The Humanetics Workshop, Internet of Humans, Meeting #2: Politics & Economics

welcome dani um we're all just taking a couple minutes to like dislike or pass statements on police you can see the link on the chat welcome andrew we're just taking a couple minutes to like dislike or pass comments on police hey everyone hello hello warren we're just taking a couple minutes to like dislike or pass statements on polis you can see the link here on the chat i found i was answering him too fast okay um let's wait for two more one more minute okay everyone i'll invite you back to the room and if you haven't finished that's fine uh for next week let's try to make sure that we that we do that in advance of the workshop um and now i'll just give a quick overview of how this conversation went and what police is so polis is a tool that helps facilitate conversations at scale and basically what it does is that it groups people into different opinion bubbles so here in our group we can see that we have two opinion bubbles group a with 16 participants and group b with seven participants let me just sorry i will actually refresh this to make sure that we really have the latest latest result um and then and this tool is actually used uh has been used by millions of citizens in taiwan and it's super effective at fighting polarization and helping people find consensus so let's see what we got for our group one second my report is loading okay while we're waiting cool public service announcement i just updated my zoom and it now lets you rearrange where everybody's video on your screen is so when you get that update you get a little hand and you can rearrange super cool can you see the report here now you can see it right yes yep all right so we have two opinion groups in our here in in our in here uh group a with 17 participants group b with 13 participants so let's see what group a and group b have agreed and disagreed on uh group a has agreed that institutions are society's best stab at date at wrangling with complexity they are not perfect but nor is anything we can come up with both new and old institutions are necessary for a legitimate and inclusive system close integration with ins with existing legitimate institutions is crucial so we get the idea group b is saying do not rely on existing institutions we shall render obsolete legacy institutions by providing greater legitimacy with proof of personhood proof of personhood could eventually supplant traditional institutions because traditional institutions identities are not internet native so now let's look at uh where we have consensus or or divisiveness so here in this bar we have dots and the dots on the right uh show the most divisive statements the ones on the right on the left on the on the left show the consensus statement so we can see that we have a lot more consensus than the disagreements most divisive statement is existing institutions should use proof of personhood protocols but not the other way around do not rely on existing institutions we should avoid existing institutions as much as possible i think that's to be expected and we probably have a lot of people over here who are probably living under uh governments who are not very respectful of democratic rights and and human rights so i think this is a result that was to be expected and then let's see what we agree on so existing institutions could use proof of personhood networks for direct direct cash transfers during disaster relief proof of personhood networks will influence existing institutions by showcasing catching up cutting edge governance and economic systems we need to better understand the adversaries to proof of personhood and what are the motivations and methods to attack proof of personhood advocate for privacy preserving approaches for civic engagement educate officials about zero knowledge methods and work in partnership all right so i'm sure there are many other fascinating comments here um i will share with you the report this was just a quick intro sorry one second um i think santi needs the the zomling can someone send that to him please okay cool um and now let's just talk about what we have for today we're having two talks by professor margaret levi and vitalik buttering and then we're just going to have an open discussion where you can ask them questions and we can debate some of the ideas that they will be presenting so before we jump into this discussion i just want to make a quick reminder that we have extraordinarily accomplished people in this room but please let's just be aware that we're all just people and we're here to talk about something that is extremely experimental and that involves a lot of uncertainty so hopefully this won't be so much of a competition of who has the most clever ideas but it can be more of a conversation where we are hearing each other and and learning together so if you are someone who usually speaks up more i will actually ask you to allow others to contribute and if you're someone who usually identify with listening more i will ask you to speak up today and um and hopefully we can just keep a spirit of intellectual humility as we go into this conversation and now i will move on to introduce our first speaker for today one of the reasons why i decided to invite dr margaret levi to be here with us is that proof of personhood networks usually are they they are these incredibly powerful protocols that enable new forms of political and economic coordination but usually most of the people who are involved in these types of conversations are technologists and we don't have a lot of opportunities to have cross-disciplinary discussions and collaborations so this was one of my motivations behind inviting dr margaret levi to be here with us today she will be speaking to us about some of the latest developments in the field of economics and the emerging science of self-governance we're extremely lucky to have her she needs no introduction but i'll make a very short one just as a formality professor margaret levi is the director of the center for advanced studies in the behavioral sciences and professor of political science at stanford university she's the recipient of the 2019 johan skytee prize which is known as the political science equivalent of the nobel and she has among many other things served as president of the american political science association dr margaret levi thank you so much for being with us today and i'll turn it over to you thank you and i start humbly here because my as i told paula my knowledge of ethereum blockchain all of those technologies is at the most rudimentary i have some knowledge but not a lot i also in doing that little survey um discovered something i suspected which is that the ways in which we define terms are quite different sometimes and so my understanding of some of those questions may not have been the same as yours since paula was talking about it i don't think of institutions in the same way as many of you do so i think of them as certain kinds of arrangements of rules and regulations and norms that structure our behavior and they may or may not be big governments so um they can be all kinds of things so that i will just i mean just to clarify that part of what i'm saying will probably be indecipherable to you just as part of what you were saying was indecipherable to me and that's part of why i think i'm here is to help bridge that gap so paula asked me to talk about um a book that i recently uh published with federica carrigotti who's at king's college in london called a new moral or a moral political economy past present and future and that book comes out of a project that we're doing at the center for advanced study in behavioral sciences um infelicitously known as casbus and it comes out of the same impulse i think that is inspiring many of you we're recognizing that both capitalism and democracy as they currently exist are extremely frayed and are looking for alternative ways to structure the future and new kinds of institutional arrangements to do that and our role really is academics is to help us think about that how do we think about what constitutes a new political economic framework all politically economic frameworks throughout history have had a morality in them but obviously we want one that reflects values that are held by many of us in this room today and thinking about that problem ultimately makes us rethink markets and how to structure them and to think about technology as a crucial piece of what that future looks like so that's part of why i'm here to learn okay so we start with a theory of change which is starts with the demonstrated failure of the status quo but also involves creating new ideas new ways of thinking about the problem and a narrative that provides a vision of and a pathway to a better alternatives that refines the the issues in a way that overcomes pre-existing mental models and core beliefs and introduces an alternative perspective and suite of choices so one of the key arguments in the book is that what we have is not natural it is changeable there have been lots of political economic frameworks over time but that we get caught in a certain way of perceiving things i think that's uh part of what vitalik might mean by legitimacy a set of ideas about what is right and appropriate and natural and we want to change that and we want ideas also you know we're practical so we want ideas that appeal to those with actual power in the system to actually affect change that can be mobilized publics as well as governments but we need to get to people's mental models to think that they can act on it and then produce some change so mobilization is ultimately where we want to go our process is to recognize that our role in change is primarily in the realm of ideas that builds on the best work in social science and hopefully technology and to establish a network of scholars we have over and thinkers we have over 100 people involved in the network and it's not exactly if those of you who know about the montpellier in society which gave birth to neoliberalism but it's akin to that with a hope that um the ideas will emerge from this network even though we're focused on trying to produce them you never know where the great ideas will come from and we want to create the the the possibility for those to emerge anywhere and then to disseminate those ideas and that's part of what this little book is about so there's certain themes that go throughout the our argument the first one is relational equality and i think that really comes into play in thinking about proof of personhood in ways that are sort of recognized and could be better recognized and this is a term that's closely associated with philosophers