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

I agree that a one-person-per-vote system is ideal, however it's hard map such a system to cyber space directly without a central authority.  Consider how one-vote-per-cpu can allow a way to directly prove the number of identities (cpus).  For example we know some entity is 10 cpus because they solve x of the last y blocks.  There is no need to trust any authority, only the  solution.

I think Git system might be the closest to one-person-per-vote where you can know about how many people contribute to the longest known chain of commits of a git repo (the trunk branch) aka the current consensus.  Of course this doesn't map directly for a number of reasons (people are not simple cpus for one).

-Yancy

On Wednesday, September 09, 2020 19:09 CEST, Adam Stallard <adam.stallard@gmail.com> wrote:
 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