So far there are no monetary incentives, but the energy overlay allows anyone who wants to reward helpful behavior to identify whom to reward and how much. For example, an app that uses BrightID/Aura to verify uniqueness could periodically drop rewards to any Aura player who helps verify its users.
More on “Energy”
Energy is a measure of a sybil hunter / human verifier’s effectiveness as judged by other Aura players. Energy also determines the capacity of an Aura player to provide expert help: i.e. verify regular BrightID users. The more energy someone has, the more verification power they have.
BrightID has long had “seed groups” (pre-trusted people in the graph), but the current process of seed group selection is slow and clunky and done by a seed DAO that hasn’t changed much over the years.
Aura will speed this up and make it more resilient to corruption through the use of energy “flavors.” If an energy team (the source of an energy flavor) is found by the public to be corrupt, apps will naturally stop using that energy flavor. At the same time, new energy teams can form and create new flavors without centralized control. They just need to convince Aura players to use their energy. (Each Aura players can pick at most five energy flavors to receive and pass on.) If a flavor needs to be discontinued, Aura falls back on other flavors and continues to operate.
We haven’t nailed down any specific incentive model, but you can imagine that energy flavors can be branded and receive sponsorships from apps that use them. The best sybil hunters will receive large amounts of energy in elite flavors. If apps are generous and willing to pay back the value they receive from Aura to energy holders, we hope it will be enough that the best sybil hunters can do it professionally.
Yes. Aura has its own internal graph which is the energy graph. The nodes in this graph are all Aura players. The Aura toolbox then provides tools to analyze the BrightID graph and provide assessments about whether its nodes are unique people or sybils. Right now, the BrightID connection graph is the subject of analysis, and the research tools allow an Aura player to privately and anonymously check facts with other players, but the same Aura game and graph could be used with other graphs or data sets (such as Gitcoin grants data), as long as collaborative fact checking is possible, and Aura players can judge other Aura players’ effectiveness.
I want Aura to grow its toolset to include specialized tools to work with a variety of data sets. An Aura player could be a BrightID specialist, or a Gitcoin grants specialist, or both.
In fact, I think the Aura game could be used for fact-checking in other domains (besides sybil hunting) where experts help to determine who else is an expert in a decentralized manner.
BrightID is useful as a tool to create the expert graph (experts vouching for experts) that is at the core of Aura, but a separate question is what will the experts research? The BrightID graph itself forms the first subject of research. Gitcoin grants data could be the second.