Proof of Personhood: Pseudonymous Parties vs. Web of Trust

After, yesterday's discussion, I see four major issues with Pseudonymous Parties, that will not allow them to become a widely adopted way to create Proofs of Personhood.



- Trade in PoP tokens

PoP tokens from Pseudonymous Parties can be traded - making them unsuitable for e-democracy and accountable pseudonyms. To solve this issue, PoP tokens should be short lived, one time usage which is not possible with physical parties.

- Corruption Risks

Corruption among organizers cannot be easily mitigated. If PoP tokens and based on them PoP Coins gain wide adoption it will create a huge incentive for organizers to collude and cheat at organizing parties. This corruption risk is exacerbated because parties are organized in physical world, making it more difficult to ensure transparency and audit.

- High Cost

Cost to convene parties is too high due to the physical nature of the parties and due to additional expenditures to mitigate corruption risks.

- Different value of coins from different Pseudonymous Parties

There is no clear way to create one (global, widely adopted) currency from coins created at different Pseudonymous Parties.



All of the above issues can be solved by using graph analysis of Web of Trust. Therefore, the practical approach to create a widely adopted Proof of Personhood (pseudonymous or not) is via graph analysis of "a new generation" Web of Trust. This new Web of Trust should be simple (undirected) with explicit meaning of edges (endorsements of explicit claims to uniquely represent living human individual).



Based on the new generation WoT, we can have Proof of Personhood ("Real Name" identities and accountable Pseudonymous Identities (suitable to be used in democratic elections)), issue and directly distribute global money, use part of this money to create and maintain core cooperation services built on humane design principals.



Validbook is the mockup and in some places a proof of concept of this idea. 

See more details about Validbook at:

- A proposal to cooperate on the development and maintenance of Validbook - https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-credentials/2018May/0024.html

- Why did the PGP Web of Trust fail? - https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-credentials/2018Jun/0142.html

- Definitions related to SURLHI (Statements of Unique Representation of Living Human Individuals) arbitration - https://docs.google.com/document/d/19pJ3_xMyNX-bAZSHTXvnwr5xLWsV-ShVv3Vy1S4gN6E/edit?disco=AAAAB7Kir0c

- SURLHI arbitration - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pj7zt7CuWu4p53Y4mC4BbHFq8PC4m_v15Ld0ydGkAVc/edit
- The nature of issues: Human Nature vs. Attention Based Business Model? https://community.humanetech.com/t/the-nature-of-issues-human-nature-vs-attention-based-business-model/2412/22 (long forum discussion about Validbook idea, better read from the bottom)

- Validbook Foundation as Organization of United Humans - https://twitter.com/Drabiv/status/1015242092795387910



You can check Validbook dev version, using the main test user Jimbo Fry here - http://futurama1x.validbook.org/jimbo.fry (as Validbook is built on Self-Sovereign Identity idea, you will need a cryptographic key to login. To login as a main test user - download and use the following key https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_ZDoXh4aBUQXR50PLRusZRF7XvEY3OQx/view Password to keystore file - “123456789”. After login go manually to the home page. Use Chrome browser. In production version the process of login will be seamless, as we will use browser extension to store key.) Note, this is alpha version so half of the things does not work and another half works half of the time.



–Bohdan

Received on Wednesday, 8 August 2018 13:40:47 UTC