Comment by EthanHeilman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EthanHeilman | Hacker News Reader

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> the ultimate and perhaps only proof of personhood is being a person, engaged in the world

I buy this.

Daniel Suarez had a very similar idea, although he referred to it as the bot problem[0]. I believe this approach of identities withstanding "the test of time" solves the oracle problem but at the cost of a delayed solution. Initially you have lots and lots of bots and Sybil attacks are common. Then after a while, identities/nyms that exist and interact with the world increase in trustworthiness. Trustworthy identities will eventually be stolen or sold to bad actors, but like fake identities today they will be expensive.

My identity on hackernews is over 11 years old. Creating such an identity with the comment history, connection to a true name, and content over 11 years would be very expensive. Likely more expensive that a fake passport.

For instance Islamic State terrorists were buying counterfeit passports allowing them to enter the EU for 15,000 USD [1].

The major downside of such a system is that isolated people or people with few resources would be at a major disadvantage and we would essentially be replicating much of inequality of the credit score system.

[0]: Daemon: Bot-mediated Reality, Daniel Suarez, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS5i1S8FXno

[1]: "One such network, run by an Uzbek with extremist links living in Turkey, is now selling high-quality fake passports for up to $15,000 (£11,132) purporting to be from various countries. In at least 10 cases the Guardian is aware of, people who illegally crossed the Syrian border into Turkey have used his products to depart through Istanbul airport.", https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/31/revealed-how-f...

Keybase was sort of trying to do this with social proof, though it's reliance on a centralized provider (keybase itself) made it brittle.

I think you can get there with something like Urbit IDs that are easy to ban. If IDs are not infinite you can some protection against abuse - pairing that with some proof-of-humanity and you can get closer, but there are still issues of someone doing the proof and then selling their ID to a bot. At least if it's easy to ban you can try to make that not economical. Doubly true if the IDs have a non-zero (but low) cost.

Helps make you resistant to a sybil attack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

The problem isn't trivial though - it's not obvious what will work best and it'll likely always be somewhat of an arms race, especially if you want to keep privacy.

> Keybase was sort of trying to do this with social proof, though it's reliance on a centralized provider (keybase itself) made it brittle.

I think something like this could've worked, which is why I was so sad over its demise. I think Keybase (like the MIT PGP keyring, which it is sort of a fancier version of) was predicated on the idea that it's much easier to build a centralized keyring and then decentralize it once it's widely adopted than to build a decentralized keyring from the ground up.

That did seem to be the direction Keybase was exploring. Their merkle trees weren't properly decentralized but hinted at ways that they could be.

I'm curious where Keybase would have gone if they were better incentivized to explore that before its demise.

> My identity on hackernews is over 11 years old. Creating such an identity with the comment history, connection to a true name, and content over 11 years would be very expensive. Likely more expensive that a fake passport.

Not if you have access to the HN database :^)

Plus now with ChatGPT, you don't even have to write the comments.

Many users here are far more insightful than ChatGPT. You might get some OK comments with ChatGPT and a stray upvote here and there, but I think you're more likely to get banned if you employ ChatGPT to write your HN comments at any significant volume.

Not that everyone writes great comments, all the time, but I'm arguing you probably won't break into the 1000s of HN karma if you try to automate it (because you'll probably get shadowbanned first)

I thought there's no shadowban on HN.

There definitely is. Turn on showdead in your settings if you want to see all the comments from shadowbanned people

Even that's a bit of a crapshoot. I have a Reddit account that's over 15 years old. I have a Neopets account that's over 20. I can't get into either of them, a consequence of (my abuse of) poor UX design. (What's the fake birth date I chose in 2000? Who knows! Was taking advantage of Reddit's account-juicing tactic of not requiring an email worth losing a decade-old identity to hackers? Probably not!)

I've tried to recover them, and faced a (perhaps justified) customer support brick wall. Was Neopets to anticipate Millennial nostalgia (and our preteen willingness to circumvent COPPA) in their sign-up processes a generation ago? How obligated is Reddit to investigate someone's claim to any single account?

But without those accounts, I'm two closer to being a digital non-entity, for significant portions of my life.

> Daniel Suarez had a very similar idea, although he referred to it as the bot problem

I also wrote about almost the exact same thing as what Worldcoin is doing back in 2006:

https://www.alexkrupp.com/fourwebs.html

As proof of the original publication date, not only is it in the Wayback Machine, but it's also cited in several academic papers and books. It's great that someone is actually doing it, but I'm also kind of ticked they didn't cite this essay as prior art in their patent application.

>My identity on hackernews is over 11 years old. Creating such an identity with the comment history, connection to a true name, and content over 11 years would be very expensive. Likely more expensive that a fake passport.

You can buy very old accounts on any platform for very cheap. Like under $100 for a 10 year account on a popular platform cheap. Most platforms offer comment editing, and most people don't archive everyone else's profiles nor do they have access to the database to check for consistent changes.

Meaning that if we use your account for example, if someone bought it from you (or it was hacked after inactivity and you don't care for it, etc), they could easily rewrite what they need to paint the picture that your user isn't actually about using your real name, but a pseudonym. Most aren't going to care about this that far anyways, as usernames are easily ignored on most sites, same with comment histories. Just indicating how easy it is to rewrite both of those aspects.

The only platforms where this would be difficult are platforms that already partake in substantial identity verification like Facebook.

On HN you can only edit comments until they're 2h old, only delete them until somebody responds. Editing history as you've described would require admin privileges. Good luck getting that for $100.

This assumes that platforms never change policies and that admin privileges are expensive and impenetrable. Neither are true, as we've already witnessed multiple times now across various platforms.

No, it doesn't. I'm not speaking of "platforms." I'm speaking of exactly one platform that has an extremely small admin crew. Buying your way to a rewritten history on HN is highly implausible. Hacking, perhaps, but I'd expect that this community has been rattling those doors for the platform's entire existence.

Ok so if I make 1000 LLM controlled AIs right now, then in 10 years I can sell them for millions?

Sounds like a great system, let's do it.

Such a fake passport is not the same as a complete fake identity. There is more to that than a passport and a lot of it you categorically cannot fake.

A fake passport can trick some people some of the time but not all people all of the time. As such those $15k do not represent a full fake identity. Your history of enhancing with the state in some way, paying taxes, requesting a new passport, getting your drivers license, whatever, serves as defense in depth.

States are pretty good at this, actually.

Also, you account is worthless. Hard or impossible to replicate, sure, but if there is no buyer it‘s worth zero.

I don’t know if many people read other users comment history or heck even their user names.

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