[Cryptography] People vs AI

[Ray Dillinger]

I thought for a while about the "telling humans from bots" problem, and 
I didn't come up with any solution that works at scale and remotely. If 
I'm setting up something like a financial market, ultimately the user 
database comes down to some equivalent of government-issued photo IDs on 
file for all participants.  This is because it will be necessary for any 
of them, or anyone else affected by their businesses, to take any of the 
others to court in the (inevitable) event of financial malfeasance, 
consumer fraud, breach of contract, or government intervention in the 
businesses the companies are engaging in.

Radical cypherpunk ideology aside, businesses control resources and 
offer goods or services for money. They have to be liable to the public 
for the misuse of those resources or for failure to provide those goods 
and services. Debt can appear or be imposed as a result of judicial 
judgment or fines, so you can't restrict the problem to a pseudonymous 
or anonymous ledger with irrevocable cash-only transactions. We saw what 
happened with Bitcoin; it was a failure. Such appearance of debt is not 
a flaw that can or should be engineered away in the case of real 
business being done with real assets. It is a core, necessary feature of 
any system that allows business to be done. Businesses undertake 
obligations and have to be held liable to those obligations.  You don't 
get liability without specific identifiable human beings held to account.

Also, is-a-human is not a permanent status.  Human beings have finite 
lifetimes that end, and the digital identity of a dead person must not 
continue to be usable to do new business. So your irrevocable ledger, in 
addition to the possibility of debt, has to account for the unexpected 
termination of accounts holding or owing debt, and the execution of 
instruments (such as wills) contingent on the death of a real-world human.

And that doesn't happen "for free" or "bottom up."  That means somebody 
is paying human beings - at the very least notary publics - to verify 
identity and execute some kind of contract document to initiate the 
relationship, and it means somebody is paying human beings for keeping 
that data safe, keeping it up to date, and not misusing it.

Cryptography can be used to keep identities secret from other users in 
the event that debt does not appear, but once debt exists the debtor 
must have a real-world identity that can be revealed. And somebody has 
to be able to verify that real-world identities not yet revealed are in 
fact real and still alive.

Bear