Simple summary You wouln’t let a foreign country fiddle with your justice system.
Abstract
At the moment, any wallet can challenge submissions to the registry. Although it is true that there is the need to include as much people possible to watch over the integrity of the registry, this creates a lack of transparency of the challenging process and creates a gap in which high-PNK holders can collude with bad actors, challenging profiles that have a gray area and influence in the outcome in order to seize the deposit.
I propose that challengers should be people in the registry, or as an alternative, to provide means that prove that they are not related to the jurors in some way (not very realistic or feasible, though).
Motivation
Transparency is the requirement of any descentralized organization. There is currently no reason for the challenger to remain anonymous, but there are reasons to keep his identity and independence from the jurors as clear as possible. If an anonymous actor can influence the judiciary system of a country from the outside, it would leave it open to foreign powers to leverage their positions for their own benefit.
A recognition to @marcwinn for the seeds of this idea.
Great proposal, would add the necesity to stake some eths so both parties would be running similar risk and only be able to challenge one user at a time as in vouches
Great proposal! I agree that there is no reason for the challenger to be anonymous. In fact, the voucher and challenger could be the same person but we wouldn’t know it if they were using another wallet. That’s why I also like the proposal to accept vouches.
As a counter to this argument, we shouldn’t discount the social pressure people may experience challenging publicly. We should be careful not to stop people challenging because they don’t want a reputation of being a snitch (for lack of a better word).
Beyond a bad reputation, there is also the possible threat of abuse if you are known to have challenged someone, particularly if that person is well known or powerful. Anonymity is a great asset in providing unbiased judgement as it removes the reputation of the person challenging so that they can speak freely.
We often look at the unfairness to the individual, but should consider that a person challenging may be right 95% of the time, and that is a good success rate and beneficial to the system overall. It is a tricky area to navigate where we make things better for the individual without making things worse for society.
My worry is this could be very popular vote for people who feel they have been unfairly challenged by an unknown person, but it could be at the detriment of the overall security of PoH.
creates a gap in which high-PNK holders can collude with bad actors
If the intention is to solve collusion i’m not sure how this does that? I’ll have to have a read of how the court works.
but if it is possible to collude now, then is that not still as possible if they are verified humans? backchannel payments etc.
Now we have added extra threats for the non-colluding challengers by making them more visible, and also made it easier for people to be contacted and bribed to participate in the collusion.
I definitely see a point here. I would not mind that the challenguers remain anonymous if we can create a system with the rules clear enough so that there are no “unfair” cases. How would it be possible for there to be collusion if all the rules were complied and there are no grays or gaps subject to interpretation in them?
I think that the problem could be solved with another approach. Or maybe I am not taking into account something related to how collusion can be done.
I totally agree with Isaac on this topic. It’s very unclear how the proposal prevents collusion or disincentivizes bad actors. It might help collusion by exposing the identity of frequent challengers. (A loss to PoH)
The “transparency” it adds only creates opportunity for harassment of challengers, that might be disincentivized to challenge profiles that in fact do not comply with the rules. (Another loss for PoH)
Note that jurors are not necessarily “registered” at this moment, so really it’s not realistic or feasible to “code” anything regarding that.
Unless it’s clear how this proposal accomplishes its objectives, I would vote “No”.
Cons that are not mentioned:
Added complexity;
Possibly increased gas cost for challenges - which in turn could have a side effect of increasing the required deposit;
Development resources spent on implementing this change could be spent elsewhere, with more impact.
You wouldn’t let a foreign country fiddle with your justice system.
This is a misdirecting statement. Parties of the Ethereum ecosystem helping to secure the registry are not “foreigners” to our PoH community just because they don’t associate the address they use to their PoH profile. The PoH concept relies on composability and openness to everyone to optimize its security.
There is currently no reason for the challenger to remain anonymous
There are plenty of reasons for the challenger to remain anonymous: avoid repercussions, public shaming, harassment,… A part of the active community is anonymous and would simply stop securing the registry if you imposed this obligatory Doxxing and the rest would not change their behaviour.
Social pressure is not a lever to solve collusion at all. What would you do about a serial challenger which is not anonymous to make him stop challenging? Threaten him? This does not solve anything.
Transparency is the requirement of any descentralized organization.
You are not advocating for transparency here but for banning anonymity which will reduce the registry security in the process.
I am against this proposal as I believe it would not only NOT resolve the “possible collusion issue” (not sure how anonymity works better for collusion than video & photo identified human profiles, its actually the opposite) but it would also neglect the overall quality of the registry as it would de-incentivize challengers to keep the system healthy.
I support isaac and Jrag points against this proposal.
I do not agree with this proposal. Transparency is that anyone can challenge an erroneous / duplicated / not human submission.
In fact, it is better to allow the possibility of anonymous challengers, for avoiding any possibility of harassment, threats or retaliation from the challenged to the challenger. What if the problematic submission is sent by the wife of your boss?
At the end, the challenger is not who decide. The resolution is up to the jury which analyze facts (not who challenges), and anyone can appeal if does not agree with the outcome. The problem with same challenger and juror will be progressively less probable as new jurors enter the court. So, the solution es: buy PNK, stake them, act as juror, convince your relatives and friends of doing so, instead of imposing barriers.
Honestly, I believe this is a very dangerous proposal, with less transparency (and not more transparency) as a final result.
Imagine a powerful politician or CEO submits to the registry with a wrong profile (it already happened several times), a lot of people would be scared to challenge him just because of the potential repercussions on them and their family.
This is completely orthogonal to the crypto ethos.
Funny, imagine being a powerful politician or CEO and having an enemy within the registry. You could create anonymous eth addresses and threaten the adversary to challenge their profile. Or any bad actor could anonymously threaten a profile because some aspect of the profile is in a gray zone. The challenges to profiles have been in this gray area recently, turning the system toxic and with fear of the bystanders to join because of the mistrust in the system.
The “threat of challenge” as you call it, is the primary way the curated registry system works. It deters people from submitting malicious or bad-quality profiles.
You don’t want to change the system in a way that reduces the number of challengers like this proposal does.
You either fight in the court by appealing to make sure the bad challengers lose money or you propose a change in the PoH policy to clarify the rules.
We agree on the issue but this is the wrong solution.
It will not help with the issue AND it will reduce the PoH security.
We should be careful not to stop people challenging because they don’t want a reputation of being a snitch (for lack of a better word).
I don’t see why would anyone would call a snitch a heroic preserver of the Registry, challengers guarantee the health of the system and should be quite the opposite, they should be held in high regard.
The opposite could be argued to! It would be already be known to the public that the challenged powerful person is being challenged, then it would add further protection for the challenger if anything wrong happens to them. A powerful person could easily figure out the anonymous challenger (through social engineering) and could get away with it and no one could find any proof of the relationship because of said anonymity.
I would strongly oppose this proposal (actually this is the worse proposal I’ve seen so far).
First:
Removing anonymity to challengers would result in a less secure court by discouraging challenges
– Some challengers could be the target of some pressures.
– Some challengers may not want to tie the wallet they use to challenge to their identity.
– Some challengers could face social backclash due to their challenges.
There is already a protection against frivolous challenges: The deposit.
Overall we want to allow as much challenges as possible to keep the registry as safe as possible, limiting or pressuring the challenges is going against this.
Second:
The proof of humanity contract is not upgradable and that would need to wait a new version (or go to considerable struggle to make a new version specially for this).