Aura + BrightID: The power of unique humanity with Adam Stallard

let's do something fun um there's a Q Car QR code up there uh if you scan that right now and you don't have bright ID installed it should take you to the App Store if it doesn't take you to the App Store then just look up bright ID all one word on the App Store and get bright ID because this is gonna be Hands-On we're gonna we're gonna do some stuff together for this and it's gonna be fun so if you do have bright ID you can scan that code from Bright ID if you go to I'll show you real quick you go back and you go to Scana code you can scan this code and if you've never made a group Connection in bright ID this is how you do it you flip the switch up at the top over to the right and then you that turns it into a group code and you can make group connections so we're all going to connect to each other the weird thing that's going on right now though is that this is also being live streamed so it's possible that someone might connect to us connect to our group over the live stream and we're not going to know who that is and so we're going to mark them as suspicious if if someone tries so if you're sitting at home enjoying this uh don't bother connecting we're just going to swipe left if we see you connect so but for the rest of us um there's kind of this uh this here let me get back to this there's this myth going around that was made up by people who I've never used bright ID that bright ID doxes people but those of us that have used red ID know that that's not true because what I want you to do when you connect to that um use a picture of your cat or an avatar and use a pseudonym because it doesn't matter when you make a connection on bright ID you're connecting peer-to-peer with the other people in the group and so it never leaves the group or it never leaves the person that you're connecting with uh that name and photo never does and that goes with this uh this mantra for privacy if you want complete privacy just never share anything with anybody that doesn't already know it um and then if you if you want maybe not complete privacy but good privacy then just make sure that whatever you share with someone that they don't share it further then let me give you an example of that so let's say you make a connection on LinkedIn and in real you meet someone in real life you connect on LinkedIn who knows where that is going like that's going up to LinkedIn servers could be shared anywhere you don't know you lose control of that with bright ID um if you uh if you make a connection with someone on bright ID it stops with that person it doesn't go to any Central server somewhere it's peer-to-peer so that's uh that's our approach to privacy and we take it very seriously um and inbred ID at like what you want is you ideally want to be verified by someone that you already know that's the best situation so that you don't have to share anything new if you're going to get a passport you'll sit in a room and someone will ask for a bunch of identifying information you'll hand it over to them and where does it go after that you don't know could go all over the place and you you lose control of that so you don't want that um so for those of us that are making connections this might not be working because the networks bad in here I was gonna say I'm sorry but it's not my fault but the Network's bad in here so uh anyways if you make a connection this is what it looks like it'll show up something like this and uh you get to pick are they suspicious like not in the room are they someone you just met or is someone you already know and what what do you end up with so what does a connection actually mean what you end up with is you end up with this graph it looks like this you uh this is what it looks like to me there's a lot of faces and uh names and some of these are pseudonyms um some of these like you know these are not people's real names but that's cool like there's probably some cat pictures in here I don't care that's fine um this is what it looks like to me this is what it looks like to uh oh that's weird okay there's it this is what it looks like to someone who's new or has never made a bright ID connection it's just a bunch of empty dots with lines connecting them um and to apps it basically it looks dark it's just you know like a like a new tab it's nothing um because apps don't even get to see your bright ID they don't even get that what they get is a is a signed a verification from a bright ID node that tells them that hey we've we've we've traversed this graph we've run the protocol and this is a unique person that that's coming to your app and through the magic of blind signatures they don't even see which dot you are they just see that one of these verified dots came to their app and it hasn't already been there so like I said we take privacy very seriously uh so let's see but hey look at this Paul is connecting Paul all right Paul in the front row let's reconnect with Paul it worked we got that we got the Wi-Fi to work good enough to make a connection this is awesome okay so yeah that's what it looks like so anyways what does it mean when we make a connection like when Paul and I just connected what does that mean uh we saw the graph that it builds but there's some and then uh we use something the first thing we used was civil rank to Traverse the graph and make decisions about whether someone's a unique human or not but there's problems with that because um what uh if if there's a note in the graph that is a um like a seed node like some of these nodes are really important and uh and they they basically are pre-trusted parts of the graph so that bright ID nodes like they know that if trust flows out from there if you connect if you're if you're connected in the right way to maybe a couple hops down or whatever the case may be um to one of these seed nodes then you allow you're allowed to get verified but that is not necessarily transitive because if I'm if I know Paul and Paul knows uh Sasha and I don't know Sasha like that doesn't necessarily mean that I know Sasha so it's not a transitive relationship so can we do better than that and that's where Aura comes in and I want to spend the rest of the time talking about aura so Aura is an improvement on the bright ID verification system and it's a way to ensure that uh that people who are um sybils don't get allowed so who knows what a civil is raise your hand if you've ever heard that term Sybil so a lot of you have heard that term civil and I I credit that to git coin for raising the awareness of what a civil is because when I gave a talk four years ago nobody knew what a civil was so this