At the risk of been downvoted: you cant. It is impossible.

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.

Not to mention having to keep going because babies are born and the money can't be delivered instantaneously...

Not to mention getting anything into the hands of off-the-grid homesteading hermits – or even finding them to begin with.

(Or getting a buck into the hands of every Sentinelese)

> Sentinelese

I mean, that's probably fairly easy but whoever does it better be really committed to this project.

OP here: I don't see why you'd be downvoted for this, it's a fair point! I agree with each of your three points, and in response I'll change the requirements a bit:

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.

It would be interesting to estimate the millions of people in the world that are likely to be completely inaccessible and would never get a dollar.

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.

This cannot be done for anywhere near your $8b. You need many times that amount of money just to handle some of the problems.

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.

“Establish a very large NGO with offices in every country in the world”

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

Yeah, in practicality you'd want to partner with different existing NGOs (or even governments) depending on the country (some countries can reach almost every single person via a church, for example).

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.

What kind of ink can’t be washed off? I haven’t ever heard of this method before.

Do you not recall the first post-Saddam elections in Iraq?

https://www.dvidshub.net/image/3237/elections-iraqi-man-prou...

Used in India's elections to mark a person hash already voted.

100 years ago, you could have just set the money on fire and had a pretty similar net effect (reduce the money supply, increase the value of the remaining money for everyone else). There are some caveats. Money burning benefits aren't distributed evenly - rich people gain more than poor people since they have more of the remaining money. You also have to already have at least some money to benefit from it.

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.

If 100 years go, This is probably the most practically doable answer but not one that accomplishes any of the goals. It only benefits pre-existing holders of USD, and this problem exists even in holders of USD. Since USD is not distributed equally among the population, the actual effect would proportional to the existing holdings; most people would effectively receive a lot less than 1$.

Subcontract. Put out a call for tenders for other people to deliver the money in particular countries, or regions, or to particular demographics within regions. Choose the proposals which are satisfactorily reliable and at the cheapest price.

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.

This sounds like a similar challenge to the one The World Food Programme faces[0]. In their case, they pick from a number of disbursement mechanisms on a case by case basis. Sometimes they physically deliver food or arrange in-kind aid via vouchers, sometimes it's direct bank account or Western Union transfers to individuals.

[0] https://www.wfp.org/cash-transfers

You enter into a contract with each national government. It obviously won't be perfect, but I doubt any other method will be better.

Nice one!

Reducing 8 billion problems to 195 problems.

Additionally, some further improvements are possible. Eg. Redirecting to the EU, instead of associated countries.

The problem then becomes that some of those dollars end up going to one person rather than 10 million people, and government effectiveness at distributing the money across their population is inversely correlated with where the people that would benefit most from receiving a dollar live (this correlation exists within populations of countries with good banking systems too: your working person that wouldn't pick a dollar up if they saw it on the street probably gets a dollar automatically paid to them via the same system they receive tax rebates from, but many homeless people don't)

There will also be overhead fees ( eg. Banking) which need to be concluded in.

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.

This is the most likely route I can think of which could actually work

There are some countries for which it might conceivably work (presuming you also pay a lot extra to cover the costs of the project), many for which it might nearly work, and several for which it absolutely won't.

But why would the national governments agree to do this? Most people wouldn't really care if they got a dollar or not so I expect that there wouldn't be overwhelming public pressure for most governments to do this, and the governments would correctly think that doing this would be more trouble than it is worth.

I think the overhead of proving individuals don’t get more than a dollar would wind up costing more than the money itself.

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.

Drones with cameras and facial recognition. And a “money gun” that shoots a dollar at every new person it sees

Those who are desperate could start swapping wigs and prosthetics to fool the image recognition system. They'd shoot down the drones and take all of the money.

I think I saw that movie.

Donate the money to an organization fighting climate change. It's the closest you will get to an equitable distribution.

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.

Interesting. How would deflation affect people with zero or negative assets, though?

The latter proposal is a good one, if you first buy up currency from every country in proportion to the population.

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.

How will one of these organizations "fight" climate change? I think the only solution to climate change is American ingenuity, private-sector technology.

Director will stop using his SUV to go to work and won’t heat his residence in winter anymore (no need in tropical islands).

