The Silent Strings of Proof of Personhood

ETHBerlin04 May 24-26, 2024, CIC Innovation Campus Keynote: Puja Ohlhaver, Mikhail Nikulin - The Silent Strings of Proof of Personhood

Experiments in Proof of Personhood—where each person has a single, unique identity—have increasingly been touted as a mechanism for tracing information provenance, distributing Universal Basic Income, and facilitating democratic governance over systems of artificial intelligence.

This talk chronicles Idena's experiment in Proof of Personhood from launch in August 2019 to a crisis in May 2022. We show how despite verifying humans, hidden pools rapidly emerged—some cooperative, but most controlled by “puppeteers” who, at best, remunerated participants for periodically proving their uniqueness in exchange for access to their secret keys and controlling their accounts. Instead of fostering an egalitarian network of unique identities, the protocol fractured into hidden subnetworks vying for control over an economic pie with economies of scale trending towards oligopoly, undermining the protocol's security and ambitions for democratic governance (one-person, one-vote) and UBI rewards (one-person, one reward). By giving humans economic incentives to periodically differentiate themselves from bots, the protocol gave more informed, resourceful humans financial incentives to puppeteer less informed humans like bots.

ETHBerlin04 - https://ethberlin.org A Department of Decentralization event - https://dod.ngo