Abstract: Can you explain the whole project and its expected outcome(s).
We (aidpla.net) aim to combat global warming by proving that a profitable, sustainable and scalable business model for climate protection exists. We will create a minimum viable product: a small-scale open-source payment system using taler.net in the Attribution’s market. Disputes between prices result in donations to the United Nations Carbon offset platform (UN). These donations stabilize the value of a digital coin, ec0.in, produced by aidpla.net. All fiat money is received by the UN at the creation of ec0.in, creating a Carbon credit of equal value. A fraction of ec0.in donations to the UN funds the payment system. Using ec0.in and Open Badges, Attribution Carbon Credits will be created. These are approved/sold by the author corresponding to the attribution, complementing copyright licenses. These will be highly valued: due to AI, most people increasingly struggle to reward their original abstract ideas; the universality of the UN allows a global market of attributions; ec0.in is scalable to any international trade due to the universality of global warming and of Taler respecting both privacy and taxes; attributions are a new use for carbon credits, not greenwashing.
Have you been involved with projects or organizations relevant to this project before? And if so, can you tell us a bit about your contributions?
I am a Physics Doctorate https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1564-9606, and I have worked in Research in Physics/Mathematics full-time for more than 14 years. I have a lot of experience in software development, including at CERN, and as a Math lecturer assistant for one year at Universidade de Lisboa. Moreover, I have been involved in Science (which is an “attribution’s market”) for a long time; I have the necessary skills, experience and perseverance, since this can also be seen as a research project trying to solve systematically what it is also a Physics problem (how to avoid the global warming, as much as possible).
Also, my research in Statistics and Physics produced relevant results that I believe will contribute to using AI/Automation to make the global economy carbon-neutral. In summary, real-world engineering involves managing uncertainty, but the mathematical methods used (like differential geometry) are mostly deterministic due to computability issues. Because adding uncertainties/probabilities to separable spaces (like 3D space) often results in non-separable spaces, where there are computability issues because some elements of the non-separable space cannot be approximated by a finite set. There are various ad hoc methods, including Bayesian inference, to manage uncertainty. However, in the era of big data, these methods are inefficient and cannot compete with specialized expertise developed by automated trial-and-error.
Crucial decisions are increasingly made by machines, and these decisions cannot be reviewed and audited by humans due to the lack of a mathematical language to communicate the machine’s reasoning. The main problem is how to implement exact constraints in a separable probability space without attributing null probability measure to the constrained space. I showed that a simple solution exists: the existence of a probability measure allows for the definition of a quantum Hamiltonian and quantum constraints. These are more general than classical ones because they do not need to commute with the variables defining the sample space. Quantum constraints often allow for the implementation of exact constraints in a separable probability space without attributing null probability measure to the constrained space.
This solution is very relevant for statistical mechanics and artificial intelligence, in particular to automatize auditable engineering, including auditable crucial decisions (as Free Software can be audited). This contributes for a global economy much more collaborative and auditable, where carbon negative economic activities are more profitable than polluting ones.
Requested Amount €15.000 in 6 months, 40 hours/week (€2500/month).
The budget will be used to cover the costs/time of maintaining, adapting and promoting the payment system while there are not enough clients to generate a profit. That is, €2500/month of the Physics Doctorate Leonardo Pedro.
The system already exists in a form that can be used among a group of friends of an author (Leonardo Pedro, for instance) selling attribution credits (at €5, for instance), since we only need to use software and services that already exist, with any misunderstandings arising solved among friends. Then by using it and progressively promoting it to more authors and donors, we will do all the necessary maintenance and adaptions needed and releasing the source-produced, until the profits cover the maintenance costs. Note that after 6 months of use (and adaptions), and assuming we only have 100 donors by then, the necessary adaptions by then are virtually none and the maintenance costs will be very low (around €100/month at most). This means that each donor would need to donate €20/month to the United Nations on average, for us to have a profit, which is reasonable for early adopters with climate concerns, who would be willing to donate to the United Nations.
After the end of this project in the long term, when scaling to 100 authors and 10,000 donors, we estimate costs of €1000/month, thus each donor needs to donate €2/month (which is of the order of the price for 10 Visa transactions, around the same that the Visa network costs per month to a regular user) to the United Nations on average, for us to have a profit.
Compare your own project with existing or historical efforts.
It is not the purpose of this project to become hegemonic in a new status quo, but rather reduce global warming through a trigger mechanism, that is, to prove that a business model exists where protecting the climate generates a sustainable and scalable profit already in the short term.
