Re: Who Watches the Watchmen? A Review of Subjective Approaches for Sybil-resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols

Verifiable credentials can certainly help. At BrightID, we're working on
way for a decentralized group of computer nodes that analyze an anonymous
social graph and make determinations about uniqueness to collaborate to
sign a credential for a user.

These credentials also have a notion of "context" to avoid unwanted linkage
between a user as they participate in various apps and networks. A user of
app A should be able to prove they're using only one account there without
linking that account to an account in app B.

On Wed, Sep 9, 2020, 3:55 AM Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I think this was the important insight of the paper here.  And I wonder if
> it can be solved with verifiable credentials?
>
> "If blockchains are to become a significant public infrastructure,
> particularly in the space of civic engagement, then Proof of Work's
> “one-CPU-one-vote” or Proof of Stake's “one-dollar-one-vote” systems will
> not suffice: in order to enable democratic governance, protocols that
> signal unique human identities to enable "one-person-one-vote" systems must
> be created."
>
> On Wed, 9 Sep 2020 at 12:50, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> PDF is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.05300.pdf
>>
>> Keywords: decentralized identity, Sybil-protection, crypto-governance
>>
>> Abstract.
>>
>> Most self-sovereign identity systems consist of strictly objective
>> claims, cryptographically signed by trusted third party attestors. Lacking
>> protocols in place to account for subjectivity, these systems do not form
>> new sources of legitimacy that can address the central question concerning
>> identity authentication: "Who verifies the verifier?". Instead, the
>> legitimacy of claims is derived from traditional centralized institutions
>> such as national ID issuers and KYC providers. Thisarchitecture has been
>> employed, in part, to safeguard protocols from a vulnerability previously
>> thought to be impossible to address in peer-to-peer systems: the Sybil
>> attack, which refers to the abuse of an online system by creating many
>> illegitimate virtual personas. Inspired by the progress in cryptocurrencies
>> and blockchain technology, there has recently been a surge in networked
>> protocols that make use of subjective inputs such as voting, vouching,and
>> interpreting, to arrive at a decentralized and sybil-resistant consensus
>> for identity. In this review, we will outline the approaches of these new
>> and natively digital sources of authentication - their attributes,
>> methodologies strengths, and weaknesses - and sketch out possible
>> directions for future developments.
>>
>> On Wed, 9 Sep 2020 at 03:21, Wayne Chang <wyc@fastmail.fm> wrote:
>>
>>> link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.05300
>>>
>>> discussion from strangers on the internet:
>>> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24411076
>>>
>>>