"1. Create a website where I promise to send money if you send me your bank account -- doesn't sound shady at all."

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?

Yeah but you wouldn't just send it to a random offering you money - that's Nigerian prince territory.

I could publish it on my website for donations, what difference would it make?

During the pandemic the US government tried to send money to just its own citizens, this was generally successful, but plagued by a ton of fraud. I don't think any organization has the capacity to get close to the goal of sending $1 to every human on earth. Also, the US is able to enforce its laws on dollar transactions happening outside its borders, so sending money into countries the US has sanctioned will be very difficult from most places.

Proof of Humanity, the "third rail" of decentralized fintech innovation

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!

> hash genome as key

What about twins? Do they have to share a key?

Steal the key from someone and where does that lead to?

I would distribute a gadget that is integrated with POS/card-reader terminals, since those are already being sent to stores/businesses that probably have a way to give a dollar to whoever shows up.

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.

I think you're also not asking the question of "how many people are there"? Someone else mentioned North Sentinel Island, which has "between 50 and 100" people, well which is it? Do you send them 50 or 100 dollars?

Remove $8B worth of carbon from the atmosphere.

Planting an $8bn forest would actually be pretty neat.

That will not be an equal distribution as the rich and the old won’t gain as much benefit as a poor child

The same is true of a dollar. If I gave a new born baby a dollar and a person on their deathbed a dollar, the baby will gain much more of a benefit.

Also people living in countries where the US dollar is actually used will gain much more of a benefit.

Now that's the kind of inequality I can live with.

Travel to New Dehli and take a car ride around the city imagine what it would take to distribute dollars in a slum. Imagine the emotional turmoil caused by a billionaire tickling themselves by "using" people for an exercise in amusement. It is practically an act of domination.

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.

Not to seem unempathetic but that seems like a waste of $8B that could be put to some good. For most recipients that $1 will amount to no difference. Interesting as a logistics exercise.

The most sensible option is offering anyone who gives you not their bank account, but a number like the Mexican CLABE or the European IBAN, which are safe to receive money. This implies that you will need to transfer some of that money to different countries, losing part of it to commissions.

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.

It sounds like a crypto startup problem

You definitely needs more than $8 Bil, but I would break it down to

- 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.

Another potential problem is people being born or dying after you’re collecting your data and running your job.

#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?

You should not do this even if it is possible to do so. Many people can't accept "free" money due to their immigration status in countries they are residents of. If you send money to them and they receive it they could be in violation of their entry permit rules.

So by sending money to everyone in the world you would create problems for a huge population of immigrant workers.

Technically, every person in the world have cellular phone (many people have more than one).

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.

You also need to account for exchange rate and processing fees. Some recipients may not receive 1 dollar.

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.

I guess I make a thumbprint database. Anyone who submits a previously unseen thumbprint pair to the database gets a dollar sent to the account they specify. That way, each thumbprint set is effectively worth one dollar, minus the trouble of submitting it.

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?

It might also be important to verify that the thumbs are attached to a living body…

Though I dislike cryptocurrency, it seems like the most plausible route for this. I would try to use my wealth to setup some NGO that would offer a "Citizen ID" solution to replace something like SSNs with a modern equivalent system using symmetric key cryptography, a yubikey like thing, and biometrics for people who lose their key. Once we get a satisfactory solution designed we start convincing more and governments to use it so we can get every individual human id'd, or, at least, most of them.

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.

Interesting challenge. Sounds like you will need a bit more than 8 billion for all the logistics involved.

It's probably 8 billion dollars to build a solution for a single large country.

There might be some distopian way of doing this using biometrics and cryptocurrency. Submit your "human hash" (e.g. some set of cheaply collectable and individually unique biometric signatures) and receive one USDT or similar fixed value digital currency. Then just slowly allow people to register ownership of their dollar as/when they decide to collect it. This only gets to people who can get access to a computer and the crypto-dollar is functionally useless to most of them but it's pretty cheap to distribute. The biometrics bit may also be literally impossible - no idea what the state of the art there is like.

Entrust 8 million people with solving the problem locally for their 1,000. Expect fraud.