and political theorists one of whom danielle allen has been involved with radical exchange so relational equality is an important argument that we're emphasizing and that's a state of affairs in which people treat each other with respect listen to each other and tolerate no domination of one by another the achievement of relational equality requires that all have adequate resources so that they can develop capabilities but also avoid the dependencies that produce unequal power relations and influence and i think that really relates to the idea of proof of personhood it also requires connectedness and all kinds of social interactions and this leads to an effort on our part not so much on yours to develop a measure of flourishing and to move away from gdp as the metric for a well-functioning economy which as we know gdp hides all kinds of inequalities economic and political and social the second big concept is an inclusive and expanded community of fate f-a-t-e fate destiny in which people recognize and act on their shared destinies i developed this concept in a book with john alquist it called in the interest of others in which we looked at some unions some of which had developed this expanded inclusive community of faith some of which had not and the the bottom line was it was institutions in the sense in which we mean institutions that did the work it was the governance arrangements the kinds of norms that developed within the community the participatory arrangements that led members to engage in costly actions on behalf of distant others who could never reciprocate so these were unions whose who were set up to really act on narrow economic interests but were able in fact to encourage their members and and evoke from the membership a willingness to act in the interest of far distant others what was uh so the creation of an inclusive and an expanded community fake really depends on institutional arrangements that enable people not only to resist domination but to develop their own bases of power and to engage in reciprocal and pro-social behavior and we consider ways in which that idea can be scaled i won't go into them here our three building blocks for the new uh political economy really involves a multi-disciplinary enterprise our emphasis is on political economics not just economics and it's really political and social economics and not just thinking about homo economicus the narrow self-interested being but really recognizing that humans are social beings so we rely on psychology and cognitive science to clarify those alternatives and build arguments on these better premises which means thinking about social infrastructure and institutions and interactions and not just individualized agents and that all leads to thinking about institutional redesign which is of course what you all are worried about institutions in our view have to be trustworthy and legitimate so those are two concepts which get used a lot and i'm going to try i'm going to define them the way i define them which isn't exactly the way all of you necessarily define them so to be trustworthy means that people have confidence that the government or organizational leadership and other uh members others involved are upholding their side of the implicit social contract through promise keeping which reflects both commitments to keep those promises but also the capacity to actually fulfill the promises that are made so throughout we're really emphasizing capabilities and the development of capacities and that's crucial to relational equality it's crucial to an expanded community of fate and it's crucial to trustworthiness trustworthiness of institutions and participants also means fairness of the process given the norms of the place and time so we've seen that change over over eons and finally evidence that free riders and corrupt agents will be detected and punished so that's what constitutes the trustworthiness of a set of relationships legitimacy rests on more than effective governance it requires popularly acceptable justifications for who holds the reigns of power who the leadership is and for the policies promoted this includes we hope in the future the prop promotion of relational equality and here i'm really making a somewhat different argument um than the then vitalik's on legitimacy though it's related he's addressing what we generally call social conventions or norms in coordination games so my notion of legitimacy the notion we're using is one that is about a belief in what is right and moral in governance context and and often for collective action problems which have a different process and a different uh problem than coordination games so we want to expand this to collective action problems not just coordination games and so it's more than a social convention which plays an important role in all kinds of things so i really love that piece the vitalik wrote but i'm really thinking about political legitimacy and collective action problems not just coordination games okay so trustworthiness and legitimacy both rest on perceptions that vary among the population so who is considered legitimate who is considered or what is considered trustworthy or legitimate really depends on those who must credit that trustworthiness or legitimacy to a particular set of agents or actors and that can vary immensely among the population as we're seeing with the vaccine hesitancy and resistance movement and it reflects histories context and information sources and i would argue information is probably the least important part of it because even though we give people facts that doesn't necessarily change their mind so we have to go deeper than that into the context in which people leave live and how they form their beliefs so okay institutions that have to be trustworthy and legitimate but they also have to promote and sustain relational inequality and this means that cooperation and self-governments work best when institutional arrangements allow members to collectively articulate and amend their governing rules and define and enforce them and it means the capabilities have to be provided i wrote a piece in a book that brian ford is also in uh with john celie brown and david lee that emphasized using expertise but disseminating that expertise not just having it held by the technologists who know how to do it um and permit and not permitting a hierarchy of that expertise and again i think that relates to proof of personhood so institutions have to be participatory they have to respect others um [Music] and require that respect and reward that respect and i'm going to give a concrete example which is really a thought experiment and is elaborated in the book and is really fed rica so i will do a bad job of explaining it but i'll do what i can which is the council of algorithms federica my co-author is actually an historian or a political theorist of ancient greece so this is really based on how the greeks did it in a very participatory way but this is a deliberative body in charge of decision making where very simple organizational rules facilitated broad for participation knowledge aggregation and citizen learning so there'll be a few principles for this algorithmic council for governing algorithms a participatory space for deliberation and debate to articulate the rules and establish enforcement mechanisms as a permanent institution it enables the type of institutional learning that is critical to amend mending the rules as circumstances norms and preferences change its members are randomly selected and in charge of decisions for a limited time preventing the accumulation of power and fostering relational equality by design the counselors are asked to embody the interest of the community that goes well beyond the given group of decision makers as their judgments will affect just in others sometimes even in distinct countries maybe this is where the i where vitalik's idea of legitimacy and ours come overlap and of course by their very participation at the root of the decision-making process the counselors have a chance to shape the decision-making process in ways that can help check the influence of powerful interests so underlying this whole schema of a new moral political economy is an understanding of power and how to regulate it an understanding of participation and spreading that power out in a variety of ways and an understanding of the importance of inhibiting hierarchies and promoting relational equality i'll stop there wonderful thank you so much professor margaret we i'm sure we all have many questions but now we'll move on to vitalik's presentation and then we'll just have some time for for a debate i will now introduce vitalik who also like margaret does not need any introduction he's the creator of ethereum and he's one of the pioneers in the field of proof of personhood he's also the creator or co-creator of quadratic funding which is one of the ideas that has also really brought a lot of interest uh to and and utility to proof of personal networks italic i'll hand it over to you okay great thank you so much um so what i wanted to uh talk about today is a topic that's kind of adjacent to and i think irrelevant to of personhood project um and this is uh coming from my perspective uh kind of seeing how governance uh works and particularly in crypto communities and various different kind of aspects of the ethereum community and just seeing like what i think is one of the biggest fundamental problems that these communities are facing which is basically the problem of kind of how to measure who is a member and who is not a member uh and even going beyond the binary and even thinking like to what extent is uh someone is someone a member and kind of why this matters uh and going through and if in what cases their proof of personhood may actually turn out to be useful um so um the first kind of big question is who should participate in governance of public infrastructure in a community and i think this question is harder um and i think you know people thinking about uh governance in in a lot of ways what can kind of put themselves uh on hard mode just by thinking about internet communities um the reason is that in internet communities there's just um so much more gradation and of uh and so much less kind of existing thought about um how to formalize the concept of who is a member who should be participating who should not be participating and we've even seen some incidents in the the history of a lot of these uh networks where this question of who should be participating and who should not be participating actually does uh turn out to be quite important right so one example of this was back when uh the dao um fork was happening this was this uh