Dominic Williams, the founder of Dfinity Foundation, proposed a way that blockchain and smart contracts can potentially help by getting millions of Russians to watch an entire informational video(s) about the ongoing war.
The exec stated that the proposal is made in a personal capacity rather than as an employee of the decentralized blockchain project.
Even as Russia faces a massive economic meltdown, the shelling in Ukraine has hit residential areas of cities and caused civilian casualties. In a bid to “hasten the end of attacks,” Dfinity founder has revealed working towards finding ways of directly communicating with, and persuading by informing, the Russian population, who are unaware of the situation in their neighboring conflict-ridden country.
On the technical aspect, the first step includes adapting the virtual people parties invention that will enable large numbers of individuals to anonymously “prove personhood” with the help of their mobile phones. Using the people party system, attendees can prove their identity to smart contracts as individual human beings.
Every successful attendee gets a new crypto account via smart contracts, which they can access and control using an Internet Identity. The main idea is to use people parties to offer an incentive in the form of crypto for Russians to watch an informational video in return for a reward.
A participant will become eligible to collect their reward in bitcoin or ether after they have proven personhood by attending a people party. This is the second step. The catch here is – the participant is immediately required to watch a streaming video, to which unique PIN will be overlaid, dynamically, number by number.
They will be able to collect the reward only after the video is watched until the end. According to Williams, the key of the streaming video is to “tell the truth about the war in Ukraine, and ask Russians to pressure their government into ceasing hostilities.”
The third step will be to finance participation incentives using a DAO. The founder recommends paying participants $50 in crypto for each video that they watch that would also cover the risks associated with Russian security services. With a target of attracting 5,000,000 people, total funding for the scheme would total $250 million.
The overall response to the proposal has been mixed. Among technical difficulties such as releasing the virtual people parties framework, preventing Russia from blocking the Internet Computer, and collecting crypto to give out as rewards, many in the community feel there are other weak points, especially in terms of GPS spoofing, ignoring the video, and just collect the rewards.
If Moscow eventually intensifies its steps to isolate the Russian internet from the rest of the world, the proposal may not stand a chance at all.