Renewal Process Improvements Discussion

Proof of Humanity
1

I’m going through the renewal process right now after expiring a couple weeks ago after 6 months. I know the renewal process has been changed to yearly, which is an improvement, but there definitely needs to be more improvements to the renewal process than that as we scale. Here are some things I’ve noticed and have questions about, and am curious about what suggestions people have for improvements.

  1. Should the renewal process be almost identical to the original process, with the same requirements for video and image and deposit? It feels like we should just be proving an active account is still alive, which should require less, and perhaps something different to prove that. I noticed in a different thread here that someone suggested maybe a photo holding a recent hash.

  2. It appears that our original vouchers count as the vouchers for renewal, in which case we don’t need to seek out new vouchers. Is that correct? If so, that makes things simpler, but also, what’s the point of redoing the entire application with video and image everything if a new vouch isn’t needed?

  3. I see an option under the right corner of my video to wait or advance to pending, and the advance to pending costs at the moment $70 in ETH. This wasn’t part of the process the first time around, and I don’t understand it. If I’ve already paid the deposit, and the gas fee for the application, why would I need to spend any more gas on anything?

What about you all? What improvements do you think should be made in the renewal process, aside from the obvious like a smaller deposit and more time between renewals?

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2

Update: Looks like someone is challenging my renewal, so that’s interesting. I already proved my unique humanity 6 months ago. I’m obviously a real person, and have voted in proposals as a member of the community, and now someone wants my deposit for renewing? This just seems to further my point that the renewal process should be something different than the original process.

I get challenging someone you don’t know, but challenging someone who is renewing, who is already known? That’s pretty shitty.

3

There is a HIP project right now that is looking to specify what phrase to be said, just to begin solidifying the procedure through policy.
https://gov.proofofhumanity.id/t/phase-1-hip-xx-define-text-to-be-read-for-profile-renewal/

4

I just saw the challenge. I would say you’ve become collateral damage of a process that is looking to prevent illegitimate renewals. Your video submission did not comply with video submission guidelines, which is really unfortunate. We all mostly believe that you are a real human and everything, and we have thought out of ways so that every video submission is checked by the community (group Telegram: Contact @validateyourUBIprofile).
I don’t know the answers to all of your questions but my guesses are:

  1. Yes, the submission for renewal should have the same standards than the original one (with the difference of the phrase, as per my previous comment). This is key to the health of the registry, since it prevents sybil attacks by the same principles than the registration.
  2. It makes sense that the same vouchers would vouch for you, since the original intent for the vouchers is that they should be people that know you and/or are close to you.
  3. This one I am certain about: you definitely not need to pay the “advance to pending” since for now this is handled automatically after a few hours of submitting the renewal/profile.
5

The entire purpose of the process is to verify real humans. I am a real human and the video I used to renew is the same video that was already approved the first time around, in which case why would I think it didn’t comply if it already counted as complying?

I have to say I’m interested in seeing how this court system works. If the court rules against my submission, when the purpose of the entire process is to verify unique humanity, then the system obviously needs to be improved. If PoH is planning on scaling up to cover all of humanity, then it can’t lose sight of the actual purpose, which is to verify humanity.

Claiming I haven’t provided sufficient evidence of my humanity during a renewal process because of the bottom of my chin not being visible in a video that is obviously real, and also already previously approved, is something a court seems like it should use human judgment in. We’ll see what happens, but either way, the existing process for renewals is simply not going to cut it and we need to learn from cases like this one.

Right now, it seems to be leaning more towards patent troll territory, where there is such a big incentive to take people’s deposits, because of the size of them, that humans will knowingly exclude other humans they know to be real and alive, just to take their ETH for their own profit.

1 Like
6

In the months that I’ve been working towards improving PoH I heard innumerous times the claim “but I am a real human”. Believe me that I trust you are, but the procedure is in place to prevent duplicates and non-humans, it is cold and soul-less, but it serves the purpose of keeping the registry clean. If your first video got approved without being challenged, you just were lucky that during the 3.5 days you were subject to incentivized scrutiny you were not caught by the kind of opportunistic challengers that loom today in the site. After those 3.5 basically no one cared if you followed policy, since there is no incentive to challenge.
The best line of defense is clearly defined policy, as I did with my approved HIP-8 policy, and as I am proposing specifications in the new HIP proposals. I also wrote an extensive analysis on what the current video submission rules are lacking, so of course there is an incredibly great room for improvement.

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There haven’t been a whole lot of renewals yet. I’m one of the few. I think it would be a mistake to look at what I’m going through right now and not think there are better ways of going about this despite the small suggestions you make in what you think video submission rules are lacking. There needs to be more thought put into this and changes made before the bulk of the renewals start happening. We need to already be thinking about how to better scale up renewals. Utilizing the exact same process as initial proofs is just not the way to best go about it, in my opinion, when renewals seems like a low-fruit way of reducing a bottleneck instead of maintaining one.

8

I agree. Let’s start then ;).

What do you think an ideal outline of a course of action and proposals that should be put in place?

