Reducing the National Debt. This problem is couched in terms of the United States, but the same problem and NFT strategy to mitigate the problem can apply to any country.

A rising national debt eventually causes many issues, such as a reduced ability to invest in government infrastructure and programs, due to so much money being spent on the interest on the debt. (see Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget)

The CBO has listed 83 ways to reduce the debt (see Congressional Budget Office). I believe that there could be an additional option : modifying the way that taxpayers can voluntary contribute towards debt reduction.

Currently individuals can contribute to debt reduction by filling out this form on pay.gov. (see Bureau of the Fiscal Service and TreasuryDirect). According to IRS publication 526, this contribution is tax deductable (see item # 5 under Types of Qualified Organizations in that publication).

I propose adding this additional method of contributing to debt reduction:

1. Whenever the president wants to make an announcement, he does so via tweeting it before going to the press.
2. As soon as he tweets, the tweet is automatically stored as an NFT. (Cent, a private company, already converts tweets into NFTs through their website Valuables, although technically they don't create the NFT until someone places a bid on the tweet, I believe).
3. Collectors of items related to American history, or investors betting that the perceived significance of the announcement will increase over time, or individuals simply wanting to reduce the national debt, bid on the tweet.
4. Proceeds from the winning bid automatically get funneled to the existing payment mechanism used by pay.gov.

Future reselling of the NFT among collectors will have a percentage of the new resell price also go to pay down the debt, by the same mechanism. Cent already does this, where 10 % of every subsequent sale goes to the original tweeter. (see "Where does the money go?" under the Valuables FAQ). This implies that for tax purposes, the gain or loss on the resale would be treated as a capital gain or loss, while the percentage going to the original tweeter can be deducted by the reseller as a tax donation.

To enable this, Jack Dorsey's Twitter (or another company such as Cent or a competitor) would need to integrate functionality into Twitter to enable all of this to happen invisibly, so that the president could just make a tweet as normal with as little of his time wasted as possible; and the government site at pay.gov would need to automatically handle the incoming contributions.

I believe that allowing people to reduce the debt this way would cause a large number of people to contribute to reducing the debt who would otherwise not do so, due to the satisfaction enjoyed by collectors and by investors betting on future increases in value.

In addition, if the twitter identification of all bidders on the tweet (not just the winning bids) were to be tracked, then another company could set up a social network dedicated to people interested in activities involved in reducing the national debt. Acceptance into the social network would be restricted to those people who had made a bid on one of the president's tweets. The person could join the network by signing in with their twitter account, and then their twitter identity could be compared against the whitelist of previous bidders. A desire to join this 'elite' (more-or-less) network could also convince people to make bids and hence drive up the price of the eventual winning bid, maximizing contributions towards reducing the debt.

One of the activities of this social network could involve (among many other things) notifications of new tweets by the president, and the ability to immediately make bids on that new tweet.

Note that the above mechanism could be generalized to other influential people (not just the president) espousing other causes (not just reducing the national debt), with the associated eligibility to join subject-specific social networks for bidders.

Here is the NFT of this idea on Valuables

Authenticating News Footage. This problem is couched in terms of the news, but the same problem and NFT strategy to mitigate the problem can apply to any video footage.

Deepfakes can now be easily created on iPhones.

In addition, deepfakes have been made of politicians saying things which they never said in real life.

Luckily, algorithms do exist for automatically detecting whether a video is a deepfake. However, ways of bypassing those algorithms have been discovered, resulting in the algorithms needing to be modified to once again result in accurate detections. This results in a type of arms-race between deepfake producers and deepfake detectors, similar to the never-ending contest between virus writers and anti-virus programmers.

I propose this idea:

1. A new type of video camera is manufactured (call it C), targeted towards news reporters.
2. A new blockchain is created (call it B) which contains only NFTs representing news videos.
3. C contains within it a full node of B.
4. As an internet-of-things (IoT) device, each C can contact each other C in order to validate and maintain nodes of B. Hence, the blockchain is essentially housed within the fleet of cameras. As new cameras get created, the blockchain gains nodes, thus becoming more secure.
5. Each C can also contact the GPS satellite system to retrieve its location on the earth, within GPS's accuracy limits of about a foot
6. When C starts recording, the time and GPS coordinates are automatically noted by C
7. When C stops recording, the time and GPS coordinates are automatically noted by C
8. After recording, with no intervention from the camera operator, the camera :
   1. computes a hash from each still frame of the video, for a total of NS stills
   2. computes the length of the video in seconds and divides by 5, for a total of NV video sub-sections
   3. computes the number of stills for each video-subsection (NS / NV)
   4. creates a merkle tree for each video-subsection from the hashes of its associated stills. it keeps only the root of the tree. This root value represents the hash of the 5-second clip
   5. creates a 'master' merkle tree for the entire video made up of the merkle tree roots of each 5-second clip and stores this tree on-chain, along with the start and stop times and GPS coordinates both before and after the filming, and the unique id of the camera
   6. broadcasts the node to other cameras
   7. broadcasts the actual footage along with the (entire node of that footage? or just the 'master' merkle root node value?) to some decentralized file store (for example, Arweave).
9. When viewing news footage on a web page, a browser extension allows the user to click a 'validate' button beneath the clip
10. The browser verifies that the footage claims to be associated with a place and time on earth. It looks up the GPS coordinates of that claimed location
11. The browser verifies that the footage is a multiple of 5 seconds in length
12. For each 5 second multiple, the browser repeats steps a-d above. It compares the hash against the hashes stored in the (nearest camera? arweave? a 3rd blockchain?)

