Proof of Personhood - Petr Porobov

up next we're going to be continuing this theme about personhood about identity about what it means to be decentralized and we've got an expert here uh peter purabov is here to talk to us he's from apala to talk to us about what proof of personhood really is peter take it away okay hey hey everyone um so i'm gonna share my screen now can you see it yeah great thanks uh so greetings humans uh we are upala uh we present a little different uh view on identity unlike russell so we don't provide a better access to your existing identity but rather a an alternative to a state id so ubala is a identity as a service or simply your future digital identity so sorry okay so currently there is no reliable way on ethereum to tell humans apart from bots uh neither of the reasons the traditional web and the fact that there are over 1 billion people without any id in the world we believe that it's a part of the same unique human problem so existing solutions out there measure the probability of personhood in percents including capture of google and bright id for example we don't do that in impala instead we have dollars we measure uniqueness in dollars and we call it price of forgery so how it works the building block of apollo is a group the group consists of users with their scores and a bowl of money uh the main feature of paula is this explosive bots protocol meaning that anyone can delete their id and run away with the money at any time and the amount of money that a person can run away is this person's score so let's say uh for this uh for the first for our group let's say one of uh members decided to run away he or she is able to take their score and other end and take it from the group's pools other people other members in in the group will certainly not let this member in again uh because basically this person is stealing their money because they have their this common pool so yeah it's another it's one part of the incentive and another part is that uh incentive model another part is that the app can access this group and prove scores of users and this group is able to charge the app so on one side we have an incentive that users won't let untrusted members in on the other side we have the apps that can query the score and for some fee so this is the incentive model and this is enough uh to build a lot of different structures on upala and actually it's enough to build a market uh where groups are looking for trusted members and way they need a lot of them because this is how they earn the apps are looking for huge groups again and they're looking for low fees and they're looking for trusted groups and users are looking for trusted groups and the groups that give the highest scores for the lowest efforts or lowest deposit in money so this way a market similar to insurance emerges but instead of trading coverage for premium in impala uh scores are traded for efforts uh meaning any app anything that reduces the risk of explosion or increases trust in these users be it deposit repeat some reputation at stake or work like solving captchas and this creates this market dynamics uh because we have a lot of groups they uh compete in providing best scores but they cannot give scores that are too high because they will be punished by explosions from within the group from malicious users so this dynamics balances the price and this price balances uh on the um on the amount of efforts needed to get this score or in other words it's the same as uh price of forgery so uh let's let's see some examples uh upala no pala group could be anything it could be wrapped over any existing community and provide a way to earn for it by the way or it could be wrapped around any identity system or around any entry test any verification tests so let's see the simplest thing let's say we created a group based on sms verification and we provide a one dollar score to anyone who can verify their sms their phone number via sms so let's say we have like thousand users with this with this within this group with this price and let's say we now want to increase our score to attract even more users and we set the score to five dollars so we have a lot of users now uh but at the same time we have a lot of explosions because it turns out that it costs like say two dollars to forge uh an account a a phone number so we have a lot of users a lot of malicious users who are using two dollars to forge their this verification method they can they can get their phone verified via sms for two dollars and they can grab five dollars from our group so we can do five dollars so we have to lower the score and eventually we will lower probably to one dollar again uh where explosions stop or they reach a certain level that is um is okay for us uh it shows the the safe bro this thing the safe score for us and this score is basically the price of forgery we come to it iteratively another thing and another thing that you can do with this building block is to create an aggregator so let's say hey we have a user which is a member of several groups already and some other groups decide that it's okay to trust this user for to such an extent that we can give this user a score of maybe thousand dollars or a hundred dollars depending on membership and uh with an ability like that we can have identities which for which the price of forgery is even higher than a state id we have an unlimited uh upper border of it so this is how it could become a replacement for state id for now uh we're starting with the blade runner dow which is a simple aggregator it's a group that will come that will [Music] sorry what what's the word bring together members of uh bring together score providers which are communities identity systems and other other groups that wish to provide scores and score consumers from the other side the the apps and offline off-chain apps and this dao will decide on the curation of new groups and scores and and fees to the apps so yeah the apps will be able to query the score from this blade runner group and this blade runner will distribute income from fees to other apps so yeah this is how it works thank you very much please if you like what we are doing join our discord or chat my my name is peter if you have any question i would be really happy to to help well peter let me ask you a couple questions real quick uh thank you so much for this uh excellent presentation so you're you you talk a lot about using market dynamics to help potentially prove identities in this decentralized way um i do wonder what do you see as the largest impediments to this becoming something that people actually use on a regular basis sorry impediments uh like obstacles exactly what are the obstacles that could prevent this from becoming mainstream uh so yeah it's uh the same as the the whole isn't for the whole blockchain space the infrastructure so we first need to onboard as many users as possible to blockchain and and then it would be easy for them to onboard to upalla because first we need the apps that need uh these types of score and second we need an easy way to access the apps and access uh upalla which is also the app uh yeah that's that's the main obstacle i think uh for that but i believe there should be a huge uh um demand for identities like this in the future and you find that uh have you been testing this so far have you found traction with users today uh we don't this is a prototype yet so we have we have a community where we discuss things and i'm talking with the uh scorp future score providers and score consumers uh so we are more interested in uh partnering with other identity system than to then looking for our own users because upala uh works uh with other identity systems there there is it's basically it's a incentive layer for other and identity system and aggregator for our identity systems so we focus most on other identity systems and communities okay well peter thank you so much for this and for answering my questions here i think there's a uh there's certainly a pathway forwards for a decentralized identity and i love your uh marketplace based uh dynamics that you've created um thanks so much for coming