How can someone prove their income? [closed]

Question

I'd like to make an app that lets people prove their income and put it on the Ethereum blockchain so that merchants can sell to provably low-income individuals at discount rates. The problem is I can't figure out how one could prove their income. Users could send in tax return transcripts or wage and income transcripts, but those could be easily faked. The IRS's Income Verification Express Service seems like it could work, but the service is only for creditor businesses.

Ideally a user could produce a tax transcript that's cryptographically (aka electronically) signed by the US government that proves their income. Is this possible? Does the US govt ever sign documents to be used as proof? If not is there another solution for providing income?

Answer 1

There's no uniform legally standardized way of proving one's income in the United States. For that matter, there's no uniform legal definition of "income", even if you limit yourself to the definitions used by government-run welfare programs (the most common split is between those that use gross income, and those that use adjusted gross income).

For your purposes, I'd recommend talking to some merchants to see if they're interested, and if so, what definition of "income" they'd look for. But honestly, I'd expect the answers to be "we're not interested" and "nothing you can cryptographically verify".