Web3 Fraud Defense as a Philosophical Stance: Ban Behaviors, Not Users with Alex Marx

like a lot of people here in my backgrounds in philosophy and been only by trade and risk and fraud mitigation so we'll get a little bit like heady and meta with this and then we can drive into some more details that might be relevant um I guess I'll start with a confession being that I am someone who cheers for the con man in the film Noir just as much as the next guy and I don't really leave that piece of my personality at the door when I'm working in Risk mitigation so I think it's important to acknowledge the Innovation that happens from so-called Bad actors and how we're all pushed and how all of our systems are pushed by this sort of constant competition and the web 3 space may be more than any attracts that competition and there's incredibly intelligent folks who are working to break the things that we're building and there's incredibly talented people there who are looking to capitalize on human nature in some cases or bag a reward that most of us wouldn't even recognize was on the table so in thinking about things like fraud mitigation I think it's really important to remember the philosophical ideals that brought us all into the space and really question whether we are abiding by those ideals in the methods we use to prevent fraud so I'll pose this question and give you a little background too about me but I'm curious whether our team's risk strategy is aligned with the future that we want to create so this is true for lots of people in web 2.5 web3 we sort of have inherited systems which may not actually be aligned with our intentions if we want to onboard the next billion users the next seven billion users as I've heard thrown around this week how can we expect to exit people from this new inclusive Financial system in the past we have penalized behaviors which were viewed as anti-social or breaking Society in some way by excommunicating the person that committed them we have our prison system which I think most people here are not on board with the way that that functions so why would we in our internet communities and our web 3 spaces why would we expect to ban a user and actually exit them from our society as opposed to focus on how to invite them in to our society my background was in Silicon startup world at a company called Stitch fix and the fraud got really real when we went public we became the target of all kinds of new and fun types of cyber crimes and what we would do is things like ban the use of vpns or stop traffic that was coming from a proxy we would look and see whether the ZIP code on file matched the ZIP code on the credit card but none of these things are relevant in web3 world right all of us are on board we are protective of our privacy and we're not aligned with those methods so how do we create systems that better mitigate fraud without having reference to Broken systems that violated all of our privacy after Stitch fix I moved to coinbase some of you may be familiar with centralized exchange world and a great onboarding tool that a lot of people use to get into web3 in the first place here we really had the best of the best the best mitigation tools and the best insights and we're still reliant on traditional Financial methods of mitigating traditional Financial methods of limiting exposure and limiting risk it's only been since I joined git coin that this all sort of started to fall into place for me in terms of seeing a philosophy which actually can create a more inclusive future instead of having reference to these practices of penalization a git coin um for those of you who are familiar with our programs we are guarding against all kinds of civil attacks and we are designing systems which are meant to incentivize the behaviors that we want to see so rather than ban penalize you know put in web3 jail as if that was even possible with our Technologies we really want to create systems that are inclusive and incentivize the good behaviors and so that those who are wishing to make money or make a co-op grab that that that's actually something they can do within the system and be included I'm going to throw our QR here for those of you who don't know what get coin is and just also refresh for those of you who may not have checked in on us in a little while we have the aloe protocol launching which you can Fork you can do your own quadratic funding I know cyberpanthers just gave a shout out to that quadratic funding mechanism and we're really excited about what this can do to fund communities in a more democratic way quadratic funding as a formula is intended to acknowledge that we are all starting at unequal places in terms of how many tokens are in your wallet and still equalize for that factor so that we can actually see what real Community traction looks like we also have the grant stack if you want help running your own grant program we'll do that we'll help you out with that we have passport which is intended to be a proof of unique Humanity or even proof of inclusion into a specific community so passport for example is a non-privacy violating way for you to show us you know a snapshot of who you are and what you participate in so we can verify that you're not you know going to support 18 grants 18 times and try to skew the results of a round so that's sort of our particular case for fraud circumstances but passport also has that malleability to be used for multiple different communities so with that in mind in that sort of context that I've been building within I'm going to ask the question here of how do we bring about the inclusive future we want if we're relying on tools from the past this just to drive home again is in mind of that unequal starting place which we all acknowledge fully and keeping in mind that that unequal starting place is something we can build for and acknowledge instead of ignoring if we're building around North American Standards it may not make a lot of sense to us that two US dollars per day is a good income for more than half of the world's population that's enough incentive to spend a few hours hacking on something we can't forget that this is the future that we're building towards is one that's fully global so to throw out a little bit more of the nitty-gritty and some recommendations and requirements of building a fraud resistant system While You're Building I would say that like some of the best practices that I've gotten to learn from a git coin and perpetuate in the system is put your con artist costume on like actually imagine if you were trying to attack your own system how would you do it and this is not only like extremely creative but it's an empathetic practice to tell that story to just put yourself in someone else's shoes imagine you're trying to make a couple US Dollars and then how would you do it I would also recommend like thinking through the ways that users gain value and make sure that these are desired behaviors if it's not a desired behavior that everyone is running around trying to catch the next airdrop and that's actually not what you're trying to incentivize perhaps you know we're going to revisit how we're talking about that airdrop how we're marketing that airdrop whether it's a transferable transferable rather nft um and then I would also super just shout out and say thank you to our Global team it's such a benefit that we have that Talent from within but if you don't already have Global Talent in your community building it's indispensable to seek out Global perspectives so that we're not building in a way that is North America Centric and becomes completely absurd and then after you've built it I think this one's a little hard for the product people in the audience but be aware that you know it could get broken and maybe it should get broken a future where we are really fraud resistant we have an extremely healthy white hat community and we are incentivizing those people who are good at breaking things to actually break things and then tell us how they broke them so white hat bounties all of these types of things to bring people into the fold and give them a real way of making money and benefiting the community have a huge game-changing factor and pay huge dividends also iterating and staying involved making sure that you actually know how people are using the product that you've built this is this can get a little nerdy with data um heuristic labeling and just sort of looking at that user path to see exactly what is happening but because we are all building on chain that's possible just because something's transparent doesn't mean it's legible so this is obviously a bigger lift um than you know a quick couple buttons but it's super worth the lift and it helps protect our communities and then I would also just like call out the direct line of community feedback being this key piece because as many people as might be interested in exploiting our systems there are so many more who want to build with us and giving them a line of contact to call out when they see something or when they're worried about something is awesome gives gives them that line of ability to contribute and helps them to feel heard too so I'm going to summarize a lot of that with just like this mechanism to take away that we can ban behaviors instead of banning users instead of banning people we can actually make that behavior that is undesirable impossible which is just such an exciting piece of building on chain and building Within ethereum and then just keeping in mind that a user who has exploited Us in the past or has had that extractive function and found that how can we invite them in how can we next time you know bring them within the system and make them feel part of that community so where they're able to put that Innovation and that creative thinking to use alongside of us so I know we're all kind of running behind so I can cap it there I would say like I'd love to stay in touch and talk to anybody after if there's specific questions or something specific to your community if you want to integrate passport and talk about what that could look like for your use case or run a quadratic funding round with us we would love love to talk to you got get coiners scattered right here um so thank you everybody that's about all I got