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<p>On 11/03/2025 10:10, Jerry Leichter wrote:</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:ED1FC9C7-FE67-428E-91D2-6E2B5BBDF888@lrw.com">
<pre wrap="" class="moz-quote-pre">Focusing on just one issue:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="" class="moz-quote-pre">...Proof of Human is the cornerstone of the networks security.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="" class="moz-quote-pre">I don't see any hope of being able to prove that an entity on the network is human, given even the current state of AI (and it only gets harder from here). That train left the station.
We need to step back and ask what the exact problem is that we're trying to solve. In fact, it has little to do with the humanity or lack thereof of someone we correspond with. It has to do with whether we can trust them for particular purposes. We're attempting to use the human/not-human dichotomy as a shortcut for this purpose, but it's a bad shortcut. For any particular purpose, some humans are trustworthy and some are not, and some AI's are trustworth or not.</pre>
</blockquote>
However, there are applications and protocols where it is desirable
that people participate on a 'one person, one vote' basis. Not every
vote is going to be in the right direction, but that doesn't
necessarily matter. If a decentralised system based on a
cryptographic protocol has 1,000 honest users and 500 dishonest
ones, then you can work with that. If a decentralised system has
1,000 honest users, and 500 dishonest people with 200 users each
(i.e. 100,000 dishonest users), that is a much harder problem for a
protocol designer. So some kind of solution for proof-of-humanity
greatly broadens what is possible for protocol designers.<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:ED1FC9C7-FE67-428E-91D2-6E2B5BBDF888@lrw.com">
<pre wrap="" class="moz-quote-pre"> Think about conversing with an advisor at your bank. You are willing to trust the entity you are connected to - human or chatbot - when you are willing to trust that they are legitimately associated with the bank. My bank's chatbot actually provides some useful advice, which I trust. It doesn't try to appear to be human, but even if it did, that would change nothing.
Suppose we established humanity by requiring that anyone wanting to access the Internet get a "driver's license" from the state, which would provide unforgeable certification of humanity. What does that "unforgeable certificate of humanity" actually mean? Whether it says anything about whether the identity it certifies is human depends _entirely_ on how trustworthy the state is in issuing such certificates to humans, only to humans, and only one per human. Well ... good luck with that. Even with the most trusted of states, exceptions will certainly be made for "legitimate law enforcement practices."</pre>
</blockquote>
<p>I think you are right that proof of humanity will need to rely on
a trusted third party, such as a state (or in Worldcoin's
implementation, the Worldcoin Foundation), and so will never be
truly decentralised. However, the alternatives are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Using a proof of work system to make it too costly to create
lots of users. The problem is, it is quite likely that the
minimum many legitimate people will spend to create one user is
less than the maximum per user that people performing Sybil
attacks are willing to spend. Also, such systems use a lot of
energy at scale and so are environmentally harmful.</li>
<li>Use a proof of stake system - you stake some existing
cryptocurrency that you can lose under certain circumstances.
This has the same problem - it is essentially, one dollar one
vote, and people will pay more for many votes.</li>
<li>Some kind of web of trust - but this either lets a small
percentage of bad actors create fake networks of users, or has
serious privacy implications.</li>
</ul>
<p>I'd argue the downsides of some limited centralisation are worth
it for many otherwise decentralised applications. States creating
a few extra users isn't necessarily fatal to many applications -
and they probably wouldn't need to anyway, as a solution that
offers good privacy would also blind other users to the fact they
work for the state. It would be a problem if a state conducted a
Sybil attack with lots of fake users - but for a widely deployed
system, solutions that provide visibility into the number of users
would at least make this obvious (unless the state also fudges
their official population statistics to cover up a sudden rise in
real people).</p>
<p>I'm working on a solution I'm calling uniquonym
(<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://lemmy.amxl.com/c/project_uniquonym">https://lemmy.amxl.com/c/project_uniquonym</a> /
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://github.com/orgs/uniquonym/repositories">https://github.com/orgs/uniquonym/repositories</a>) - a portmanteau of
unique and pseudonym - which will use centralised trust of states
as arbiters of personhood, combined with zk-STARK proofs, ensuring
users can only have one pseudonym per namespace per state (at a
time - eventually uniquonyms expire and can be removed from the
Merkle tree of identities in a namespace, and can be replaced by a
different one). States cannot tie pseudonyms in a namespace to
real users. Uniquonyms can be used for approximate voting, or to
slow down how fast malicious users can come back after being
blocked in a pseudonymous decentralised system.<br>
</p>
<p>-- Andrew<br>
</p>
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