?