Why am I working on police brutality insurance? When I have never been brutalized by the police This week was fantastic. I had one of those “ ,” moments. I wouldn’t exactly call it fun. But it was honest and it caused me to take stock of where I am at and how to move forward. oh my God what have I done with the last five years of my life I’ve only got two months to find my pilot group The MVP for the app will be ready in September. I’ve got to find a pilot group of 50+ people by that time for one of these four use cases: TandaPay Latinos who want coverage for the $500 auto insurance deductible(practically speaking my only ) market is Latino Americans A group who wants police brutality coverage A group who wants campus sexual assault insurance A group who wants workers’ compensation coverage independent from their employer approving claims I’m not qualified to help of these groups of people. All these groups are going to be equally suspicious of me if I contact them directly. I decided to focus on police brutality and then I wrote this article, . I chose police brutality insurance because: any How P2P insurance can empower social justice in local communities TandaPay can likely provide the greatest benefit to ideological groups. Stories from the mainstream media evoke the strongest reaction of anger in me with respect to this issue, partially due to its graphic nature. . This results in a reassessment of the power of insurance. Most people are surprised to find out how much power insurers have over the police Potentially TandaPay can do the most good by tackling the problem of police brutality first, before attempting other types of coverage. Jaleel White aka Steve Urkel then and now So being a naive dumb white guy I call up at and a few other groups with a hopeful attitude. I’m sure I probably came across as a , “hey guys, can you try out my cool new app for police brutality insurance.” I didn’t say that, but I’m sure that’s how I sounded like to people. Lawrence Grandpre LBSBaltimore white version of Steve Urkel Everyone was polite, no one was rude but it was clear that this inquiry was not welcome. I got a lot of, “just email me and I’ll take a look at it.” If I tried to call back I would go to voicemail or someone would pick up and then “click” line was dead. “ ,” or “ ,” I can imagine that’s what they thought after hanging up the phone. What does this guy want who does this guy think he is anyway I never intended to work on police brutality as a cause I’m not into blockchain to get rich, that’s for sure. If I wanted to get rich I would have quit a long time ago. I’m just trying to find a reasonable use case for peer-to-peer insurance that doesn’t suck. I began working on this problem five years ago with my and is my final attempt at solving the problem. A great deal of my intellectual life these past five years has been consumed by this problem and nearly all of my money. I’ve run out of both funds and patience, this is my last chance to get it right. first whitepaper TandaPay Depending on what happens with TandaPay, these are five years I could come to see as either the best possible thing I could’ve been doing with this time, or it could be that the entire five years might have not even happened; because there was no impact my work had on anyone. Then that’s just five years that are gone. It’s not the sort of thing where there’s a consolation prize. I definitely won’t feel, “oh well I gave it a good try, it’s all fine anyway. It’s just trying that counts.” No, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe it’s just trying that counts. . I believe getting it right is what counts You’ve got to consider the legal liabilities, the potential use cases, incentives for the participants to join, the cost of premiums relative to claims, available markets, and more. There might be 10 to 20 different constraining factors that need to be taken into careful consideration. This is not an easy problem to solve. In the end you don’t get to choose what types of products you can or can’t cover. The constraints upon the problem continue to limit your options until very few viable choices are left. One thing becomes abundantly clear. Decentralized platforms for insurance produce more value than anything centralized companies could ever provide. A cheaper, more transparent version of what we already have isn’t valuable enough for an organization to spend millions of dollars building speculative software. This value likely comes in the form of new insurance products that don’t exist yet. MUST But why then use blockchain? If blockchain is so inconvenient and so awkward as a technology why then even bother? These two features have enticed men to their doom The allure of blockchain with regard to insurance products can be summed up in just two key points. I would consider these two points as “siren sisters” because their allure has drawn people to become “shipwrecked” upon the “jagged reefs” of reality. Blockchain can do a lot of but in terms of insurance you’ve got to capitalize on both of these two points to score a win: neato things Unimpeachable record keeping If blockchain does one thing good its record keeping. This is not something human beings are particularly good at. If a company spends money, the accounting for what the money was used for is completely separate from the money itself. So the chance of their being a discrepancy between of what the money was used for, and of what the money was used for, is a huge problem. With blockchain, an entity’s and its can become and that has never happened in the entire history of money. the record the actual fact money accounting the same thing Even if you could trust people to honestly create all non-blockchain records have the same problem. . This means that people can always come along later and change, tweak, improve, fix or massage the items in the record. Doing so would leave no trace of what the original values were. In addition the record can also be destroyed, either or . the initial record Without blockchain there is no guarantee of data integrity willfully accidentally — During the life of the trust, income earned is distributed to the grantor, and only after death does property transfer to the beneficiaries. *cough* *cough* Revocable trusts shellgame There is also no way to know for certain when humans do the record keeping. In technical jargon if you can know for certain who created an entry in a record then the database is said to have the property of . This is a very important property. Did one CEO sign the check or did two? Did one scribble on the second line to make it like two people signed the check? Who can understand these things? How can they even tell if that signature is even anyways? What’s to prevent anybody from just stealing a check and scribbling on it? What’s to stop them from cashing it? who created a record non-repudiation