We believe that GNU Taler and the United Nations Carbon offset platform complement each other. Because, the lack of privacy by itself is not enough of a reason, to replace the existing payment systems for the Internet (and in fact we can argue that the lack of privacy is empowering for those who are already powerful, and thus perhaps seen as a positive feature by many decision makers). And there is not yet any short term benefit for the general citizen to buy carbon credits from the United Nations Carbon offset platform. When combining GNU Taler and the United Nations Carbon offset platform, there is a crucial reason to replace the existing payment systems for the Internet by GNU Taler, since this increases many times the voluntary funding by the general citizens of solutions to the global warming, and also gives a short-term benefit for the general citizen to buy carbon credits from the United Nations Carbon offset platform, since thanks to GNU Taler it allows the citizen access to a more convenient and cheaper and private payment system.
There are a few markets for carbon credits, but these are not of easy access for the general citizen. Note that the accreditation of carbon credits has such intrinsic uncertainty (it is essentially a political process), that only an exceptional organization with worldwide credibility could do it effectively. The United Nations Carbon offset platform, despite all its imperfections, is so far the most credible place for the general citizen to buy carbon credits. We believe that in the next decade, some progress will be made that will improve the credibility of the United Nations Carbon offset platform (as the global warming increases, more people/governments will expect and allow the United Nations to do something about it), but not enough progress that will allow an alternative to appear.
On the other hand and unfortunately, there is no privacy-preserving, usable, efficient and legal payment system for the Internet. There are not even proposals for such a system that we are aware of, other than GNU Taler (Blockchain proposes something very different).
The collaboration between Adidas and Kanye West (Adidas Yeezy), is an example of the Attribution’s market: where Author A is willing to pay to Author B the right to publicly claim that A’s item is derived from B’s item and that B at least approves such attribution (if not A’s item as a whole). Since Kanye West was a very famous singer, what Adidas was paying for was not only for Kanye’s design skills, but for the fact that many people wanted to wear shoes that Kanye publicly acknowledged that were derived from his work, irrespectively of how good of a design Kanye West really did.
Using Open Badges[1], we will create Attribution Carbon Credits. These play the same role of the usual attributions (Creative Commons, citation, web link, etc.), however they were approved by the author corresponding to the attribution (in exchange for a negotiated fee). This is complementary to the copyright licenses. For instance, it can be used with public domain items or with private items, since it is issued by the author corresponding to the attribution.
Note that using GNU Taler’s micropayments, issuing Attribution Badges can be automated, and the Badge can display the amount of the contribution and the context (for all users, or exclusive for an anonymous user). For instance, a video on YouTube could display an Attribution Badge per visualization (identified through a hash of a random key generated by the end-user’s browser, for instance), so that the viewers know that the creator of the video is also paying to an author who was relevant for such a video.
What are significant technical challenges you expect to solve during the project, if any?
This project for a minimum viable product is straightforward (assembling software and services available in the internet), there are no major technical challenges. The weakest spot of the Taler payment system seems to be the ability for the exchange (that is us, in this case) to emit ec0.in which are not backed by carbon credits, unless we are strongly audited. Such a strong audit can easily be made by the public if we simply publish most records related with the emission of ec0.in, with some privacy costs for the users (which is acceptable in a small scale payment system). After the end of the project, when scaling up from the minimum viable product to a worldwide adoption (by us and other companies, as explained above) of this kind of green business model, at a scale that is relevant to some climate problem, we do expect technical challenges: for instance, a strong audit by the public while keeping the user’s privacy can be made by an adaption of the Heliosvoting service; also GNU Taler was never tested while dealing in the real world with huge amounts of monetary transactions, and the kind of potential attackers is different in such case. But such potential challenges are beyond the scope of this project for a minimum viable product.
Note that each transaction in the payment system will have a tiny fee to avoid attacks on the system, such as a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
The ecosystem involves one software developer/researcher/author Leonardo Pedro, around 100 donors of €20/month to the UN (that is a goal, but many of them the author already knows) and indirectly (in the sense that we will not need more than the services already provided to the public for free) GNU Taler and the United Nations Carbon offset platform. As a byproduct of finding donors, we will likely get additional funding for GNU Taler itself, through Attribution Credits to the GNU Taler project itself. During the project, as part of the promotion work of the payment system, we will ask for some kind of public support form GNU Taler, open source software organizations (such as GNU) and from the United Nations, but these would become as an extra help, since the success of the project is independent of that.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0)