is great that like half the people in here already know what a Sybil is and what a civil attack is and why we need to defeat things like this so the problem is that our regular old people like our regular regular Old Bright ID users that are making these connections and that they understand this is as far as they're able to go they know how well they know you uh but they're not looking for civils they're not actively like they may not realize if you come back and connect to them the next day with the different with a different account because that's not what they're there for they're there to collect the thing they're there to vote on git coin they're there to go to unitap and collect tokens and that's as far as it goes they just want to be Brad ad verified that's totally cool like that's that's fine for bright ID people to uh users to do that but we need to go beyond that if we want really good civil protection so with aura we have a subset of users um so these are made up numbers but let's say there's a thousand bright ID users but there's there's really a hundred thousand but out of every thousand bright ID users um that there's a hundred Aura players it might be less it might be more we're just getting started with aura so we don't know but there's some subset that care and are willing to go beyond and learn um like analyze the graph and and learn themselves like what is a civil attack and how can we stop it those are the aura players and I'll show you what it looks like if you're an aura player and you're using Aura so your friends your connection list rather than just saying how well you know them you review them and you look at that account and you look at the evidence that you have and based on the evidence that you have you answer a very different question is this the account of theirs that should be verified or did they have a duplicate duplicate account maybe they lost the ability to recover their other account and so this isn't their account that should be verified so you can answer that yes or no and then you can uh State your confidence on it and you can also for other um for other Aura players you can leave notes or you can leave notes for yourself like what did you think about that uh that person did you get Good Vibes did you get bad vibes why why do you feel that way like what evidence are you bringing to the table and uh we we have this uh this is Aura auras live if you go to aura.brightide.org you can use it you can log in with your bright ID and start using it you'll be given a list of all your connections and from there you can um actually you can rate your connections and let me show you an example of what it might be like if you're rating someone what evidence do you have what might you look at so one of the most important things to look at is mutual connections you want to see who do we know in common um so I can see here they've got social recovery set up um they made a connection four months ago these are good signals these are telling me there's a good chance that this person still has access to their account I look at who do I know that has connected to this person um I see a bunch of people that I know that have connected this person so I'm I'm getting all this evidence that leads me to go back here and uh you know give them a good a good high confidence rating so I can give with all that evidence I can I can give them high confidence and what that ends up doing is that that creates a new graph and um this grab is kind of messed up but these blue lines are uh connecting to other Aura players and then the orange lines are connecting to people that the aura players are verifying um Aura players are sending each other energy around the graph and then they're also evaluating people and helping them get verified in Aura so as an aura player your first job is to go through your list of friends and get them or verified so they can use all the cool stuff that they want to use do all the cool things like maybe there's some free tokens to give out in unitap that you have to be or verified to get you can uh you can help your friends get those so there's these interest intrinsic rewards for helping people to get Aura verified and that's what you're doing as an aura player and like I said not everybody's going to do that it's going to be a small fraction of the bright ID users that are going to be Aura players and then for Aura to grow some of those Aura play players have to not just rate their friends they have to help other Aura players join so maybe out of your 20 friends that you've helped to get Aura verified you you recognize that one or two they might be good Aura players themselves so you train them you go to the next track and you start training them and you show them how to use Aura and I've done this a bunch of times I've shown people how to use Aura and how to get their friends verified and then as an aura manager what you do is you kind of have this maintain this bird's eye view of the whole graph or at least the graph around you to see how energy is being sent see how people are playing the aura game and if they're doing a good job and what you end up with is um uh a way to evaluate other Aura players which is called Energy and this is that inner graph that I was talking about before so this inner graph of Aura players and that relationship the edges in that graph have to do with um a transitive relationship which is how good of an aura player are you so if I think you're a good Aura player most of the people I'm reading on Aura are not Aura players they're just regular bright ID users but if I'm rating an aura player I need to know are they a good Aura player in other words are they rating helping other people get verified correctly and are they rating other Aura players correctly so this is actually a transitive relationship because if I think if I'm here and I think this person is a good Aura player that means that I think that they're doing the right things with these other Aura players that are adjacent to them so it is transitive and you can use things like civil rank in a much more effective way and then here on the edge these um these regular bright ID users all they need to do is connect to an aura player so if you've ever if you've ever gotten bright ID verified before you know how it works it kind of works like what we did today where um we made this group connection and I'll show the code again in case any of you came late you can scan this code with your bright ID and get connected to us but you get verified by making connections like that but the problem is you can be a bright ID tourist you can you can get verified by one group of people and then you