controversial hard fork that the ethereum protocol was doing back in 2016. there are a lot of people in favor of this protocol change and uh there were a lot of people against uh that protocol change and it again the public discussion ended up getting very heated uh and uh one of the accusations that was sometimes made is um that people the p by the people who were in favor of the hard fork is that the people against it were actually people coming in from the bitcoin community either trying to impose their bitcoin uh community values on a an ecosystem where people have a somewhat different values or just be uh basically people without any alignments with the ethereum community are trying to cause trouble and when bitcoin itself um had their own block size war between small blocks and big blocks um of course there were accusations thrown in the other direction basically saying that proponents of the big block side were actually coming in from other cryptocurrency communities trying to split apart or break or cause damage to the bitcoin ecosystem and so like i i personally think that in both cases um those arguments actually ended up being overrated i think in general people tends to uh be too quick to blame things on foreigners and uh tends to not appreciate enough the extents to which um actual divergence of opinion exists even in their own communities but even still like that there was this interesting facts that it was difficult to know for sure right the reason why it was difficult to know for sure is that all people all that people had is these reddit accounts and with a reddit account so like no one knows if uh you know you participated in the ethereum community a little bit or you participated in a lot or you're just one of 200 bots that's run by the same person that's just like trying to manipulate the results of a discussion in their preferred direction and so this question of like well who should participate anyway right like if we wants to have us this concept of like well here these people are i don't even know quote real big when people are real ethereum people and these people are you know quote coming in from another community like you know what does that even mean how do you even uh how do you even define that right and so there is this concept of membership of a community right so members in a community um there is a general idea that they should be participating in governance or that they should have more say in governance in that community than non-members do and then also outside experts can participate in governance right and this happens all the time companies hire consultants uh governments have uh foreign advisors all the time um you know the ethereum community is sometimes or in various organizations that temporarily hire cryptographers there's always a need for experts and including experts that are not also persistent members of the community though of course if an expert participates enough they can also become a member um so one of the ways at kind of thinking through this right is that members of a community tends to be um good at deciding what goal what the ends are and of what the goals are that some mechanism is trying to achieve but they're not necessarily good at deciding means right like just uh random people in the community especially if it's a widely distributed democratic vote negligent they don't necessarily have all the correct ideas about like what are the best strategies to use to achieve some objective and sometimes um as far as strategies go like you actually want to have room for strategies that some small group of people are very confident um work correctly um and where they only get proven right after the fact and uh they sometimes need some kind some kind of room to actually develop those strategies until they get proven right um outside experts could be good at deciding the means given specific ends um if they're held accountable right so to me being held accountable basically means that they have some kind of reward could be financial could be psychological could be social um could be all three um if the community if their decisions lead to good outcomes and they get some kind of uh penalty if their actions lead to bad outcomes um now means and ends are often hard to separate and so sometimes like you even want people who are in both groups at the same time um so last week i published this uh post with optimism people on retroactive public goods funding and the core idea here is to basically try to it's essentially a decentralized price fund for where prices are given for things um or projects that provide value to some community where the prices are given retroactively um so after the project has already achieved some good outcome and uh the the way that projects are get funding before uh they actually can actually finish is projects can issue tokens um anyone on the outside um hopefully people who know what's going on can buy these projects tokens to bet on what will achieve their desired goals and if they guess correctly then they're then the project token gets it gets a retroactive price uh and if they don't bet correctly then the project token does not get a retroactive price and uh they ended up losing their money so and then the retroactive rewards are decided through some democratic mechanism which could be quadratic funding or quadratic voting it could be it could be simple voting it could be something else right so this is basically kind of combining prediction market like logic and that's trying to target kind of goals and doesn't really care who participates and this kind of democratic governance at the end that is actually trying to kind of implement the community's idea of what goals it's going toward so who is a member of a community right this this question is important right like you know you want um ethereum like we have this intuitive notion in our heads that it's better for ethereum people to have more say over ethereum protocol decisions and bitcoin people to have more say over bitcoin protocol decisions then vice versa or then both groups having an equal say in both um and often membership is non-binary so there's this concept of to what extent someone is a member of a community uh so for example i'm a member of the ethereum community of lots of people here members of the ethereum community um lots of people i interact with on reddit um or that are members of the ethereum community um just people who randomly recognize me on the streets are members of the ethereum community but different people are members of the ethereum community to a different degree right and we have existing attempts to formalize membership and we have existing attempts to formalize membership and degree of membership of different kinds right so for example their citizenship in a country citizenship is binary either you're a member or you're not there is um having an account so for example having an account in a forum or having an account on reddit that's binary and that's a low threshold um karma like points on internet forum um that's linear so you can have accounts with no karma accounts with low karma accounts with high karma often internet forums even explicitly give like extra uh privileges that go up the the higher the tier you get into um coins and shares in companies um big btc if governance tokens um also a concept of membership that reflects how much money you have invested in some project or ecosystem and also a concept of membership um one of the ways in which you can compare these is you can put them on a graph between like basically level of commitments what level of effort you put into a community and level of recognition meaning like what level of power the system um assigns you as a result and that could be formal governance power or it could just be some some kind of informal wrecking or formal recognition um in some kind of in in discussion forums that that informally leads to power so forum accounts are this yellow line low threshold low recognition citizenship higher threshold high recognition um coins are just a line you can have a few you can have more you can have even more uh karma on forums you can have a little you can have more you can have even more um but each one of these is one is has its flaws right so citizenship for example it can be exclusionary it can be elitist um also if we go beyond countries and we start talking about internet communities then it it becomes harder to make a credibly neutral uh criterion for who is a citizen right um like with a country you can say oh if you get into a country and you spend 10 years living there you can be a citizen and that seems like a formal rule that people can agree on it seems reasonable and it seems to give good results but in an internet community it's harder to do this right um having an account um is um another concept of membership um it's vulnerable to brigading so people from one community that wants to um influence another community they just like quickly create accounts or they use their existing um existing accounts if they're reddit accounts and they just kind of pop over and say things um karma on internet forums only captures some types of contributions it's also gameable um you can buy accounts uh you can pay for upvotes you can do lots of things coins also only capture some types of contributions they capture contributions they get financial rewards they often do not capture contributions to public goods or even contributions to things that cannot be easily financially rewarded uh and um also gameable um coins are also vulnerable um they pull over some types of contributions over others uh coins do not do a good job of selecting for local expertise uh so for example if you have um karma on an internet forum that actually usually means that you spend a lot of time and effort putting yourself into that particular community and as a byproduct you know what you're talking about within the context of that community coins it does mean you made a commitment if you but throw a million dollars into um you know bitcoin then you really like bitcoin uh but throwing a million dollars into bitcoin is not proof that you know a lot about bitcoin um and also it's vulnerable to financialization so it's vulnerable to these financial things where potentially once a financial system gets advanced enough it basically starts separating out the governance power in a token from the economic interest in the token and you can make this kind of gadget where you basically create a rapper and people put the token into the wrapper and then they get this wrapped thing that represents the economic interest but then the governance power goes to someone else and the governance power goes to the highest bidder