To incentivize people to stay home, a secret contract market could be deployed where sick people can purchase “Stay-at-home” bonds by depositing collateral. The collateral could yield interest from 1) forfeited collateral of sick people who leave their homes and 2) liquidity provided by federal/state/local govs, companies and/or other entities.
The secret contract would answer a simple question: “Is tracking device pertaining to address x within the specified boundaries or not?” or simply, “Is this sick person home?”. If the answer is no, collateral would be forfeited from the sick person’s on-contract escrow. There would have to be some way to verify that sick people are wearing tracking devices honestly and reporting honest data to the contract.
Not really. It would be easy to game the system thou. What if I leave my phone at home? All we’d need would be an oracle input for location data though. The secret contract would work similar to SafeTrace.
There could be some sort of ankle monitor that can only be locked and unlocked by a trusted third party. Market creators (governments, companies, etc.) would be incentivized to have a more trustworthy list of third parties to increase participation in their markets.
I’m not sure how this could be completely trustless, especially in the short term. What do you think?
As far as location input goes, I think something like FOAM could work.
Foam location services don’t work yet and i don’t know when it will become functional
I think the whole concept of the ankle monitor is a bit antithetical to my values… If there was a way to avoid gaming with your phone, then it would be more exciting
The tracking device would have to refuse all connections besides the location service and the contract so that the bond holder couldn’t submit transactions using a proxy device. Since phones accept inbound connections from services other than the two mentioned above, it could easily be gamed.
The location service being used for SafeTrace, Google Takeout, would work.
Another idea would be to require that market creators specify the tracking device they want their bond holders to use. They’d be incentivized to specify trustworthy devices to increase honesty in their markets.
@can I’ll add that Google Takeout is a good short term solution for location tracking, we’d want a decentralized oracle input such as the one FOAM is trying to build as a long term solution. I think a phone would work but we’d have to solve the Device Abandonment problem. A few solutions can be implemented to make it harder to game the system but it wouldn’t completely solve it:
I think you will find success if you find a way to incentivize people to share their location at all times. As a Byproduct if sharing that data for monetary incentives, you would be able to get safetrace to work. Maybe monetizing location data so people get paid for sharing their location at all times would work. I can say with confidence that without a mandate or financial incentives, very few people will participate. Is there a big market for location and contact data? If it is profitable, anonymous, and encrypted, I think you will get a good business model. Doesn’t Pentland use Location data for his social physics algorithms?
@Cryptojoe I think being able to sell location data would be an excellent incentive to share location data more frequently. The only challenge though is the “how”. Bond holders could leave their phones at homes even if they do have to share it more often. This vulnerability in itself would decrease the value of the data. If they were to use some sort of ankle monitor, that would both solve the problem and add value to the data, as the buyers of said data would be much more confident that the location data represents where the bond holders actually are located and not just where the BHs say they are.
There probably is already some sort of algorithm to detect change of location. Incentivize people to keep their phones on them at all times by paying them per movement or change of location. That way a person will never leave home without their phone. Make the financial structure so that it’s is more beneficial to keep their phone on them than cheating the system. I think that creating a well thought out algorithm will work.
Right now we are already sharing our location for free with all the location tracking apps.
You could have a mobile app (oracle) that sends periodic msgs to the user and require the user to take certain steps within a time window. For example text “XYSvb” to 6651 in 10 minutes. That way we can assume that you are not leaving your phone at home. This may be game-able, but assuming it’s not - only users who are participating can upload their location data.
