On 1/23/22, alessandrot@tutanota.com <alessandrot@tutanota.com> wrote:
Decentralised Identity Trilemma (http://maciek.blog/dit/) Here's my proposition: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ir3gbumhgzc8khy/Themis%20-%20algorithmic%20equalit...
There have been a few other cryptos posted that try defining new frameworks for social and related models beyond just agnostic cryptofinance. There was also a proof of bandwidth/network coin posted. The world needs more new ideas than its legacy offers, thus you are encouraged in these and future endeavours. Perhaps Human PoWs could be used with Prediction Markets as oracles to determine completion of road building contracts. Feel free to post updates and projects. Themis algorithmic equality Proof-of-Used-Internet-Bandwidth Proof-of-Human-Work Alessandro Toumi alessandrot@tutanota.com January 16, 2022 1. Introduction A press release from 2017 [1] states that the eight richest individuals own the same wealth as half the world (approx. 3.6 billion people at the time). The modern financial system is not as many would like to believe a natural source of growth and adaptation, which operates similarly to the evolution of species (which is based on competitiveness). It is rather a "winner takes all" game. Nature contains an element of randomness, inherent to life itself, which allows for a specific state of equilibrium. Pure capitalism does not involve so much randomness advantage is gained exponentially in relation to the capital owned; therefore, the competition is more reminiscent of a giant Monopoly game, which must finally end in one person or a group taking possession of everything. Every social structure was born out of a certain longing for some equality that cannot be found in nature. In order to achieve this, we always need to subject ourselves to a force that is above us. We need to be equal vis-à-vis someone. We cannot be equal by ourselves, as no system that would allow this actually exists. However, when our right to equality becomes exercised by a person above, we become elements of a bigger game played by the powers we submit ourselves to; this is based simply on the assumption of a rational behaviour in the context of game theory [2]. These powers are human-based and they are instinctively seeking wealth and control over others. Just as human beings treat their environment and other species as resources to extract and animals to farm and kill, they apply the same principles to one another, treating others as something to take advantage of and exploit. No ideology, political or other, can change this fact it can only obscure it. Now, with the advent of the Internet, AI, Big Data, etc., this game has certainly become more intricate, as decisions can be made and enforced globally, almost instantaneously and in an automated manner [3]. What kind of a system should we develop to make it an equalising power in itself; one that would be resistant to manipulation by any individual participant? All real-world resources (such as gold, coal, oil or even hashing power in case of Bitcoin) are or will inevitably be monopolised. Ideologies are by nature hierarchical and human-based. Is there anything that is available to all uniformly (or almost uniformly) and cannot be manipulated? What we propose here is a genuinely decentralised, blockchain-based financial system that rewards its participants by minting new cryptocurrency units through constant increase in monetary supply and distributes the units to competitors proportionally to the amount of time and energy they have spent on solving pseudorandom, AI-hard problems, which we call here Proof-of-Human-Work. It is assumed that this process can be optimised only marginally so that the probability of being rewarded is approximately proportional to the time and energy spent on solving the said problems. If implemented in a proper manner (with a constant, fixed increase in monetary supply, distributed mainly to human problem solvers), it could become an equalising, fair solution that would give everyone an equal chance to "mine", i.e. to acquire coins. All that would be required would be a computer and an Internet connection. This document describes a decentralised financial system, operating as a peer-to-peer network and using blockchain technology [4]. There are two components to the system: the main consensus mechanism, called Proof-of-Used-Internet-Bandwidth, described in sections 2-4 below, and the mechanism for distributing coins to human problem solvers, i.e. Proof-of-Human-Work, described in section 5. Together, these two parts form an idea for a financial system that will allow for a predictable, uniform distribution of wealth globally through a global Universal Basic Income. The existing solutions for a distributed consensus are not promising. Proof-of-Work [5] proved to be insufficiently decentralised. At first, this approach seemed thanks to its "one CPU one vote" rule to allow for decentralisation. But with the manufacture of mining ASICs [6], this feature was lost [7]. Some solutions [8][9] aimed at increasing decentralisation in blockchains in which block production requires the use of real- world resources have been invented, but no substantial progress has been made. Proof-of-Stake [10], on the other hand, does not entail the need to use any real-world resources in block production; however, it introduces some new problems, amongst which are the weak subjectivity problem [11] and the "rich getting richer" problem [12]. Sections 2 and 3 introduce some basic principles of Proof-of-Used-Internet-Bandwidth. The complete scheme of operation for the proposed consensus mechanism is described in section 4. Pursuing this line, section 5 deals with Proof-of-Human-Work as a coin distribution mechanism, which is to be implemented on top of the previously described consensus mechanism, i.e. Proof-of-Used-Internet-Bandwidth. The necessity of using Proof-of-Used-Internet-Bandwidth as the basic consensus mechanism in any implementation of Proof-of- Human-Work is discussed in section 6. In section 7, our project is summarised and compared briefly to other comparable ideas. ... 7. Conclusion Attempting to design a Proof-of-Human-Work blockchain was pioneered by HumanCoin [20]. Unfortunately, HumanCoin utilises indistinguishability obfuscation [21], a cryptographic primitive that is far from being ready to be deployed and it is unknown if it ever will be. A second attempt, called uMine [22], proposed CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), generated by consortiums of CAPTCHA generators using secure multi-party computation [23] instead of utilising indistinguishability obfuscation, to create human-solvable puzzles. However, some of the assumptions on which uMine's feasibility is based are dubious, most importantly the assumption that text-based, picture-based or sound-based CAPTCHAs can be solved efficiently only by humans; this isn't true [24]. In the recent years, some new and interesting approaches to the problem of verifying humanness in a decentralised manner were proposed [25]. Out of those, only reverse Turing tests and pseudonym parties can be implemented in a decentralised manner. The problem with those approaches is, however, that they cannot scale as they are not permissionless and require verification of new users by the users who are already verified, which limits the pace at which a system can grow. To give an example, it took about two years for the IDENA network [26] to reach just 10,000 users. Furthermore, if the verification of humanness involves a symmetrical amount of effort on the side of the provers and the verifiers (i.e. each verifier must sacrifice an amount of time and effort similar to the amount invested by a prover proving their humanness, e.g. a verifier must interact with a prover or prepare some AI-hard challenge and verify the solution), it further hampers the adoption of a system. We propose Themis, the first implementable Proof-of-Human-Work blockchain protocol that is a secure, permissionless and scalable solution for a new financial system capable of establishing a global, borderless Universal Basic Income.