and this ends up favoring uh concentrated interests a lot um so my personal conclusion is that it's all of these are imperfect and until we have things that are better and probably even when we have things that are better like i think uh a pluralist approach like you any kind of community uh crypt especially crypto and internet communities but i think uh communities that are kind of rooted in things in offline space also need to think about this but it's important to combine together multiple concepts of membership um so let's talk about having an account right um so one of the four things that i have here is as a concept of membership they're just having an account right just a simple account and the goal is that you want something limited to one per person so that the curve actually looks like this and you can't just keep on you know creating lot more and more accounts um and the goal is right that you know we wants to combine together multiple of these concepts of membership and concepts of membership they're not the same thing as proof of personhood right proof of personhood is like very universalist it just says hey if you're a human then you get one uh concepts to membership are not that you have to actually work and put effort into a community to get membership at least if your concept of a membership works well but um what i want to argue is that proofs of personhood are valuable even within these other constructions so first of all just having an account itself is uh useful right it's a useful to have something that's low threshold where you still need a bit of effort but that effort is only just the effort of caring enough to participate like that could be games but that still delivers good results a lot of the time um so that and it's very egalitarian it's very inclusive it's very easy to participate it does require some form of proof of personhood to be secure um so there are already um proofs of personhood that are insecure right so reddit twitter github most people only have one and if you're lazy then even if you want to screw around and do it with some community and uh and like participate in some way that's not aligned with them with their interests then like most people they would still be like they would probably be too lazy to figure out how to get 100 accounts but it is possible to get 100 accounts it's possible to buy all these accounts as possible to buy thousands of them but even still often they work well enough right so a lot of discussions in the ethereum community for example depends on github accounts um there's a lot there's kind of implicit polling that happens for a lot of uh uh eips ethereum improvement proposals where basically people there is someone makes a github pull request that includes a proposal and people just do a thumbs up or do a thumbs down and people actually take that those thumbs ups and downs down seriously as an indication of community sentiment um so that uses proof of proof of personhood but it's not very secure and also it doesn't attempt to distinguish kind of to what extent you're actually a strong ethereum contributor now a more secure proof of personhood would solve one of those problems right a more secure proof of personhood would make it more difficult to actually brigade that kind of system and come in with uh and give yourself a thousand accounts um now coins with sublinearity so this is interesting right so um this is where some of the ideas that i am and uh glenn and others have been working on with quadratic voting and quadratic funding come in um basically yeah these are governance mechanisms that do use coins right and they basically say that you have to actually pay to uh participate in some decision and the purpose of paying to participate in some decision this time it's not like paying as membership directly or it's not holding coins as membership it's paying as a signal that you care about that decision now paying as a signal that you care about a decision if you just do it linearly so if you say if you pay a hundred dollars you have a hundred times the impact of someone who pays one dollar then it ends up favoring concentrated interest and wealthy people are kind of way too much but it turns out that there's a bunch of mathematical reasons why if instead of taking the amount of money that someone pays you take the square root of that amount then you get something that actually does do a fairly decent job of balancing between being democratic and actually taking into account the fact that people have different strengths of preferences and strength of preference can indirectly measure strength of community membership because if you're a more heavily involved member of a community then you are likely to be more willing to actually like sacrifice more in order to influence some decision right so it's a different kind of uh membership of measurement of um uh membership but it still is that in some ways um so quadratic voting does this quadratic funding does this but the problem is well if you have a square root formula then well the square root of 100 is ten the square root of one is one and so if you have a hundred dollars then you make a hundred fake accounts and with each of your 100 fake accounts you uh send in one dollar and you get 100 votes instead of 10 votes and proof of personhood prevents um this kind of splitting attack which is nice um proofs of participation um so this is uh getting into other kinds of uh like attempts to measure membership that actually yeah like that do try to provide different levels of gradation but with um within like one system right so the goal is to define membership in a community through proofs of having completed some activity um so karma is one example of this um participation at events uh so in ethereum there's this pope uh protocol the proof of attendance protocol where these a lot of events issue pope tokens and you can get a pope token if you participate at an event um so these are good um and uh like of lots of events issue poke tokens and if you have lots of folk tokens then that shows that you atta attended watson events um and another example of this um this is something that bolognes renovation really likes is uh proofs of learning right so you can learn uh something through some kind of online course and you can complete an exercise and you can prove that you know you completed an exercise and got the results correctly so you can say it's a special case of a proof of attendance protocol now proof of personhood can help proofs of participation right um so there is a two reasons for this one of them is this kind of sublinearity argument issue right like basically if your proof of participation is one where it's easy to get a little or a little bit but it's much harder to get more so like for example you need to participate 20 times longer to get 10 times more governance power then you still have an incentive to create split personalities and like basically yeah if you have 20 units of time instead of spending them on one identity you spend the 120 different identities and you get 20 units of governance governance power instead of 10. proof of personhood can make it more difficult to create these display personalities um also for online events uh you do not want it to be possible to like just show up at an online event with 20 virtual avatars and get 20 proof of attendance uh tokens instead of one right and so uh having a proof of personhood be a precondition for getting a pope token if you participate at an event like that that also um improves this improved security there uh so like these are just a bunch of uh ways in which uh to solve this problem of like who actually should participate in governance and uh to what extent um we we do needs to like first we definitely have to look beyond uh coins and we definitely have to look beyond just very simple naive one per person things that have some fixed threshold um and there's a lot of different ideas for this but even for those uh ideas uh proof of uh personhood is just very useful as an ingredient in a lot of them so where do we go from here right i think uh there's a a few things that we can do like one is to make proof of personhood better um two is to actually integrate proof of personhood into these other proof of x mechanisms so like actually make a pope that's dependent on having a proof of personhood of some kind um and um actually make uh quadratic funding depend on proofs of personhood that's been happening bitcoin grants have been uh improving their civil protection for for some time now and just improve community discussion and governance in general right like the ultimate goal of all these things is to have a better governance and having better governance is not just about having governance right um a lot of the time the the governance itself is only the last step and uh discussion is uh something that's also very important right but even in a discussion um proof of personhood also can be important now not always right because uh sometimes like an a good argument is a good argument regardless of who made it but if someone is making a claim about like what their own values are um or if someone's have making an appeal to up like it's like personal experiences within some community then like you want to know whether or not that person actually is either a a new member of that community or a very uh long time member of a community or a very highly contributing full-time member of that community or someone else like that's important decision important uh information to have in that step as well um but uh in there's a lot of things that can be improved in addition to like figuring out these membership and you in and these are proof of personhood questions as well so that's what i have wonderful thank you so much vitalik um i definitely want to hear your thoughts on some of uh professor margaret levi's uh comments on this distinction between legitimacy in terms of coordination and legitimacy in terms of collective action um yes before we get into that sure sorry uh i just want i i want to get back to to this to the overall theme of our workshop and hear from you if you have any thoughts to share with us on what could possibly be some of the implications of proof of personhood networks for the current institutions that we have and um how could they improve existing problems that maybe are difficult to address within the institutional frameworks that that we have today sure um so i think second question first um i think uh one important thing to remember is that in 2021 like the concept of existing institutions realistically does involve internet communities um now you can argue that like that crypto communities are still too niche to be