Peer-to-peer Insurance on a Dfinity Network

Hello,

Five years ago I wrote a whitepaper entitled, “Peer-to-peer Insurance on an Ethereum Blockchain.” This was published before Ethereum had launched its Olympic testnet. I published this whitepaper to the Ethereum Reddit here. Clearly I had a dream, but that dream was not fulfilled.

My dream for peer-to-peer insurance continues. As much as I love Ethereum I just don’t believe that the Ethereum network will make this dream a reality. For a very long time I have followed Dfinity. I have been waiting for the opportunity to have a new start. Now on Dfinity’s network, I believe there is the opportunity for the vision of decentralized insurance to reach its fulfillment.

TandaPay is a new type of architecture that functions to help small communities of people reach consensus on claims. It is part of a family of protocols that exists within a class known as zero-reserve architecture. Prior to 2018 nothing had been published as to this class of protocols or their inherent properties.

Conceptually the architecture is as straightforward as creating a GoFundMe community where the members pledge to fundraise a claim payment at the end of the month. The members are required to exist locally or be related to a network of mutual friends. By using a system of charters and pledges the community establishes predefined criteria for validating a claim. If anyone refuses to pay an approved claim then they are effectively out of the group. This renders them ineligible for further participation and will likely result in fewer Christmas cards that year.

The TandaPay protocol has one essential feature which was necessary for the whistleblower use case. If a community ever approves an invalid claim then the protocol should result in the community’s termination. I am developing models now where the protocol incentivizes collapse given a specific threshold of honest participants that refuse to collude with the super-majority to pay an invalid claim.

Obtaining this attribute was difficult and it took a lot of research, which is why I have decided to obtain several patents to protect my effort.

Patent portfolio

Granted: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160335533A1/en

Continuation: https://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?PageNum=0&docid=20200225974&IDKey=&HomeUrl=%2F

Application: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1n1dZwixlyds3C2IUPiZmJ68YEVzNUDdV?usp=sharing

The smart contract code has been completed and a prototype was built. If you want to find out more about the protocol then here are some helpful links:

If you want to understand the heart of the protocol which incentivizes groups to terminate when invalid claims are approved for payment you can read this post:

I hope that I can discuss this protocol with many of you here to see what opportunities there might be for further collaboration.

Thank you

Joshua

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“Day by day, let us all speak according to our vision, according to our dreams. Furthermore, we must interpret the visions of others, and we must live according to our vision. We should not speak according to our feelings, but according to the vision. We are visionaries. Because we are visionaries, we do everything according to the vision. Although a certain thing has not yet come to pass, we speak according to what we have seen of it, and we find that our vision is being fulfilled.”

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Wow, this sounds fascinating!

Was that using sdk.dfinity.org or something else like Solidity or others?

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@bengo it was built in Solidity

Code — There are two public GitHub repositories that host the code that makes up TandaPay. The application portion is broken up into two branches called app and api , which make up the frontend and backend respectively.

Here are some videos which demonstrate how the system works.

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