Greetings humans! I wanted to create a workstream on Moving to the price of forgery, but just noticed this one. Think it’s better to publish here.
Moving to the price of forgery + turning gitcoin into identity provider.
Quality control of human verification methods
(or the way we assign trust bonuses to verification methods)
Systems like Proof of Humanity, Bright ID, Idena, POAP and ENS are already doing an amazing job in moving towards a no-bots future. Yet there’s room for improvement. Which is better quality control and a fairer trust bonus for each method as a result.
@Adamscochran proposed to create a standard assessment procedure for new (and existing) methods. The procedure is incredibly detailed and exhaustive. It can describe literally any existing verification method quantitatively. Yet as well as the current procedure it is…
…subjective. we cannot predict the ingenuity of malicious actors. There’s no way we can think of all the exploits for a particular verification method. And there’s no simple way we can tell the method was exploited. An exploited verification method + exploited quality control algorithm is a Trojan horse for a bot army. So the first problem is the high risk to be a step behind malicious actors.
…and speculative. See how @Adamscochran scored Idena. It is so low that Idena would be kicked out of the approved methods. I’d disagree with that. I love Idena and most probably would propose a different scoring for it or probably would demand to reconsider weights in scoring parameters. But we cannot really determine which weights or scores are right. Thus the second problem is the lack of objective measurement. Without it, we leave room for political games, biased opinions, and unproductive disputes (same as disputes on religion, politics, vaccines;)).
How price of forgery works
The solution to both of the problems described is the price of forgery concept.
The main idea is that the user score is valued in dollars and the user can grab these dollars at any time. After that, the user’s ID is deleted forever. The procedure is called “explosion” in Upala terms (we invented the concept and building the protocol implementing it). I’ll use the term further.
With the price of forgery approach, we don’t have to rely on any assumptions about any verification method. The market will drive the scoring of each method to its price of forgery organically. We also get an assurance for future exploits. If a method got hacked we would see it immediately through an increased explosion rate. That would mean the method should be fixed, or its score should be decreased.
- See more on the price of forgery in this article on EthResearch
- See what we are up to in Upala
How Gitcoin may benefit
Price of forgery gives the ability to quality control human verification methods with market forces. It is unbiased, precise, and responsive to new exploits. For the verification methods It would mean:
- Fairer trust bonuses
- Automated, transparent, and ongoing quality control
- Incentive for third parties to bring new verification methods or invent new ones
The benefits from shifting to the price of forgery go a bit further than “just” quality control. Gitcoin has tremendous data on interactions on the platform. It is then possible to aggregate scores from multiple sources for a single user (which trust bonuses do), and also append an additional trust bonus to award “proper” internal interaction. That would benefit users and will help assess own algorithms (help understand better what the “proper” behavior is).
And even further. With all that data and algorithms measured with the price of forgery Gitcoin may start providing its own digested scores to other DApps and earn on that (Upala protocol allows to do that). Due to the high user base, it may become a starting point for a decentralized identity system of the future.
Work done, next steps, and coordination
You can track progress on developing the price of forgery protocol here (looking for contributors by the way - we’ve got Ampere-hours!).
I had a talk with @owocki about the price of forgery back in September 2020. Then described integration in this github issue. I learned recently that Gitcoin is continuing on the idea - thread. So seems like the Upala’s price of forgery concept is already approved. Though I haven’t had any conversation with the gitcoin team on this and I don’t see any coordination. As Gitcoin is decentralized now I thought it is a good idea to start the discussion here.
Related topics:
- [Workstream] Anti-Fraud Workstream Assemble!
- [Workstream] Self-Sovereign Individuals
- [Proposal] Establishing a New Process for Identify Verification Scoring
Discussion
- How do you feel about turning from manual assessment of verification methods to the price of forgery?
- What are your thoughts on adding identity provider functionality to Gitcoin?
- To Gitcoin team: is the price of forgery really on the roadmap?