We could also have some input from the concerned registered people in the PoH Governance Telegram Group if you prefer. Telegram: Contact @PoHGov

9

I have to say I agree with both of you. We need to keep in mind what is the ultimate goal of PoH: to have a registry of all humans in the world so that they can receive a universal basic income. I agree on that it needs to be clean, and I think that currently the incentives are set so that it actually works on that way, but at the expense of having several submissions challenged by arbitrary rules (which are indeed necessary). I think we should try and find a workaround to this, and here’s what I propose:
Whenever there is a challenge, the submitter can provide additional evidence to prove that he/she is human. Maybe the challenge was legit, in the way that the actual request did not meet all the guidelines. But now, with the additional evidence, the humanity is proven. We then could allow for those humans to correct their submission, without them losing their deposit and without punishing the challenger (ie. let them keep their deposit as well: after all, they was right in challenging in the beginning). So in these cases the court should rule that the submitter shall have, say, 3 days to resubmit their application and if the new one is correct, both the submitter and the challenger shall keep their deposit; if submitted failed to submit a correct application, then challenger would win in.

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10

This is the kind of suggestion that I think would be an actual improvement. If the goal is to accomplish verifying all real humans, then we have to provide a way of doing that instead of just creating cracks for people to fall through.

Here’s what just happened for me. I was unable to find any way at all of providing my own evidence, so the existing system doesn’t even allow input from those who are challenged. That definitely needs to be corrected, and it seems like it’s the way it’s actually supposed to work, but whatever link I needed to submit evidence was impossible to find. Whatever that link is to provide evidence needs to be easily findable.

The jury voted against me. The challenger now gets the bulk of my deposit, and the jurors get their own slice of it too. The jury has an actual incentive to take money from people by ruling against them. That’s a grossly unjust system that’s been setup, and one I simply do not support now that I know the dirty details of how it works. If we’re going to use the Kleros system, there really needs be better utilization and implementation of it.

Suggesting that edge cases requiring juries focus on extra work to make sure people are real and unique makes sense. Instead of the goal being to rule against people, the incentives should be for making sure people get into the system once, and only once. An extra fee applied, such that the challenger loses some of the deposit to pay for the services of the arbitration system makes sense, but they should not lose the entire deposit when they could just provide extra evidence.

Also at this point, I’m now in the appeal process, and again, I have no idea what to click to actually appeal the ruling. It just says “Go to arbitrable application to appeal this ruling” without anything hyperlinked. It’s like telling someone to just go through that door over there, and it’s a wall.

We really need to improve this system, and quickly, or there’s going to be a lot of pissed off people applying and trying to renew who get robbed like I just did. If I didn’t fully support the goals of this project, I’d be officially done with it now, and talking some serious shit about how bad it is.

11

well this is not true. You are able to post your own evidence in the correct period. What is true, is that, so far, the defense was virtually unheard by the jurors, which by now they’ve become precedent drones without reasoning on what is going with the actual case.

I’ve tried to solve this in several ways, for example make the challengers to be accountable by requiring them to be registered to challenge, and I’ve discussed the perverse incentives of the system in another thread. There is currently a proposal to avoid more challenges in the renewal that I think it is necessary. The jurors behaviour can get so ridiculous that it required a HIP just for them to understand what 360p actually meant and redefine the minimum size of videos.

The appeal process and the juror situation is beyond control. If nothing has changed since the last time I checked, there is only a handful of big whales holding most of the pnk in the Humanity Court so that they get selected over and over again, and there is a high chance that these are acting in collusion with both challengers and vouchers in the system. So there is an even bigger issue down the line.

I’ve been warning the leadership time after time that all of this is going to increase the bad PR associated with the project, and it doesn’t need to be this way. Let’s hope that we could do more in the future.

12

“You are able to post your own evidence in the correct period.”

Where? Show me the actual link. If it exists, it’s extremely difficult to find, and therefore functionally non-existent. I know we are SUPPOSED to have the ability to submit evidence during the period for evidence, but I could not find the link anywhere during that time period. The links on resolve.kleros.io and court.kleros.io do not enable people to submit evidence. Instead it just says use the “the arbitrable application” which is never hyperlinked. Does that application exist? Probably. But the existing UI without any links to find it, and without anyone directing people to it via the Telegram chat and the Kleros forums makes it functionally irrelevant.

As for the whale jurors, that’s another problem I didn’t know about, but makes sense as another issue with the system.

Basically, at this point, I’m team anti-Kleros. I think continuing to use the system without vast improvements will hold back the growth of Proof of Humanity.

1 Like
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In your own profile, you have an “Evidence” section down below where you submit the evidence.

Screenshot 2021-11-02 at 10-59-40 Proof of Humanity, a sybil-proof list of humans
Screenshot 2021-11-02 at 10-59-40 Proof of Humanity, a sybil-proof list of humans1903×1982 314 KB

In the kleros resolver here an example down below you have a timeline, where it shows when is the proper window for evidence and when does it end:

image
image1804×257 18.7 KB

Indeed, we need our own Humanity Courts, where the conduct of jurors is more strict and not use a foreign token.

14

Oh for fuck’s sakes, the submit button is hidden in the collapsed section at the bottom of my profile, and not a single place mentions that, and no one could even tell me that in the Telegram or the Kleros forums?

Thanks. Okay. Now I know, and unless things are made clearer, there will be plenty more like me who can’t find what to do and just have their deposits taken by the Kleros system.

15

I am pessimist about what Kleros will do to fix this (besed on my personal experience), but I am optimist that the gang that want’s to make actual improving is gaining momentum, close to critical mass to make it actually change. Join us, if you still have willpower!

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A new proposal is up to help improve the renewal. Snapshot