On PoHs ugly judicial underbelly and a way forward

[fnanni]

So much bullshit in this post. I’ll only comment on the good stuff.

@ptaq.eth

No ability to correct submission before going to court

These silly issues should be resolvable in pre-trial. In order to keep incentives for challengers,
they could be promised 10% of deposit as a tip. Unfortunately, Kleros would never come up with this or design such feature, because they care more about Kleros and its shareholders, and prefer to pump their metrics and resolve any conflict with their court. Even the Governor Contract has to go through court.

I agree with you although you got it wrong about Kleros intentions. If Kleros had cared so much about “metrics” and maximizing disputes even at the expense of POH, Kleros would have probably designed POH without a controversial challenger ecosystem. Just send all goddamn submissions to a cheap compliance court (similar to paying to get a driving license). However, a challenger ecosystem makes POH more secure, efficient and users sending compliant submissions get to register for free.

Regarding settling some disputes outside of court, I agree. For the sake of efficiency, privacy, etc., In most legal systems it is important to have the chance to resolve disputes before going to trial. The court should be the arbitration layer of last resort. This is even a feature that Kleros is working on in some other use cases, like escrows. If POH users have the chance to recognize submission mistakes and only lose a % of the deposit without going to court, this might be good because:

1. Better UX and smaller fines for people making probably honest mistakes, which in addition could reduce bad publicity.
2. This means that we could increase the registration deposit and have a stronger incentive for the detection of fakes and duplicates, which is a complicated task. I think that currently the incentives for detecting and challenging malicious profiles might be too small.

However, the issue with this is that the system would also become more complex. The POH smart contract would probably have to be split into 2 contracts, which means more dev and audit resources + more smart contract risk. I don’t know if there could be unintended consequences I’m not considering. For example, if front-running was possible, malicious submitters could attempt sybil registrations for free. My priority would always be security, because in the long term an improved UX can deal with honest mistakes but not with a broken system.

@ptaq.eth

Lack of registration rate-limiting

Any well funded party may attempt to organize large number of people into Proof of Humanity, because all it takes is a deposit and giving a free vouch. It’s possible for the registry with less than 20000 people to triple with legit, but well funded and organized humans, within just a week and takeover the whole DAO. There is no way to stop or slow down the flood of new registrations or make this explosion more symmetrical (even), unless existing people in the PoH registry or court attempt a “foul play”, which brings us to the next point.

This is not a problem with the registry itself but with governance. Governance needs a fix. It’s funny how your whole post implies the virtuosity of POH democracy and you still fear it. In the fork discussions a lot of people are talking about adding a constitution to make governance more robust. I’m not sure a constitution really solves anything long term, but it might be a first step in a good direction.

Time proofs

I think you didn’t mentioned this, but I’m taking to opportunity to draw attention to a topic which might not be urgent, but I think is important: A verifiable, time-constrained, frictionless mechanism for Proof of Humanity renewals.