HopeCoin — building and maintaining wealth as a slave without trust, under the daily threat of torture

In my current quest to become a slave, the one problem that defines my current existence is: what to do about my money? A recurring theme in my life when I seek to give someone else control, is that they would have control over my finances. With someone I trust, sure, that’s great. But oftentimes, I’m seeking a casual power exchange relationship. Wow, that’s hard. How can I give someone else power over me when I have such an economic advantage over them? I would become (or fear I would become) used for my money, which would lead to feelings of insecurity and objectification. While I’m interested in being a slave, I want to do it with a master who loves me, not my resources.

So I have this problem: money. And so, I’ve been looking at ways to get rid of it. Or more precisely, to prevent it from being accessible while I engage on this journey. First of all, as a potential slave I am incredibly fortunate to have access to free time to research, and access to plenty of financial advisors in New York City who are happy to sit down with me, and are trustworthy individuals, and could even invest my money for me.

But, let’s assume that I enter into a situation where I am a slave and I have a real master. Let’s assume I give up total control, but first I give my money to a trusted financial advisor, or a bank. So I move in with my master eventually, he/she has total control over me. And one fine day he/she decides money is tight. So a conversation goes like, “I need you to give me X thousand dollars”. “Oh I can’t/don’t want to”. “Then you’re not being a good slave. I thought you were devoted to this lifestyle”. Potentially. Now, in this situation it would be an unloving relationship that I should exit. But what if by that time I was unable to think for myself (i.e. under the influence of Stockholm Syndrome)? Or just afraid that if I said no, she’d do any number of horrible things to me under the guise of the master/slave relationship which I’d already agreed to.

So maybe I’ve got a financial advisor that I’ve instructed to take care of my money for me. Now assume you’re the financial advisor with instructions to hold the money. A highly trained professional in the most wealthy nation in the world. Then you have a client coming to you telling you that he’s changed his mind and wants to invest in something and it’s really important to take it out. At some point, the financial advisor will release all of your money, if you are persistent. And then you give it to your master. And then you have nothing left, you feel used and maybe your master will then go on to use someone else.

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This scenario sounds contrived. And my situation is unique. But, is it? What if I was a prostitute with a pimp? Ostensibly, I would be collecting huge sums of money and would be living a luxurious life (sex isn’t cheap!). But I can’t use credit cards or banks. I am paid in cash. So instead of building wealth for myself, my master/pimp beats me and takes everything, every single day. And, after years of living as a literal sex slave, I’m left old and destitute, completely dependent upon the ambiguous largess of my master (the one who forced me to have sex every day and beat me regularly), who might just as easily toss me aside now that I am worth nothing.

We come to the main problem: Is there a way to construct a payment system and financial system that can serve its clients robustly under the assumption that those who use it are constantly under duress?

There may be.

Consider the creation of a new crypto currency called HopeCoin. Built as a contract on top of the Ethereum network, this coin acts as a drop-box for money with some additional features. A portion of all money is taken by the network to act as a crowd sourced financial advisor and to ensure that money is accessed only when the individual is not acting under duress. The more that this can be proven, the cheaper those purchases become, and the easier it is to move money. In a situation where I am held against my will (or kidnapped), this would provide economic incentives to my master providing some measure of freedom and quality of life, so that the master would be forced to weigh increased costs and limits of a transaction (from not proving my freedom and joyful living) against the increased chance of my escaping. This directly allows the exchange of money for freedom (for the slaves).

Such a system becomes complex, because if we don’t have a trusted authority to tell us, how do we know who’s who, at scale? Fundamentally, we would need some metric of trust that the person that owns the account is the one who is the slave. With modern smart phones that are accessible across the world, we have video and pictures. Even if the slave does not own one, let us assume his or her master likely will.

What if there were “bounties” created in the coin itself to provide this verification? This could be as simple as smiling for a camera to decrease the cost of putting money into your account, or where you are paid directly for sexual or other acts on camera (so that the production of pornography will necessarily directly benefit those who perform in it).

These bounties could have arbitrary conditions, so that — for instance — the bounty could only be collected for some accounts that have existed for a certain number of days, and are actively used and have already been sufficiently verified (or any number of other conditions that prove interesting to a determinant fraud detection algorithm which is to be introduced later in this document).

With these bounties in place, the master is in an interesting predicament. In order to collect on the money from these bounties, they need to allow their slaves to already have their independent account that is increasing in size and with limits on how the money may be extracted.

Thus, we create an economic incentive for masters to allow their slaves to have their own independent accounts that are verified to be owned by the slave with increasing certainty over time. And we can increase the trust that they are the owner without the aid of any other technology or institution.

Now imagine I own an account of HopeCoins and I wish to give some to someone else (or to buy another currency). First, the money must not have been “locked”, which is a mechanism in the blockchain to prevent transfers from an account that that is fraudulent, abused, or owned by a slave who does not want their money accessible for a certain period of time. The transaction would need to be then authorized by the system. Without an authorization signature, the blockchain will reject the transaction. So (requested outside of the blockchain, but registered on the blockchain) a request would need to be made to one of the transaction guarantors.

Transaction guarantors literally guarantee transactions in the system. They are responsible for ensuring that a transaction is not fraudulent. For this service, they are rewarded with a portion of the transaction. However if they get it wrong, they will be required to pay for the full amount of the lost money. Essentially, they are transaction insurance.

More details on guarantors and implications of this system in a subsequent post.