Ask HN: How would I send 1 dollar to everyone on Earth?

[Hacker News]

Let's assume that:

  * I am a billionaire with 8 billion dollars on my bank account
  * There are 8 billion humans on Earth
  * Around 6 billion of those humans have a bank account
  * I would like to send 1 dollar to every human on Earth

How would I go about doing this?
Some challenges that I believe I'd face:

  1. Getting the bank account numbers of the people who already have a bank account
  2. Getting 1 dollar to people who don't have a bank account
  3. Verifying that I'm not sending 1 dollar to the same person several times
  4. Building or finding some kind of service that makes sure I don't have to do 8 billion manual transfers
  5. Making sure I don't break any international laws in the process
  6. How do we handle children?

Some ideas for how to perhaps deal with these challenges:

  1. Create a website where I promise to send money if you send me your bank account -- doesn't sound shady at all.
  2. Use the same website to also allow people to send their address instead of a bank account number, and then simply send 1 dollar through regular mail? How would postal services in poor or corrupt countries deal with this, once they know there are millions of dollars being sent through the mail?
  3. No idea.
  4. Would a simple script that iterates over 8 billion rows and sends Stripe commands do the trick?
  5. Am I allowed to send money to North Korea? What happens if I send money to a known terrorist? No idea.
  6. No idea.

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33530583

Points: 6

# Comments: 10

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