considered um you know a part of the any kind of establishment but there's many kinds of internet communities um whose outcomes uh do end up mattering a lot right like on uh the discussions also on social media become a very relevance for policy for example and uh social media like they has this uh like all social media platforms have this hard trade-off between like basically yeah being exclusive um and uh being being vulnerable to like brigading and so and civil attacks and similar things and uh proof of personhood could be potentially part of a solution to um provide a best of both worlds um in a way that's very inclusive to a lot of people anywhere um and there's plenty of other internet institutions as well i mean i don't know if like to what extent like wikipedia has um challenges for example but um that's uh like anything in that category that needs some way of just preventing people from creating thousands of accounts as uh something that that could use proof of proof of personhood and i think almost everything on the internet fits into that um going outside of the internet again i think uh there like things become trickier because uh like regardless of what you think of them um some forms of centralized identity do exist already um and so like yeah you don't just have like you're not just or the trade-off that you're making is not proof of personhood versus like anyone being able to spin up fifty thousand bucks to trade office proof of personhood versus um you know passports or phone numbers or whatever else and that's that argument can be made sometimes but it's a harder argument to make um i think uh the the cases where that argument is the strongest are when you have something international um and when you have potentially get some kind of like developing low income country where the formal even the formal infrastructure is uh already missing a lot of people um and i think those two are probably the major ones um another interesting one is um if you're trying to do something where like you both want to ensure that you're talking to or getting information from real people but at the same time those real people wants to uh protects their protects their privacy and including protecting your privacy from whatever institutions are giving them their identity but the challenge there right is um that like that's not that's less a problem of like centralized idea versus decentralized idea that's a problem of uh zero knowledge proofs and zero knowledge groups can be used with both those zero knowledge proofs do uh combine with uh i get uh cryptographic implementations of proof of personhood like you know proofreading had proof of humanity on ethereum pretty naturally um so there there may be a fit there as well um on the first question actually this is what i wanted to ask margaret like what is um an example of uh something that you would call a collective action problem that's not a coordination game like i know they exist but i was just wondering like what you're thinking about well as as you know vitalik the difference between the two is in a coordination problem basically everybody has the same interest i mean the toy example which is a real example is driving on the left side or the right side of the road in a collective action problem they're people who want a free ride and who can still get the collective good even if they free ride if you free ride on driving on the wrong or right side of the street you're gonna end up either killing or being killed um or both and it's a very different kind of outcome so governments deal a lot with collective action problems and that's where coercion and other forms of producing compliance become an incredibly important part of the story um so they're not social conventions um you might try to turn them into coordination games but they it's very hard to do that there are things where people really benefit from not participating and you want to get beyond that you want to find ways to get them to to contribute yeah okay i think uh i think i definitely agree with that i think uh it might even be just a difference of a language more than anything else right like i think uh the way that i think about this as solving a collective action problem usually requires setting up an institution of some kind and that institution does um you know it's uh it works in order for that institution to have teeth people have to break people have to participate in it right and actually getting from what kind of from here to there like i guess that's where i see a lot like that step i see as being a coordination game so even like one getting a lot passed for example like if you do some work then that work can often be wasted uh um unless a lot of other people get that lob uh work with you to get the law passed at the same time um and just uh the process of setting up a government itself um but so i guess i the way that i think of this is that there's ways of converting um or a lot of the ways of solving collective action problems do end up converting them into coordination games first um some but not all maybe in the world of technology and kinds of things you're talking about that's possible but in the world of tough politics that aren't about the internet um that's not always so easy to achieve um we can see that in the world that we're living in right now the social norms and social conventions among different populations are really different and so creating a common social norm a common social convention turning a collective action problem into a convention is not so easy and that's that's the kind of politics that i deal with would you disagree that follow that following and enforcing the lies of social convention i would disagree why like if if because a lot of people don't follow the law okay um well i mean not everybody buys into the north it's really from a philosophical point of view and from a collective somebody christopher asked about collective choice and from the collective choice literature point of view social convention and collect coordination games and collective action games are really different problems and i think norms have a lot lots of people that did that just that don't care about them either um i know and i i i get that there is a big difference like one of them like a with coordination games like once everyone flips over it's stable but with collective action games like you have to create another game to make it stable um [Music] and it's an ongoing iterative often as opposed to um you know with a coordination game once usually once you set the rules everybody goes along you don't need an enforcement mechanism beyond the cost to you of if you violate it um this is a super interesting discussion we have tons of incredible questions so i just want to make space for them everyone please uh raise your hand can i make one other point though about that because the reason i'm emphasizing this is not it's not simply because there is a technical distinction in game theory that's interesting but not so interesting but that we have to really confront a world in which there is a lot of conflict and collective action understands that coordination does not i mean this is this is actually a perfect uh point for us to bring in brian ford's question uh i'll re brian uh can you can you please uh ask it out loud and then everyone can just raise your hands and we'll follow that yeah yeah well so super interesting talks both of you thank you um i wanted to ask both of you actually about you know you both touched a lot on on you know this question of membership and representativeness and uh you know legitimacy um to to can you discuss uh the uh like why communities want to or need to you know distinguish create clearer distinguished distinctions between members and non-members you know okay the in the inside the outside and the trade-off between that and the risk of say gradually becoming more insular more ossified more inward focused you know kind of rewarding the existing members instead of bringing in more members and growing and so one way i like to think of this is you know as a community decision maybe you have to make the choice between serving your existing members and having a governance structure that re that represents your existing members or do you want to are you trying to uh create a structure that represents the potentially much larger membership the population that you don't have as members yet but would like to right so i think that's a brilliant great question brian and i so it made me think about this issue in a slightly different way actually than i've been thinking about it so when i'm talking about an expanded community of fate an inclusive community of fate i think what i'm really talking about um has a lot to do with who you will mobilize on behalf of [Applause] so think about the environmental movement um you know particularly that led by young people um it's really a big community of fate where people don't have membership per se but they recognize that they're part of the same human or human nature community um another kind of community is really what i think vitalik was was describing beautifully is where there's and and where that federico was talking about in the council of algorithms which is really about a community with members in it where you've assigned roles or participation status or rights to vote or power in some way and they're boundaries to it so even in my case of the unions exp in their expanded inclusive community of faith they had both kinds of communities so they had their membership in the organization which had all kinds of boundaries and exclusivities involved in it and various kinds of roles within the organization but they also had this expanded notion of community which extended to others who would never be members of their particular community and i think we really want to play with both levels of that the danger of the membership community you have identified well is that it tends and even of an expanded community of fate it's actually a term that got used by the nazis to talk about an inclusive and a very exclusive community of people so all of those cases we really have to constantly be fighting with and finding the right institutions and the right governance arrangements to inhibit that tendency for people to um really identify in an exclusive and inhibiting way to others yeah i didn't think i agree there is a there is like tough um trade-offs to make um i do think though that like it's not a kind of like 180 degree against each other uh insurmountable trade-off um because well one of the things is um that recognizing the uh existence of uh exist of of existing members and that their voice means more than the voice of someone