can go somewhere else use a different phone and get verified again so we call it a meat verification and it's a low level verification because um because you can do small scale civil attacks with it but large scale civil you can't just sit in your basement and create hundreds of sybils but you can go around and and get verified multiple times but with aura it's different instead of going to a connection party with a bunch of random people and getting this low level verification you find someone that you already know that's an aura player or they'll find you and they help you and they get you Aura verified and you get a high level verification because they've done the research so that's what Aura is all about it's about helping people get verified sending energy to other Aura players it's an expert system it's a decentralized self-selecting system of experts that are helping people to get bright ID verified and so we really think that this is the future of unique human verification but Aura can go beyond that to other things so unique human accounts is just one domain of this decentralized expert system of experts selecting other experts in a decentralized graph we're running a pilot program with gitcoin where we're moving git coin grants from being just this sort of like closed close-knit group of fraud detect like fraud analysis people that review every get coin Grant to being something that's open and potentially decentralized where experts can bring in other experts and evaluate how well they're doing using Aura so it's not just for Unique human accounts you can uh you can evaluate how well people are doing evaluating get coin grants another thing is nft valuations so you could you could get uh there could be some uh nft that has a bunch of cool traits but no one's exactly sure how it should be evaluated and maybe only experts know how to do this but who are those experts and and who do we trust and how do we know how to find them where it can help with that Oregon uh you can have this decentralized self-selecting group of experts in any domain they could anything you can think of anything where an expert set should be decentralized that's where Aura can shine so what what's the what's the next actions that we can do we got a Discord do you want to try out being an aura player and take that next step and go a little bit further on bright ID than just being a regular bright ID user if this is interesting to you and you want to join the the civil defense Army that we're forming and be an aura player you can do that help all your friends get verified for that next best thing all right look at this we got another one um all right I want to make sure this isn't sewn from the live stream yes all right we're good we just met glad to meet you okay this is this is beautiful this is what it's all about so scan the code if you want to um if you want to join our group um so anyways uh let me go back to my code okay uh if you want to join our Discord that's what this code is that's to join our Discord the aura Discord where you can learn more about it and if you want to form an energy team if you think that you and your friends are going to be the best or a civil Defenders on the planet then come sign up and uh start your own energy team if you've got a cool new idea for a domain if you're if you're like Hey we're doing a restaurant review site and we want the set of experts that review it to be decentralized come sign up with a new domain with us if you're an app that says I want better civil protection bright ID Meats was okay but we want bright ID Aura now it's as easy as just changing a parameter in the URL you can start asking bright ID nodes for Aura verification instead so let us help you figure that out I think that's it I got a little bit of time for questions do we have a mic you got a mic there so does anyone have a question on anything that we that I talked about right here is that mic not working oh man they gave us a mic that didn't work can you hear me oh oh here we go all right there we go there we go um so maybe you mentioned this before yeah but is there an incentive for Aura players to verify other people like that's a great great question I love that question so let's go back to this uh these different Aura roles so if you're just at the aura player level and you're just helping your friends and and like family and people that you know get verified we think that people will do that and we hope because we got to have a lot of a lot of Aura players even though they're like maybe just one percent of the whole Brady population that's still a lot it's still like thousands of people right now um awesome this is great we just got another one in um so at Tien are you here raise your hand yes all right cool I love this okay so if you're um if you're just starting out being an aura player your incentive is let's say you went to unitap and you got like 50 worth of cool tokens you want your friends to get that too so you're over verified you want to help them get Aura verified that's your starting incentive then when you start moving along these tracks you start becoming an aura trainer and or a manager you're actually monitoring other Aura players I think you need more of an incentive than just because now you're you're like monitoring the whole system and making sure things are working well so what we have is uh that energy that I talked about that gets passed around in the graph so that energy uh you and what you end up with is you end up with um some people I don't know if this is going to work because the Wi-Fi connection is so bad but um like uh let's see okay so yeah we have a leaderboard right so there's um the the most awesome Aura players are at the top and that's that's the opinion of the other Aura players like they're giving you they're giving their energy around um you don't you can't hoard energy you can only give it so what what do other Aura players think of other Aura players that's kind of this so you can there's a leaderboard so what you could do let's say that you're an application that absolutely depends on Aura verification what you can do is you can you can drop in uh a donation I guess you could call it and um or a grant into the aura bucket for these Aura players that could get proportionally distributed to how well they're playing so the people who are the best trainers the best Aura managers that are at the top will earn the most so we haven't solved the problem of like how to get people donating into that bucket but we know how to distribute it does that help all right cool um okay I think I'm over time thank you everybody for learning about Aura and yeah come join us