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Comment by nurumaik | Hacker News Reader

I think better approach for "ghost keys" would be requiring X amount of crypto to be sent to 0x0 (burning). Current implementation (requiring donation to freenet) basically gives freenet foundation infinite reputation (including any other potential project that would accept ghost keys as identity), kinda breaking the decentralization aspect

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Ghost keys will ultimately be just one of a menu of options for bootstrapping reputation in a decentralized reputation system. They have the advantage of simplicity, anonymity, and helping to fund the project, but as you correctly point out - they are centralized.

A cryptocurrency-based solution like you suggest will undoubtedly be one of a menu of reputation bootstrapping options that will develop over time.

Reputation systems have been a theoretical idea for a while, but we haven't come up with anything sybil-proof without centralized identity management. "we have a menu" sounds a lot like "we don't actually have any viable plan" in this case.

Don't get me wrong, this is awesome. I think it is built on a subtlety bad premise. I think it is time to start build organizational nomic games on this sort of contract system, literal organization governance, for systems like this to thrive.

There are tons of sybil-proof systems if you don't include signal from sources by default, but instead opt them in by hand. E.g. use a web of trust and then choose who you trust. It doesn't matter if there are trillions of accounts you don't trust, because you don't trust them.

Which isn't a web of trust. it is just an "allowlist". Humans are vulnerable to sybil attacks too.

An allow-list with transitive trust is a web of trust. And I said "use a web of trust", not "use an allow-list", because I really did mean "web of trust".

And sure, they can be, if they adopt patterns that allow it. I can also find plenty of counter-examples. I don't think "humans are less vulnerable to sybil attacks than automated systems" is a weakly-defensible stance at all.

Appreciate your feedback.

> Reputation systems have been a theoretical idea for a while, but we haven't come up with anything sybil-proof without centralized identity management.

I don't think it's accurate to say that we haven't come up with anything. The original Freenet has had a decentralized web-of-trust plugin for over 20 years[0].

It's far from perfect, in practice it seems to have empowered a small number of people with disproportionate influence - but that's due to solvable design issues, it's not a sybil problem.

It's also important to distinguish between sybil-proof and "raising the cost of sybil attacks to the point that they're manageable".

I do agree with your broader point that there is massive scope for building truly decentralized governance systems on Freenet. I've done some thinking about it but it's still very speculative[1].

[0] https://github.com/hyphanet/plugin-WebOfTrust

[1] https://freenet.org/about/news/799-proof-of-trust-a-wealth-u...

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