who has not yet contributed anything does the recognizing that existing facts does not imply um being again um or not um having other processes that try to be maximally inclusive in helping new people join right um so i think you can have both um i do like i do think that ultimate at the end of the day you have to recognize some concept of membership somehow um i mean eleanor ostrom i mean governing the commons like this is even one of her criteria right that you need to have a clear distinction of like what the inside and the outside is um the uh now the question of like can you create a governance mechanism that formally represents i guess uh like your goal of uh in of in helping um other people get included in into that mechanism is interesting um but i guess uh the question to ask that like and it's an amazing goal i really support it um but the the question there is like what mechanism actually represents the interests of those people right um that's hard to do i agree yeah yeah it is hard to do and like how do you distinguish somewhat like the the the will of someone who is uh interested in participating versus like the the will of someone who really is just interested in screwing around and not interested in contributing genuinely i don't know um i mean my answer to this stuff is fairly like experimentalist like let's just try a lot of things and like you can analyze them and see what happens all right i just want to add one thing if i can't paula can i have one thing um i totally agree with that i'm a big fan of the ostrom principles um but i also think that there's another issue that brian's raising that we just can't lose sight of and this really comes from social psychological work i mean some of you are probably familiar with the taj fell experiments and things that have emerged from that or if you just assign somebody vitalik's a blue and paul is a red the next thing you know is we formed exclusive communities of reds and blues who compete with each other rather than cooperate with each other so you know writing into these um notions of community and of governance the recognition that that is a tendency and attention is i think critical and i thought that was part of what brian's question was really getting at yeah um i agree that's a that's a great point margaret i think uh one of the things that i usually stress that where i think part of the goal is avoiding that tendency is this idea that membership is uh a spectrum and not a binary and like you can be a red you can be a lot like very red and a little bit of a blue um yeah or you can be yeah you know medium red and medium blue and like you know you can have all the shades of purple and add a little green as well um and i think uh like real human communities do work that way and we should totally celebrate and explicitly recognize that yeah well i think that what's interesting about proof of personal networks is that precisely we're talking about something that is even uh below or above that which is just you know the other in in terms of proof of personal networks is are the bots or uh attackers to the system but this is not necessarily creating any specific community among legitimate humans um but it's an interesting discussion because of course the way that we go about determining proof of personhood might end up leading to these types of of segregation and communities but i'll let primavera come in now and everyone please feel free uh to to respond to her question if you have any point uh just please keep keep raising your hands yeah so yeah i just wanted to actually follow up on the highest question and kind of like expanding on a slightly different direction uh because i think that uh indeed so you're raising this important question about like how do we um how do we ensure inclusivity and how do we allow more and more people to become member uh to me the problem with that vision while i agree with that i think that's a very important thing to to to think about um but it also somehow lead this focus towards the idea that uh the more voice and the more influence should be given to the people that are the more strong contributors um from the spectrum of of membership and so in some way it means that if i want to have a voice i need to contribute and i need to contribute according to whatever metrics have been established by the community to qualify me as a contributor uh which makes sense but at the same time i think there is another uh gap that uh emerged which is the fact that some people might actually not have the opportunity and maybe not not want to contribute and yet they are inherently affected by the decision that the community will make and so to me it seems that when we are designing this car this type of like protocol uh about how to give influence to people on the one hand it's important to account about how much they have been contributing to the community but at the same time there might be a lot of metrics that also need to be accounted for which is giving the voice depending on the degree to which a particular individual is actually affected and uh and this is like oftentimes the people that are affected by decision are not necessarily members of the community making the decision um and of course this is really hard to you know how do you what how do you magnify how do you quantify the the the impact that a decision has on a person and how do you give voice to this person but to me we cannot expect that everyone that is affected by a decision needs to be a hardcore contributor uh in order to acquire the possibility of voice him or herself right that's uh yeah and i think a good point um i guess there's two ways for me there's two ways of looking at that um one way of looking at it is that like membership in a community this cannot can be not just a function of what effort you put in but also a function of uh to what extent you're affected by a decision um like even just like one even an example of this is um like in in a lot of places like if it's like in local elections for example like if you live in a in some place then you can vote and then you can vote for local politics there and that's not tied to any notion of needing of like contributing to that city that's just like well you live there and so you're affected by the decisions right and and you can base membership on that the other way of looking at it is that sometimes like actions that communities or actions that um infrastructure managed by community stakes i really can have like externalities positive or negative that stretch out across the entire world and like i think ultimately every community does have some degree of responsibility to do what it can to make sure those uh externalities are positive as much as possible and negative as little as possible um and some like it would be ideal to have some um to have some kind of like voice in the governance for that as well but how to actually do that and how it's that also just encourage communities to have that at all like that and those are also hard problems let me add something to that because what we've you've just described primavera is really government everywhere um federal gov national governments local governments as vitalik was saying where in fact we are citizens who are affected but don't necessarily participate there are a lot of us like that and so part of the response to that is i mean if we're talking about membership yes i think people who are affected should be members but in terms of participation one of the big problems here is that people don't have always have the capabilities to participate they don't know they can they don't know how to they don't understand the issues um and this goes back to the relational equality argument i was making which is really about enhancing those capabilities so that more people can who choose to not everyone will choose to be an active member even if something affects them um but those who who would like to be can actually act on that can actually make their membership meaningful so i'll just do a quick question before we go uh towards peter you know this is a a common issue within blockchain networks because of course we have a bit of a rule of the experts who are the people who really understand the technical aspects of these protocols which uh hinders participation from from the public at large so so i'm interested in understanding what is do you think uh the role for these experts to have within these communities do you think that there should be more of an emphasis on on educational uh components should everyone be learning how to code or how can we uh deal with that asymmetry of information within these types of deeply technical communities it's a question for both of you sure so i think i guess uh like i personally definitely um deeply believe in education and in like educating in in ways that's accessible to people from um a wider variety of backgrounds um and one of the things i do is i have my blog and i use and i use that to describe a lot of this like fairly complicated technical and cryptography ideas and like i know that those things are not going to be yet understandable by 100 of the population but like you know 10 is better than 1 and 1 is better than 0.1 percent because uh if uh there is um a proposal that's being made that has problems then like even if it's only a few a few people the more people that can critique um the greater the chance that um something that specific that that deserves to be critiqued actually will be critiqued um in a way that's visible to more people um so that i think education is a big part of uh in just a decentralization to me like one of the things i say and this is that and you have to give like you do need to have a bit of a crypto background to understand the word but uh a cryptographic protocol that only 20 people understand is just another kind of trusted setup um so that's um emma so so that's definitely that's definitely big aside from that i guess uh the other kind of solution is uh like what i call um accountability and like basically engaging experts in ways um that um like when [Music] when you see what results the outcome of their work leads to like that that actually kind of comes back and has like and has consequences to them and like either just to the um just to them as a um as a reward or to or a penalty or to them just as an influence to like what level of participation they'll be able to have in the future margaret do you have any comments in that uh i would just emphasis i mean i think expertise is never going to be spread equally around i mean i'm trying desperately as i said to understand uh blockchain and i may never i it's not not playing to my strengths um but so i but i respect those who