I'm not sure yet where the hash for each 5-second multiple should be saved. In any case, the idea is that the film could be validated in 5 second sections at a time. After the end of the video, the 'master' merkle tree for the film on the page could be created. If the root matches one of the master roots on Arweave, then the user knows what he sees matches the entire footage. if the root doesn't match but the 5-second ones do in the same order, then the user knows the footage is valid but is incomplete (the beginning or the end is missing). If the 5-second ones match but are out of order, then the footage is valid but has had 5-second sections edited out. If one of the 5 second sections does not match anything, it has been edited.

Meanwhile, some people like collecting things about "occurrences," for example anything to do with a particular war, or a protest, or the actions of a leader. The NFTs used above to contribute to authentication could thus be 'bid on' as a further use case. Proceeds could go to fund something like Reporters Without Borders.

Also note that competing camera makers could create C's above, so that competition can exist among the ways that the footage is validated, though they would need to speak the same language so that their footage and validations could be compared. This way someone could collect NFTs representing film footage of the same event, but filmed by different cameras from different news organizations.

Here is the NFT of this idea on Valuables

Dismantling Criminal Enterprises. This problem is couched in terms of drug lords and the US government, but the same problem and NFT strategy to mitigate the problem can apply to any crime syndicates that amass personal wealth, and any nation that attempts to thwart them.

Crime driven by the securing of territory in which illegal business can be done is a major source of violence in society today. In addition it is one of the indirect causes of increased illegal immigration between countries.

Currently, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) establishes projects aimed towards the dismantlement (if sometimes only temporarily) of particular drug cartels, such as Project Reckoning (60 million dollars seized) against the Gulf Cartel/Los Zetas and Operation Xcellerator (59 million dollars seized) against the Sinaloa Cartel.

The DEA receives resources for these projects from the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF); the OCDETF also establishes a list of members of the associated crime syndicate known as the Attorney General's Consolidated Priority Organization Target (CPOT) List. I was not able to find this list on the internet, so it may be classified. However it perhaps may contain a subset of the DEA's All Fugitives list. If it in fact is NOT classified, then it could perhaps be generated by reporting against the DEA's PTARRS database (see p.30 [pdf p.34] of the 2021 Interagency Crime and Drug Enforcement Congressional Submission).

What if ordinary citizens could contribute towards anti-drug financing by bidding for a share of the as-yet-unknown amount of forfeited assets for a particular crime syndicate, before the operation has been concluded?

I propose this idea:

1. An NFT is generated for each member in either the CPOT list (if not classified) and/or the Fugitives List for those fugitives with a known association to a criminal enterprise
2. Collections of these NFTs would be organized according to criminal enterprise
3. Citizens could fund efforts against specific crime syndicates by bidding on their associated NFTs
4. Every time an NFT is resold, 10 % of the new bid goes towards the same funding effort, against the same syndicate
5. Once an operation is complete and the money is confiscated, a percentage of that money gets shared amongst the last holders of the NFTs

Doing this would allow people to help take down specific syndicates which may have affected them personally, while at the same time providing them with the possibility of gaining a profit should they resell their NFT at a higher value.

One consequence of this strategy is that the OCDETF would need the ability to channel funds to various operations according to criminal syndicates, so that a citizen who bids on a member of for example the Sinaloa Cartel does not have his funds spent on an operation against the Gulf Cartel.

Note that members of the criminal enterprises themselves may want to own their own NFTs. What better way to snub their nose at the DEA while displaying confidence in their own abilities than to provide the DEA their own funds with which to catch them, while at the same time providing themselves with insurance (assuming that they forever remain the highest bidder) should they actually get caught? (according to the above they would be eligible for a percentage of a fraction of the entire organization's forfeited dollar assets.) Alternatively they could invest heavily in NFTs belonging to competing criminal syndicates; this would indirectly help their own enterprises, while at the same time providing leverage with the DEA should they ever need to plea bargain.

One might also wonder what the effect might be among criminals if their NFT is valued less than that of another member who is actually at a lower rank in the organization. Indeed, the DEA itself might bid on some of the NFTs specifically to influence activity within the organization. This assumes of course that members of the crime syndicate are both aware of the collection of NFTs and interpret the "going rate" of their token as a reflection on their abilities.

Here is the NFT of this idea on Valuables

More categories (under the Examples: dropdown) coming soon...

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