It's probably not possible to get everyone a dollar. But maybe add an incentive on top to get local community involvement with assisting you? Create multiple million dollar lottos per region. To enter the lotto, proof of receipt of the dollar is necessary. How that's figured out is another issue. Even with this you still won't reach everyone on Earth. Getting past terrorist leaders, or anyone who doesn't want their people to claim a dollar will be a big hurdle. But adding incentives to accept the dollar might get you the most recipients.

Also once you achieve your goal, global chaos will ensue.

I'd say destroy your $8b and take it out of the money supply, making everyone else's money slightly more valuable. No overhead.

Except it wouldn't evenly distribute the value and most of it would go to rich people.

I will bite. Using the postal service.

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.

build something globally accessible that provides at least one dollar in value, that's the only way I can think to overcome most of the hurdles you face with currency.

(maybe you can even do that cheaper than 8b.)

I had this idea for a world crypto where everyone would start with the same amount... the biggest challenge that I saw was how to verify identities so that no-one could claim other's crypto.

Have you considered building a device that will scan people's retinas, then recruiting volunteers to deploy it around the world?

Can you make a retina scanner good enough that it recognizes a retina correctly with 99.999999% accuracy? Retinas can change, get damaged.

seems really expensive... there must be a better way

Easy: get everyone on earth to sign up for Stripe connect on your platform 1dollarforyouandyouandyou…com and then API the shiznit outta that thing.

Do something that increases the absolute wealth of every person on the planet by at least one dollar.

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.

You find something that everyone uses and you spend the money reducing costs so that people will save a dollar the next time they buy it.

This is very interesting! Might be sorta hard to find sth that everyone pays for that is "subsidisable"

I think it'd still be impossible to ensure -everyone- gets the discount -exactly once-, even if you found that "something."

Let me help you to clarify step 1:

Make a disposable $8,000,000,000.

Create website where people can claim their money for themselves and their kids upon verification, it's much easier than trying to distribute it by yourself.

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.

> I would like to send 1 dollar to every human on Earth

Your task doesn't mention them receiving the dollar...

Give it to me - I'll take care of it.

Create a new crypocurrency with 8 billion tokens each worth one dollar.

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.

A bit off-topic, but giving everybody one dollar wouldn't change a thing in the world. However, investing that $8bn in a project/org that's effective at improving the world, would change a lot. Not sure where I'm going with this, just an interesting thought..

Count down the number of people in each country, send that amount to the government contracted to only be spent only on reducing national debt.

Has same effect? Perhaps greater as not only reducing debt but interest the people's taxes had to fund.

Start walking and handing out larger sums and asking each person to help carry your one dollar idea to reach every person? For a decent amount of countries that would probably be the best method, just walk for the next 40 years

Avoid the banks, governments and middlemen and use bitcoin. You'll save a ton of time and money by avoiding transaction fees and bureaucracy. Every person with a cellphone can accept the donation.

> Avoid the banks, governments and middlemen and use bitcoin

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.

How would you ensure each person gets the same amount?

Lobby to pass a law in your country that gives everyone a $1 per person in household tax credit. Agree to fund it.

Use that as an example, get it inserted into the next big trade agreement as a mandatory thing.

I think technically if you just burn the money the deflationary effect would be equivalent to $1 to everyone and would be the cheapest way to do it.

It doesn't works like this. Inflation/deflation is not something tangible. It's something that is computed with arbitrary rules and it have barely no meaning on a worldwide basis.

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.

Worldcoin (cofounded by Sam Altman) is trying to do this. They plan to have contractors do eyeball scanning of everyone as identification.

And it worked just as we all expected: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

Note that it was months ago, now it's probably even worse with all scams being exposed and general downturn of the pyramid schemes.

I honestly don't get how people like Sam Altman still have any semblance of reputation after investing in that crap. Could something look any more transparently dystopian?

What about people without eyeballs?

Infect everyone with a virus that will kill them in a few years unless they get the vaccine.

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.

What about people who think it's not real and who will be randomly immune?

Horrendously good and working answer... Mr. Gates, pls login.

In many developed and developing countries, you could likely work with the state and build it into their taxation schemes.

Global distribution is complex. So there is no easy way to do it. Now, what is the option here? Your assumption, around 6 billion of those humans have a bank account. So, we can leverage the bank network to do the distribution.

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

How many $1 bills are even in circulation?

Elon?