It's also illegal to steal things but that happens much more frequently because it's often fairly easy to get away with.
> What ZKPs don’t do is mitigate verifier abuse or limit their requests, such as over-asking for information they don’t need or limiting the number of times they request your age over time. They don’t prevent websites or applications from collecting other kinds of observable personally identifiable information like your IP address or other device information while interacting with them.
And going forward I think that any communication without establishing some kind of trust boundary will just be noise.
If we allow incumbents to make photo age verification and upload of ID to third-parties to be the solution, we will have a much worse solution.
and then layer on citizenship on top if you want to use this for polling, voting, etc.
Identity attributes on chain are "soulbound" to prevent people from exchanging them like other assets.
> You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
Wanting to flip the tortoise back over was why he failed the test.
It's funny to think of how the US government is effectively a decentralized web of trust system. Building one that works, that has sufficient network effects, auditability, accountability, enforcability, so that when things are maliciously exploited, or people make mistakes, your system is robust and resilient - these are profound technically difficult challenges.
The US government effectively has to operate IDs under a web of trust, with 50 units sitting at the top, and a around 3,000 county sub-units, each of which are handling anywhere from 0 to 88 sub-units of towns, cities, other community structures.
Each community then deals with one or more hospitals, one or more doctors in each hospital, and every time a baby is born, they get some paperwork filled out, filed upward through the hierarchy of institutions, shared at the top level between the massive distributed database of social security numbers, and there are laws and regulations and officials in charge of making sure each link in the chain is where it needs to be and operates according to a standard protocol.
At any rate - ID is hard. You've gotta have rules and enforcement, accountability and due process, transparency and auditing, and you end up with something that looks a bit like a ledger or a blockchain. Getting a working blockchain running is almost trivial at this point, or building on any of the myriad existing blockchains. The hard part is the network incentives. It can't be centralized - no signing up for an account on some website. Federated or domain based ID can be good, but they're too technical and dependent on other nations and states. The incentives have to line up, too; if it's too low friction and easy, it'll constantly get exploited and scammed at a low level. If it's too high friction and difficult, nobody will want to bother with it.
Absent a compelling reason to participate, people need to be compelled into these ID schemes, and if they're used for important things, they need a corresponding level of enforcement, and force, backing them up, with due process. You can't run it like a gmail account, because then it's not reliable as a source of truth, and so on.
I don't know if there's a singular, technological fix, short of incorruptible AGI that we can trust to run things for us following an explicit set of rules, with protocols that allow any arbitrary independent number of networks and nodes and individuals to participate.
Yes 100%, that's why the government needs to offer it, make tampering a serious offense, and dynamically defend its integrity from attackers.
> incorruptible AGI
Not a lot of alpha in planning for scenarios where we get that
Off the top of my head, a possible method is a proxy or two or three, each handling different components of authentication and without knowledge of the other components. They return a token with validity properties (such as duration, level of service). All the vendor (e.g., Polis) would know is the validity of the token.
I'm sure others have thought about it more ...
The problem is that lots of sites need/want email address. So would need system for anonymous email, and that would either need real email to forward, or way to read email.
I'm assuming it's equivalent to lobste.rs implementation: https://lobste.rs/about#invitations
The cost of this is adding a ton of friction to joining.
what's interesting about polis's approach is that it surfaces agreement clusters instead of amplifying disagreement. most comment systems optimize for engagement, which in practice means conflict. if you optimize for "where do people actually agree despite appearing to disagree" you get a completely different dynamic.
the invite-tree idea someone mentioned below is interesting for the same reason: it's not just that it keeps bots out, it's that it creates social accountability. you're more thoughtful when your reputation is linked to the people you invited. same principle as why small communities tend to self-moderate better than large ones.
Edit: Why is parent comment flagged/dead? Doesn’t seem that controversial?
But it should be treated as a relatively safe ID, it's even used for voting. If you feel uncomfortable, just have one device for eID, and one for everything else.
I think it's a great tool if we want to implement some sort of liquid democracy feature.
Technology must assist local, bottom-up governance, rather than being supplanted.
You have a point but I am not sure it is the one you intended.
This is how representative democracy is meant to work... you work/talk with your local representatives who work as part of a larger body on your behalf. Part of the problem in the US is we stopped growing the House of Representatives, which should be about 4-5x the size that it currently is, so you have much closer local representatives.
We've lost our sense of culture, purpose, pride and nationality with each generation. And while a lot of it may have been mostly propaganda, there's something to be said for civic cohesion.
- Not having just upvote or downvote, but upvote as funny or insightful (slashdot)
- Not allowing to vote or comment until some karma has been reached (new accounts inflame topics and disappear later, having influenced).
- Invite only so one can block while chain of accounts.
- Not allowing to vote or comment every day or every hour, but randomly (more difficult for bots)
- Automatically downvoting posts with grammatical or low-effort errors.
- Having a way to allow replies only from the account you are answering to (so that bots do not switch places while moving the topic).
- Post history public (on reddit it can be made private, so a bot is posting hate in many communities and one cannot cross-check)
- Some sort of graph of statistics of accounts that comment together.
- Paying a small amount as friction for bots (linked to card, etc.)
I guess with AI there would be even more. These are some from the top of my head.
So allow only LLM generated posts?
If someone cannot be bothered, why should we bother to read what they have to say? I think it is a good signal.
EDIT: plus it is not an allow or not allow. The more errors the more downvoted, so it is a small adjustment.
I think an llm approach could be good. You make suggestions in however insane language and it converts the format to something boring and mundane accepted by all clients.
Some people are to brief, some elaborate more than necessary.
Says who? Having good grammar is a signal that the person cares enough. I am surprised more forums do not use this signal.
It also had me completely convinced that one should only listen to what is said rather than how.
So, (lol) with me you score extra points if you properly em dash but not the kind of points one would want.
I'm just using this as a specific example. Not saying that there aren't hateful sentiments or people behind comments or positions... only that depending on how such policies are interpreted you can't even debate sensitive issues.
It's such an unpopular idea for so many different reasons that this has managed to unify some very different groups of people in opposition: feminists, conservatives, disaffected liberals, and many others.