Nuhu: Number of Humans

Ideas Bank XIO Accelerator - Ideas Competition
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Title of your idea
Nuhu: Number of Humans

Summary Description
Track the total population of humans with a synthetic token pegged to the population.

Which metric will your synth track?
Total population of humans on Earth. It might be easier to peg it to the nearest billionth, a value of 7.54321 might represent 7,543,210,000 as the estimated population.

How will you get data for your metric
There are several sources that appear to be viable such as. “Population Clock: World” and “World population - Wikipedia” ,
This data would only need to be updated once every 6-12 months. The sources appear to be reliable and free and as accurate as you could expect.

What collateral type(s) would you use for this synthetic
I think the USDT would be an ironically good choice: it is pegged to an infinitely inflating dollar and also seems to have unlimited growth just like the human population.

Notes
One concern could be that the human population counts are just estimates, and can never be expected to be exact.

If we are able to find multiple sources giving slightly different answers, we may need to take the average value between them, possibly weighted based on trustworthiness of the source of data.

One design consideration to take is that whatever starting value is decided on, should increase by +2.5 per second per “https ://www.live-counter.com/world-population/” , but could be manually adjusted once a year as new data becomes available

Other use cases
This could be useful to determine how many people to split up an asset for.

If there were an “Inverse Nuhu” this could incentivize a smaller population: the current population is just under 8 billion, and up to 2 billion has been touted as the highest optimal number.

An offshoot secondary synthetic token could even be a “Optimal Nuhu” that divides Nuhu by 2 billion (“https ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimum_population”) to extrapolate over population, that may have some use cases similar to tokenized carbon credits.

2 Likes
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Interesting idea - why would we want to track this data though? Are you looking to use NuHu to potentially replace census data (which if so would be a really cool application). I’m kind of just struggling to see what type of institutions or protocols would use this data - can you maybe elaborate to give us a better understanding of a few use cases?

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To me this is possibly an experiment abstract concept. The use cases may not be immediately obvious or have mass adoption. It’s a fun idea I wanted to share.

Census data
Re: census data, yeah that is another cool way this could be used!

Airdrops.
What if you want to target 0.1% of the global population to airdrop an ERC20 token? If Nuhu is 7,654,321,000 and total ERC20 addresses that exist is over 100,000,000 then you know that it is possible to target 7,654,321 addresses and meet your goal.

Prediction markets.
If hypothetically an increased population next year means this year’s Covid pandemic didn’t reduce population year over year, maybe this gives insight into how economic recovery or stock markets or crypto markets may rally.

Optimal Nuhu (concept)
Optimal Nuhu number could be Nuhu divided by 2 billion, which would currently be somewhere around 3.8 … there are 3.8x more humans alive on the earth than what the upper limit of “optimal” is. If you are on a spaceship that has limited air, water, and food, and you know there is only enough resources for 2 people, but you have 8 people on board, you know that unless you come up with a way to create more resources or supplies, either 6 people need to be taken off the ship for 2 to survive, or else it’s likely all 8 people die due to running out of resources… a very extreme example but, if we know the Earth can really only support life for 2 billion and we have almost 8 billion humans on it… it’s good to have a tangible number and understand where we are at compared to where we should optimally be.

  • Maybe if we can convince the world to stop having so many children, we can give every person on the planet a KPI option if we can get this number down, year after year. I realize this sounds nuts, might only be wishful thinking, but what’s the harm in trying, right?

Future Tech
Water (for drinking and farming irrigation) is becoming a scarce resource very quickly in many parts of the world. 20 years ago it sounded alien to me that anyone would possibly bottle and sell water at 100x markup in plastic bottles or that countries would literally be going to war over water. But here we are. It may sound alien now to be tracking the population, but when all our resources are becoming more difficult and more expensive to obtain and there are less of them, including water, I would expect that tracking the total population might be a lot more important. 7 billion vs 8 billion people gives a different picture on how many resources remain and how fast they will be used up. There may be more practical applications for this data metric in the future that isn’t something necessarily all that useful today.