Penalizing bad vouchers

My reading of the docs is that someone who vouches for a bad registration is removed - but only if that is during the application process. After registration if the entry is challenged the voucher is not removed. Now for sure there are cases where the reason for removal is beyond the voucher’s control - the person died, or the vouched for person had a malicious second entry approved - either with or without their blessing. But, in the case of the person not actually existing in the first place, surely that should be grounds for punitive action against those who vouched for someone. And in the duplicate entry case - I think the person who vouched for the second (or more) additional entries should be penalized.

Now if we always punish someone who vouches for a bad registration, presumably because they are a bot or bad actor then what about the person who vouched for them? And what about all the other entries that bot or bad actor vouched for? Are these second degree connections also tainted?

A system with more finesse would involve some kind of scoring system so people can be penalized without removal. And if their score drops below 0 they auto-challenged and must re-up their identity or get removed. Funds of entrants slashed by an auto-removal would go to the system for redistribution in UBI or yield. Bad scores percolate upwards with diminishing effect and bad vouches of one descendent would percolate to siblings with or without some weighting. Vouching could be weighted by the score of those who vouched for you with some kind of quadratic effect so multiple vouches help but don’t just add.

Another tactic would be that people are required to keep some skin in the game for the lifetime of their registration. A bond if you will. Unless they request removal of a bad registration they vouched for themselves then they would risk forfeiting that bond. This gives any entrant to be vigilant for any information that might lead to their vouches being called into question. And if those people are valid it would incentivize them to participate in their defense. This strengthens the network.

And if PoH is sitting on 0.157 ETH per registrant for a year it can find creative ways to generate yield - Anchor manages to self generate over 20% APR I’m sure it can be done elsewhere. Yield can be used to offset inflation of UBI. Or maybe it funds emission of UBI? I’m not sure. Not returning deposit does not impact those without the ETH to pay it themselves, those who donate to crowdfund a registration deposit would become eligible for any yield from that registration. Since yield is a desirable thing people would be incentivized to vouch for and fund other registrations accelerating adoption. But now they have equity at stake they retain their incentive to not vouch for or fund registration of bad actors.

Maybe I’ve gone a little crazy there but just trying to be creative.

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Critiquing my own thoughts here… it is hard for someone vouching for PoH to validate the person vouched for is not already in the database. The search is very limited - even case sensitive - and the set of accepted entires is already large. Folks can also use a pseudonym. This makes it risky to vouch for anyway if that could get challenged and your own identity slashed for supporting duplicity.

We need submission tools that the submitter and voucher can leverage to search existing submissions and verify there is no duplication either maliciously or accidentally (you might have an un-vouched submission you forgot about from months ago). This can use facial recognition, speech recognition, look for strongly connected ETH addresses, whatever works.

That is the reason why you only vouch for people you know and trust (= that will not trick you into vouching for a duplicate profile).

All the verification tools you mentioned are being developed but they are more to be used by the community of challengers, not by the vouchers who should vouch for trusted people.