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But what if I pretend to be two different people? It seems we'll need some kind of centralized organization to verify identities here (the government? )
by cdancette 9y ago
But what if I pretend to be two different people? It seems we'll need some kind of centralized organization to verify identities here (the government? )
- hectorlorenzo 9y agoYes, I thought exactly the same. And immediately after: "then what's the point...?"
- dllthomas 9y agoIt's not quite "identity" that we need to verify, but rather uniqueness. Centralized approaches are theoretically easy; I'm not sure there isn't a possible decentralized solution. The one proposed does seem to be a partial solution, but probably not enough of one.
- cdancette 9y agoI agree that the proposed solution seems not enough, but I'm impatient to see what will happen when they try it out. Maybe the trust chain will work out
- baddox 9y agoI don’t think you need an explicit decentralized solution. I think the individual incentives are such that this type of scam is unlikely, because it’s probably prohibitively difficult to maintain two significant non-overlapping social graphs. I explained this more in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15898504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15898504
- dllthomas 9y agoI followed up over there :)
- baddox 9y agoI assume the point is that an individual wouldn’t just form a trust link with another individual without some confidence of their “true” identity. For me to trust someone’s currency, I would either need to be very sure of their identity through some trusted third-party system (e.g. a centralized system like government ID), or be involved in an extensive social (and probably in-person) relationship that would be difficult to fake (like friendship). For the latter, what I mean is that it’s probably prohibitively difficult to maintain two significant in-person social graphs that have no overlapping members. Sure, people can get away with it for things like romantic affairs, but the incentive there is very different than money exchange, not to mention that romantic affairs often get discovered.
- dllthomas 9y agoI don't see that overlap in the social graph implies a high enough chance of discovery. Wouldn't discovery require that members from each group are actually involved in the same financial transaction (in a way such that people are paying attention to who's involved)? It may well be possible to keep that rare enough for long enough that people try it, and are sufficiently successful to be a problem. (This is certainly not confidence that it wont work, just lack of confidence that it will, pending further reading/experimentation/analysis...)
- SolarNet 9y agoRead the linked website. They include validators, a decentralized set of organizations, that can check government IDs to provide that sort of trust. (This is like the only response I seem to be contributing, no one seems to have read the full thing, so people keep asking questions like this that are answered by the source, so there is no interesting conversation).