have that expertise and can use it in all the productive ways that people here are using it so then the really critical question is what vitalik is calling accountability and i think what he's describing is ways to ensure accountability are one of the mechanisms for doing that but i think there are others that we should also attend to and this is why i sort of had problems answering some of the questions and i'm not of the school that you do away with all existing institutions i think that one of the things that we've learned through the experiment of liberal democracy is that representative government has its place now we're not doing it particularly well but that doesn't mean it can't be improved and through representative government we have mechanisms of accountability of people who can watch the the people who are the technical experts and make sure that they're acting according to the public good or the desired end so i think their accountability is the key in their variety of forms of accountability you know i i agree that like having uh democratic votes is definitely a form of accountability that's worked quite well in a lot of cases all right peter thanks paula uh my question aligns with the active membership and accountability theme raised by primavera with blockchain we are switching from using force to using motivation to make things work because of this i think identity score will basically mean credit score in the long run and so the higher the score the more you can get so the questionings the questions are do you think this is where we go if so uh is there is this is this fine or should we avoid it and more general uh what is the difference between reputation and uniqueness um i think uh like this like this is definitely one of those complicated topics like um you know what actually is like what what are the negative things that people that people are kind of instant are afraid of when they're instinctively afraid of like things like social credit scores or like or like the uh faker credit scores being expanded to everything or and similar kinds of things right i think there are legitimate concerns but like it's uh that are really important but it's uh important to like or if we want to figure out what actually makes sense um at some points like we have to actually have this much deeper public conversation about kind of articulating those downsides beyond just kind of like vaguely pointing pointing a finger at the word dystopia um and and that's something i think that like we as a civilization haven't really haven't really done enough and shouldn't do more um i would say yeah like some obvious disadvantages that come to mind like one is um that just that there's often in those existing kinds of things there's like single centralized actors that um have a lot of influence over that score and they have uh the ability to incorporate um just basically their own prejudices into that score like either their own political opinions or like their own ideas about personal morality that actually don't have anything to do with uh being with the goal of being trustworthy um another cha issue that often comes up is just infringement of privacy um and on two ways right like the like having to provide your score can infringe your privacy and also there is a privacy concern in that like there's uh um like certain types of uh like like people should be able to have conversations uh freely and uh and be able to speak their minds and for that to be possible like you don't want every single word you say to possibly be an input into a magic algorithm um so i think um a lot of those things can be yeah like it i think it is possible to come up with something that resolves those concerns but like this is um one of uh like the output may not necessarily even look like a number right this is one of those things that's important like i think the concept of a credit score as it exists in modern culture is like basically says like hey you know you have a number and every and everyone sees the same number and that's not even necessarily true and one of the reasons why that's not necessarily true is because that different people in different communities in different contexts have different um expectations um and different needs about um what uh what kinds of uh credit or trustworthiness or whatever else some you um they care about like one person might uh you know really care whether or not you're compliant with sharia law another person just wants to know whether or not you uh you're gonna pay your debts the third person might care about something else entirely um and so like one uh one number cannot satisfy everyone um so i think that's an important um a really important just example of a direction to look into um so yeah i don't know what uh the reputation um ecosystems of the future will look like but this is the sort of thing that's uh probably going to like take uh you know dozens of hours or well dozens of years to figure out in dozens of minutes thanks an interesting sorry go ahead peter yeah i just wanted to to note that philip also put it in the chat that non-local non-contextual reputation is evil and this uh goes along with what which alex says one number is evil and totally agree with that with decentralized systems we can make multiple numbers so probably a decentralized credit score is not apple thanks yeah everyone feel free to jump in uh this is not these are not only questions for uh professor margaret and and vitalik we should all be participating um [Music] so ted or professor margaret do you have any response to that no oh hey i had a question for uh professor margaret actually um so you mentioned um unions coming together and for narrow narrow interests and then later um coming to serve sort of the public benefit or strangers at a distance and you mentioned uh this was brought about by the actions of the union the institution and i was curious what sorts of actions you observed leading to a broadening of of a broadening support for um uh you know distant strangers um in the hopes because in the crypto states we have a lot of people coming together for narrow financial interests and so if that can be broadened out that's wonderful so i'm just wondering what the main mechanisms you saw at work there were well the main mechanisms really had to do with the governance arrangements of the union different unions have different they in principle they're all democratic but in fact the rules are very different for different unions so in the long sure unions that these were all uh unions in the transit sector that we were looking at um but the longshore unions that were particularly um that engaged in this uh expanded community of fate behavior were ones whose uh when they were established they set up rules that made sure that the president and the other major elected officials were subject to easy recall and lots of accountability um there was a lot of participatory democracy mechanisms put in the place the votes on things like um [Music] your uh the contracts that were negotiated with the employers were done by each individual not by some representative as in the teamsters organization most important for the purposes of expanding the community of faith there was lots of education and socialization about the rest of the world um within the union and when someone suggested an action um like closing the ports that would be very costly and might even bring the police down um and heads get cracked and people go and go to jail and maybe even die for and certainly lose income um for engaging in that action the way those decisions were made could be the suggestion could be from the bottom or it could be from the top about this was an action to undertake but the process of deciding whether to undertake the action involved debate and deliberation among the members in ways that allowed them to challenge the information so for example um one pensioner from the longshore union in australia told us about how he was at a meeting and he was told that those ships over there in the sydney port were going to indonesia and order and they were dutch ships in order to put down the peasant rebellion there he didn't know anything about the peasant rebellion but he didn't think that was fair and they debated it and made sure that that's really what the ships were doing that there really was a rebellion of the indonesians against the dutch and then they decided not to load the ships and for years they refused to load ships going to with armaments um going to indonesia and it lost the money um it threatened their jobs and yet they did that so it was a set of participatory governance arrangements a process of socialization and a capacity to really debate and challenge the information that was presented whatever the source great that makes a lot of sense thank you just a quick note here uh we have come to the official end of our discussion but everyone is welcome to stay for another half hour so that we can continue this exciting debate i'm afraid i must leave thank you unfortunately so much you have to leave margaret is there do we have your contact info you should it's easy mlevi stanford.edu or my name with a period in between at gmail.com and it's spelled levi thank you pronounce levi thank you and call me margaret yes don't call me professor margaret paul thank you very much so much for being with us margaret have a wonderful day thank you so much vitalik and thank you so much everybody else if you want to stay you're welcome too all right adam you go next thanks so yeah i asked my question in the chat already um but i'm just curious what scenarios there might be if we can even dream up scenarios where um there might be uh like we can sort of objectively say that people value their their votes equally because if we had let's say you know a non-universal system or non-universal group of people that were voting or deciding on something and and everyone had approximately the same value uh attributed the same value to their vote then that just immediately takes bribery out of the out of the way so um you know in as much as we can dream up a scenario like that i think it's interesting to think about that so i wonder because to me that's like we talk about the anti-sybil but um like something that i got from the i mean i already kind of knew this but from the from like when brian ford was and glenn weil and uh and that panel was going on um that uh they basically said hey you know there for any of this stuff that's not universal um it's gonna fail because someone's gonna come out from outside and just like you know the bribery is gonna overpower everything so um anyways i'm curious about this and i want to know if any i mean this is really hard