Crypto Sapiens - Mini Series: Web3 ID | Proof of personhood, & sybil resistance - BrightID - Philip & Adam, Gitcoin - Disruption Joe
Primer: How do you tell if someone is who they say they are? What are decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials? Find out more in this Crypto Sapiens Web3 ID Mini Series where host Humpty Calderon interviews Philip and Adam from BrightID and Disruption Joe from Gitcoin.
Background
Philip
Involved with BrightID since 2018
Adam
Founder of BrightID
Got into the field because he saw it as a major roadblock for universal basic income
Started out with a grant from Aragon
Disruption Joe
Working with Gitcoin right now
Running the fraud detection & defense workstream
Uses BrightID and multiple other systems to determine whether the voter is a unique person
Increasing Interest In Self-Sovereign Identities (SSIs)/Reputation Space
Disruption Joe
More DAOs are asking about people’s reputation
Sharing of info should be through mutual consent
It should be attestable or credentialed (e.g. showing the bouncer you are 21, but not your address, favourite color, etc.)
Understanding reputation could allow DAOs to better allocate resources within the community
Adam
Web3 is a reaction to Web2 and its failures
Web2 identity solutions like OAuth and OpenID have been co-opted by big tech
People are becoming more privacy aware
“We're fighting back. We're saying with Web3, this time, we're going to take it [our data] where we want. And if you want our data, it's on our terms, and you're going to pay us for it.”
- Adam Stallard
What Are Verifiable Credentials (VCs)?
Philip
People can have a whole bunch of verifiable credentials
They only need to provide a specific one to prove something to the recipient (e.g. their age when they buy alcohol)
Doesn’t think that verifiable credentials solve the uniqueness problem as there’s no entity on earth that can say that an account is unique
When someone eventually solves uniqueness, it could be issued as a verifiable credential
Disco
A new project that’s tackling problems in the identity space
Their approach is to use Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and VCs to facilitate data portability in a privacy preserving way
Their VCs are kept off-chain, have lower costs, and are highly scalable
Users can choose to store their VCs in Disco’s web app
Unable to prove uniqueness without having one unified dataset/registry that everyone uses
In the future, it is most likely to have different credentials from school, work, DAOs, etc. Taken together, they create a higher assurance of uniqueness and personhood
BrightID’s Perspective On SSIs
Have been following the W3C working groups on VCs
Exploring how other VCs could be integrated into BrightID
Developing Aura, a toolbox for Sybil hunters to verify people and analyze the network on a deeper level
Implementation Of Sybil-Resistant Tech Across The Gitcoin Ecosystem
Looks at each grant as being a small public community with its own little governance
The Grants 2.0 protocol would be able to mitigate sybil attacks in multiple ways
E.g. simple dollar tax would make sybil attackers play into the positive game theory by contributing to the fund
If they issue a VC protocol, the graph of grants donations will give a much different profile between sybil and non-sybil users
Proof Of Personhood Passport
Kevin, the founder of Gitcoin, had built a quick and crude version to show what it will look like
Users could just use a few lines of code to integrate it into their website
The aggregations are done through the Gitcoin platform
In the process of making it more decentralized
Right now, people can sign up and connect their brand, image, etc. to get a trust bonus score
How Can People Get Involved With BrightID?
Go to meet.brightid.org to join a connection party
You will make your first BrightID connections and learn how it works
Will have an upcoming feature that will anonymously allow you to find people that you know
Uses social recovery to recover your identity if you lose it
If you are an expert sybil hunter, check out Aura
Working on a gas faucet for lower price chains like Gnosis chain
How Can People Get Involved With Gitcoin?
Check out Gitcoin DAO. There’s plenty of ways to get involved
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