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

There is a way to do one person one vote without losing anonymity. It uses
a Sybil-resistant VC (e.g., a passport or driver's license that gets its
Sybil resistance from some centralized system), but WITHOUT disclosing any
strong correlator for the person in question; the verifier knows whether a
person has already "voted" (or any similar once-per-person action) but need
not know ANY other attribute of the person. Furthermore, the holder of the
credential is fully aware that this technique is active, and can thus opt
in or choose not to cooperate, if they prefer. Balance of powers. It was
first described in a seminal paper "Clone Wars" paper by Jan Camenisch; for
the less mathematically inclined, it was described at RWOT9, here
<https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot9-prague/blob/master/topics-and-advance-readings/zkp-safety.md#technique-2-prevent-link-secret-reuse>
.

On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 1:11 PM Adam Stallard <adam.stallard@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 1:03 AM email@yancy.lol <email@yancy.lol> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>
>
> It's hard, but that's what we're doing. Instead of trusting a central
> authority, users should trust an anti-sybil algorithm they can verify
> themselves.
>
>
> 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
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>