so but i just want to know if anyone like has already thought about this um ted is actually doing some work on this so maybe you can talk a little bit about it uh sorry i was actually distracted for a moment and so i was calling up to try and find the question um um [Music] i can say about about um the problems with vote buying bribery so i just thought that this would be a good opportunity for you to mention the work that you're doing of course one of the goals here is to facilitate collaboration so let's thought about uh thinking yeah so vote buying there might be um a really pernicious problem um i've been looking into ways that um we can maybe encourage um the person whose vote is being bought to defect on the person who's buying their vote in a way where the defector actually earns extra money and the the person who paid for the vote doesn't ever find out that it happened um so there might be a way to i saw your idea in chat of making it so that coming to a world where everybody has um everybody's vote is of equal import to them and that would be a really wonderful world i would love to live in that world but um it feels quite far away so in the meantime we might need to invent uh something else um i know probably brian ford has thought about this as well and probably a bunch of other people here so how would you yeah where does that extra money come from so you talk about like giving a reward um that's bigger than what uh someone bribing might be willing to do like where where would that well how how do you get about how do you arrive at some something that's bigger than what what someone would be willing to pay in a bribe i feel like christopher allen has an interesting perspective on this well i mean it's it's a couple of different things i mean you have to look at existing systems i mean part of the reason why you have voting curtains and things of that nature was to be able to prove that in that particular space that nobody can observe you that nobody can coerce you et cetera into um abiding um rather than basically going well he may have maybe paid me 50 bucks to vote his way but screw him i'm going to vote my way in this box and he'll never know um so you know that exists now in voting systems but trying to bring that into the virtual world is really hard how to you know how to observe coercion much less ux issues of telling people hey you're allowed to uh um to do what you want here you're allowed to uh nobody can see you nobody can can uh observe you whatever so if you want to not abide by some coercive thing you don't have to here so it's you know it's a combination of both of those yeah i'm really skeptical of that because of things like trusted hardware uh yeah setups but um so that's why i was asking this alternative question like is there a scenario where just the economics of it precludes any sort of bribery sorry i think brian was about to say something yeah yeah so this is a super har you know hard and important question uh and i think yeah both ted and christopher's uh answers are are right on on point um uh so one um one of the things to point out is uh in the in the voting systems especially evoding literature there's a uh there are a couple well-known approaches to coercion resistance schemes one is the the re-voting mechanism that estonia implements the other that's really only in the academic literature is a ted it sounds like along somewhat similar lines that you're getting to the jcj so-called jcj scheme named after jules uh when who are his kind of colleagues jules catalano and jacobson or something like that uh just look up jcj e-voting in google scholar you'll find it um but and that and the that class of schemes the the basic idea is to give people somehow both uh give voters somehow both real and fake credentials and the fake credentials are indistinguishable from real credentials to anyone you know who isn't the voter yeah you know and the point is you can if somebody is offering to buy credit your credentials are wanting to buy your vote you sell them fake credentials you make money you know whatever they're willing to give you for them uh and and so yeah you know kind of that kind of answers your question well the money doesn't come from anywhere the money comes from whoever whatever sucker is willing to give you money for fake credentials right um so it doesn't have to be created by anyone per se but you know but there could be alternate solutions to that now the big catch coming back to christopher's point is that nobody has that i am aware of has proposed a jcj type scheme that that success you know arguably successfully does this without either a trusted hardware which i don't like any any more than you do or b an in-person some you know in person moment where uh you know somehow somewhere uh you know real users can have that privacy booth or or something equivalent like christopher was talking about and and that's actually the basis of what were some of our research is currently looking in trying to trying to merge that kind of coercion resistance with a proof of personhood but it only but that only works with the in-person proof of personhood of course go ahead chris another thing in the from the real world in that category is is notary um uh the um the non-us notaries have to basically not only assert did the two people sign it but they weren't coerced so americans may not be familiar with that because that isn't in the u.s system but um the uh but again you know is there are there possible proofs for non-coercion yeah that's that's important right uh an eth research post by vitalik which you may already be familiar with but if not you might find it interesting all right i wanted to to bring up i've had my hand up for a while and i've got to be going pretty soon um yes thank you um one of my main things right now is uh you know that after we meet this uh this summer um i'm i feel like you know trying to solve some of these problems um when we don't actually know what the problems are is getting in our way and i would really love to dive in deeply into what are all the metrics for fairness what are the attacks and adversary motivations and things of that nature that we can then create a rubric to evaluate some of these different types of things or separate them into different categories i mean i'm fairly convinced that there is no right answer it'll be different for every context whether or not it's a global context or you know it's the 10 of us in this in this room right now um and all of those will have different things but i can't prove that statement but like arrow's impossibility theorem which has a list and when you go through that list you discover some of them are in a conflict um i'd love to have that you know post these this series of intros i think that maybe we could start this out just by people could just so we have an idea of kind of the map of interest maybe people could add to their own uh notion bios what are things that they're interested in working on and then maybe based on that we can start seeing if we can create a couple working groups what do you think does that sound good all right so i'll take care i'll take care of that and ping everyone does anyone else has any comments to make peter please yeah thank you i just wanted to add on the bribery theme so if if someone is not familiar with price of forgery or fupalla this is what what we do so in upala bribery doesn't differ from forgery so actually we can measure bribery cost instead of fighting bribery so this is what we do if anyone's curious so i'd be happy to to introduce you to the concept and i'll share the ethersearch link in the chat thank you wonderful please also make sure to add it to your bio oh sure thanks just so we have it there um and of course we'll be uh writing a summer a summary of this discussion as as much as it's possible to summarize it and we'll make sure to be added is there something from last week that got posted yes i sent it over email uh did you guys missed it okay all right everyone so a final note for us for those of you who are here um next week we're having a really exciting presentation from philip sheldrick it's also going to be uh an interesting and extremely enriching discussion for everyone in order to prepare for it i want to ask all of you please please please go through the police exercise so that we can we can start it off already having some information in our hands so just share the link with you i'll share it over again uh over email but last week we were not so good at doing this group exercise and so we had to take some time from our meeting here i don't want to will it be a new list of questions it's one question and you just have to add statements and then uh but i mean is it that are we going to be reusing the all like i would completely redo my my uh questions that i added before given what's in there now there were a lot of i don't know maybe i just don't know if there's a restart is worthy that's a valid point so so actually the idea our final workshop is happening on the 30th of august and so we're going to have one a one week break and then during that one week break we're sending it sending over quick summaries of our discussions but we want to refine and elaborate this report a bit more and this will also be an opportunity to elaborate a bit more on the reports of the police exercises i i'm sharing this because if you all have any additional statements to make please keep adding them and then in that one week break is the moment where we can all go back and vote on each other statements so that we can refine it uh the result from police even a bit more um but it's interesting that we have a snapshot of before discussions and then we'll have a different snapshot from after discussion so we'll have an interesting comparison to make and then no christopher now it's going to be a new question uh that i'll be sending over right now for you um and but you can you can add to the to the old question as well so let me get you the link for the new question right now and if you can please add a couple statements and then uh one day before we meet again next week uh please make sure to vote on everybody else's statements here it is all right everyone this was fascinating thank you so much for being here you're the greatest group and i'm extremely pleased to see everyone talking and uh just creating a room for some of these discussions it's a dream come true to have this space thank you greatest chair thank you organizing thank you thank you thank you okay bye-bye bye-bye we need to make sure uh we need to download the chat because i think the last time you didn't get there no we we have it we it's dropbox oh okay perfect i just saved it now okay