Practices close to mutual help have existed for a long time.
So, its prototype was the layout system: losses were distributed among all members of the community in accordance with preliminary agreements. For example, caravan participants shared the damage among themselves.

Friendly communities were created in England, whose members could count on payment in connection with illness or death. Communities of mutual fire insurance were widespread.

Moba (Montenegro), Arvut Adadit (Israel), Talkoot (Finland), Talaka (Belarus), Mahalla (Uzbekistan) and many more...

In the history of every nation, there is a historical experience of effective self-organization to make life easy.

Modern technologies have opened qualitatively different possibilities for solving such problems.

A good example is the Mutual Insurance Funds in China, recently banned by the government. Using smartphone applications, participants registered preliminary agreements and jointly financed the needy, sharing the damage among everyone. For 15 cents a year, the participant received $60,000 in insurance coverage. And the largest platform served 100 million people.

Such efficiency rendered meaningless insurance medicine and entire branches of China's financial industry. Cash registers were banned by the government.

The maintenance of such platforms in China, on average, took about 8% of the collected funds (for insurance companies, such costs are higher - in the US they range from 12% to 18%, in general, about a third of US spending on healthcare goes to administrative purposes).

More about China's social phenomenon in article

The purpose of decentralized "people's insurance" is the same as that of the usual one - to redistribute the damage of one among the maximum number of participants.

Unlike traditional, decentralized cash has no structure, form and boundaries. It cannot be banned or destroyed.
It does not require a constantly replenished fund.
It has no operating costs, and the relationship of participants is referential, voluntary, transparent, parity, and self-regulating.
The number of participants is not limited in any way.

The decentralized mutual benefit fund is a reference list of people (who know each other personally or through mutual acquaintances) who are connected to each other by voluntary intention.

When an insured event occurs, the activity or inaction of the participant forms his reputation. The self-regulating process is provided by a software.

Reference and reputation are necessary and sufficient conditions for mutual trust among members of the network community.

Trust is a necessary and sufficient condition for the development of direct cooperation (called by the futurists p2p economy, Economy 3.0), in which the benefit of everyone is obvious and calculable.

The method of self-organization described below opens up opportunities for the emergence of a global decentralized social network of mutual trust, as an alternative to existing hierarchies.

The model of coercion transforms nonviolently into the model of consent in a natural way. After all, it is scientifically proven that everyone is connected to each other by five handshakes.

The condition of decentralization is that there is no advantage of one over the other - the software is open source and has no ownership.