Project Title
Oracle of Undoing (Death Oracle)
Description
An oracle that returns the death status of a registered web3 participant in order to enable innovation in the web3 service sector.
Manifesto/Vision
What is the point of unstoppable code and programmable money if we can’t direct its impact after we die? What is the point of decentralizing our systems of support if we leave the arbitration of our very mortality in the hands of a pervert god in D.C.? Who better to tune the string of fate held taut between our birthday and our death day than ourselves?
One single variable holds more power over the disposition of our assets and the welfare of our loved ones than any other, and that is our Will. Moloch has convinced our species that our Will must be executed upon our death, tied to a post and exsanguinated by vampires. A privileged few can avoid this fate through their mastery of the technology of Trusts. But what if we could empower one’s Will to persist and operate trustlessly beyond the bounds of mortality?
We believe that one’s Will is endowed by its creator with certain inalienable rights, that it may be capable of securing for one’s posterity the resources necessary for them to remain free of indenture or compulsion. We believe that one’s Will is a whole and holy spirit that requires no legitimization from profane magistrates to carry out its divine mission of loving and protecting one’s progeny. And we believe that one’s Will is not written on the corpses of trees, instead, it is given life through one’s actions each and every day.
For these reasons alone, and through the power of distributed ledgers, we intend to make the boolean value of mortality available to all decentralized protocols so that each of us can train our Wills in real time according to simple binary clauses. No web3 native will ever die intestate and no probate court will have the power to overturn our Wills. Our Wills be done, god dammit!
Problem
The second most important factor in the execution of instructions on chain, after control of the private key, is agency over a given wallet. Billions of dollars in value have been lost to the void due to mortality or, simply, by losing a wallet.
Sybil resistance, wallet recovery, and digital asset inheritance are more complex problems on chain than off chain because they lack a single point of data: Existence.
Solution
Oraclize the Social Security Death Index. This single source of data provides ternary existence data. If an SSN holder is alive, dead, or has yet to exist. This oracle is the first of many. Additional sources of existence data will be sourced from credit bureaus, utility providers, and genealogy registries.
Product Features
An oracle that receives an SSN, keeps it for its own, and returns existence data. An SSN must already be known by the querent. A private messaging system will be built using this oracle to allow the secure handover of secrets to heirs. And the system will include a liveman switch to provide defense against “credit zombification”. (Credit zombification happens to 1000 people each month who are falsely reported as dead and corrections get overwritten by downstream death reports from other institutions.)
Validation
We’ll provide dummy SSNs for public testing and auditing. Testers will be able send messages upon their simulated demise, or trigger the live man switch to create an attestation of existence. The Author will be the first to register himself in the system to prove its security against malicious actors. All code will be open source and test results will be licensed to the Creative Commons. Upon validation, 3rd party smart contracts will be able to leverage the oracle data in their product offerings. Oracle data will have a minimal financial cost to ensure its sustainability.
Progress
Four of the smartest people on the planet are completely obsessed with this objective, and have been for about two and a half years. We user tested our user interfaces and received exuberant reviews. But, we didn’t have a product that could solve their digital inheritance problems. In most cases they didn’t even have digital assets. We decided to invest in cartoons about digital inheritance with an awareness campaign. So far we’ve realized that people are eager to engage with digital estate planning if we woo them with tales of itinerant poet owls and gangrenous lawyer owls. Also, tin-man Buterins and bitcoin lions make for both a cool summer’s eve beverage and warm Valentines’ night douche.
Differentiation
We don’t believe in governments, we believe in people.
Team
1 Discordian Episkopos
1 priest of The Latter Day Dude.
1 reverend of unknown providence who has wed two couples.
Y, una bruja del barrio
Grant Request $
$100,000. 10% in shares and 90% in loot.
What the Funds Are For
$25k to comply and apply for Social Security Death Index (SSDI) / Death Master File (DMF).
$65k for 3 months of development time and 12 months of dev-ops.
$10k to be shared among the members of the team. We’ve wanted to become part of MolochDAO since EthDenver2019.
Help Requested
In order to maximize testing and criticism, this project’s information needs to be shared widely throughout the web3, security, and cypherpunk communities. Endowl will produce the Public Service Announcements (PSAs) and members of MolochDAO are requested to like, retweet, and share these PSAs in order to amplify their reach.
Additional Resources, Links, Portfolio
