Who Watches the Watchmen? Sybil-Resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
I previously proposed formalizing this problem as Decentralized Identity Trilemma (http://maciek.blog/dit).
> Those three requirements, sybil resistance, self-sovereignty and privacy-reservation, compose the "Decentralized Identity Trilemma".[7][8]
> [8] ‘Decentralized Identity Trilemma’, Maciek, 2019.
"To control for Sybil attacks BrightID runs GroupSybilRank, a modification of the SybilRank algorithm, to estimate the anti-Sybil score of the network participants based on affinity between groups. Proposed to be used as the official BrightID anti-sybil algorithm, the effectiveness of this algorithm in the presence of multiple attack vectors, remains to be proved."
Unfortunately, just proving personhood is only the first step in deciding someone's reputation, but it seems like a good basis to build some proper decentralized trust systems from, for example [1].
[0] https://www.brightid.org/faq
[1] https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati...
We should hope that a democracy would consider not only whether there are more in favour than against but also other factors.
For example. Suppose there are two rabbits and three foxes and the question is what's for dinner? Majoritarianism suggests that the foxes can vote "Rabbit" and then eat the rabbits, all is fair. But I think we'd want our democracies to consider that there is an outsize cost to this choice compared to the 40% vote for "Fresh fruit and vegetables" from the rabbits. [A fox isn't an obligate carnivore, its digestive system is perfectly capable of obtaining nutrients from a meal of fruit and vegetables, although rabbit is delicious].
To achieve the result that you're hoping democracy will provide, it is perhaps better to rely on the principle of Freedom of Speech / Expression.
The most obvious cases of fox / rabbit issues are regarding GRSM rights. A majority would weakly prefer that gay people not marry (but they'd just shrug and move on if overruled), a small minority would strongly prefer that gay people not marry… and then you've got all the gay people, most of whom would very strongly prefer that gay people can marry. The weak majority who care enough to block "rabbit", but not enough to actually be upset if it happened, rule the policy – until democracy becomes indirect, anyway.
Indirect democracy should never have superior properties to direct democracy. Is there a way of fixing this?
I fail to see how this ever scales. Surely as the user count increases it becomes extremely difficult to get all the users to be ready to validate themselves at the same time?
uses plain PKI certificates to solve identity and information verification in general.
> Certificates are information verifications issued to you by Certisfy partners.
> Certisfy partners:
> * Police departments.
> * Government agencies, ex DMV, SSA, IRS.
> * A notary public.
> * A school, college, university
The fact is the internet is in need of a privacy-friendly information verification solution that scales...when it comes to approaches for achieving this I think the more the merry.