seem your signature It’s when people start to actually look closely at how our financial system works that they realize its all a bunch of smoke and mirrors. That’s why we spend so much money on audits and anti-fraud measures and that’s why they are of so little use in actually deterring fraud. Immunity from unfavorable regulations Given that human beings are not particularly good at record keeping, it comes as no surprise that keeping people honest requires frequent audits. Audits are the only way to make sure that an insurance company is wisely investing your premiums and paying valid claims. Audits are expensive because they require an army of auditors, accountants and lawyers. These people are to records what security guards are to banks. The only way to make sure that money isn’t being mismanaged is for accountants to constantly patrol an insurer’s records similarly to how security guards patrol a bank’s vaults. Blockchains can do this better than humans can, which allows them to provide financial services which are . legally compliant by design Built-in legal compliance is the magic key that gets decentralized insurance platforms out of regulatory jail.* This feature is very special because it means that the cost barriers to providing group coverage are eliminated. Previously if a group wanted to form a or a the initial legal costs involved were tremendous. Sometimes this involved lobbying congress to change the law to . Since no small groups can afford these huge up-front costs, this has small groups access into insurance markets and removed their . This problem is known as . RRG discretionary mutual create a specific exemption for your industry effectively denied right to self-insure the crushing burden of government regulation Solving the problem of costly government regulation provides us with new markets and new opportunities. We are effectively getting insurance coverage for cheaper than we should be paying for it because we don’t have to pay the regulatory expense. This is why regulatory arbitrage is like finding . If we can scale this model up in the future, peer-to-peer insurance may someday be able to compete directly with traditional insurers. free money Sometimes you choose an idea and sometimes an idea chooses you Did Neo choose or was he chosen… there were two pills but . only one cookie As I stated earlier I didn’t choose to create police brutality insurance. It resulted as the most promising option after studying various use cases. The initial concept of the $500 auto insurance deductible made logical sense but there was still several problems: Mutual insurance requires coordination, coordination requires time. People are effectively sacrificing two hours a month to get cheap deductible coverage. Acquiring and using cryptocurrency requires the group leader to take several hours to learn the technology and several hours each month to assist users. The technology is new and has its unique shortcomings, and disadvantages. Is deductible coverage valuable enough for groups to persist and not give up? I felt that the technology just wasn’t there yet to be able to provide sufficient value for this use case. I needed a use case that was than deductible coverage. I put aside everything I thought I knew about insurance and started thinking about what might be special about of insurance. . more compelling this type That’s when I made my critical breakthrough Putting aside the value of covering a claim, ? It creates an official, . I thought about this for a while. Is this type of record keeping valuable? Out of all the people and groups in the country, is there anyone who could stand to benefit from being able to create a record when an event triggers an insurance claim? Is there any community who can’t rely merely on government records, social media or blogs to tell their personal story? can TandaPay do anything else historical record of what everyone in a community believes TandaPay’s records are censorship resistant this is what censorship feels like — all your records are belong to us I remember hearing a podcast or reading a news article about how the posting of a police shooting video to youtube or social media was causing controversy. The violent content was in violation of the platforms ToS but if the content was taken down then the victims freedom of speech was being denied. Since the users didn’t have control over the platform this means they couldn’t be guaranteed their posts wouldn’t face censorship. . The creation of the record itself was valuable because it was . Bingo, the TandaPay protocol could provide users with a value going beyond the mere payment of an insurance claim censorship resistant and not subject to rules imposed by governments or other authorities Out of all the people and groups on the planet, ? Insurance is a record of history documenting policyholders paying premiums and a policy paying out claims. But, if it exists on the blockchain it becomes a special type of record because it is granted the properties of and . The only record we have of what the police are doing in local neighborhoods today are: who could stand to benefit the most from the ability to create an indisputable, censorship resistant record of history from the perspective of their local community data integrity non-repudiation Official records kept by the police ( ) not public Unofficial records created by mainstream media outlets Blogs or social medial posts created by individuals Official records created when victims take the police to court, kept by the government We seem to be missing a category of “ ” official records kept by the community Conclusion (and liberty) For great justice Blockchains are good at holding people’s money because they are good record keepers. They don’t permit any creative accounting and they can’t misplace people’s money. The best blockchain architectures for insurance are designed to be fully compliant with the law, . This lowers the initial cost to start a group to nearly zero, which allows blockchain to provide new insurance products that could never be provided previously. When combined with the feature of censorship resistance, the value of offering police brutality coverage goes beyond merely paying a claim. Now communities have a censorship resistant way of creating an unimpeachable, official record which represents the communities point of view. without users needing to take any legal action to form a coverage group * Blockchains do not provide this by default. Just because policyholders give their premiums to a smart contract does not exempt the smart contract from acting as a third-party custodian of funds. Additional architecture is required to take advantage of blockchain’s capacity to eliminate custodial risk. TandaPay accomplishes this through the use of . zero-reserve architecture

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