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Kinda surprised no one's used a blockchain for this. The registration flow could be as follows: 1. User registers a non-transferable username (maybe an NFT?)

by jude- 5y ago

Kinda surprised no one's used a blockchain for this. The registration flow could be as follows: 1. User registers a non-transferable username (maybe an NFT?) 2. User signs into the client with the username NFT 3. The server admin maintains a list of shadowbanned username NFTs -- if yours gets added, then the server won't relay your messages. Non-transferability means no one will squat usernames (since there's no money to be made by reselling them), and since it costs money to register but costs nothing to shadowban, the asshats only lose money by being asshats (and their spam doesn't even get read).

southerntofu 5y ago
Most dweb startups you hear about are precisely marketing their "solutions" as such. You hear stuff like "but if there's a financial participation for registration you can't have spam so that's why you gotta use our tokens", which is really ridiculous considering the most nefarious actors usually have a lot of resources at hand.
- jude- 5y ago
  Fundamentally, a struggle between asshats and honest users/admins is a struggle of attrition. The honest participants only win the struggle if they can make it too costly for asshats to continue participating. To achieve this, it would be sufficient to make it so the cost of registering a user account is asymptotically more expensive than the cost of shadowbanning an account. If the software required that each additional account a user registers costs more in USD terms than the previous account, while keeping the cost of shadowbanning a username constant, then the honest participants will win in a struggle against asshats who must keep registering accounts to circumvent the shadowban. A strawman approach would be to require all user accounts to be tied to real-world identities. Then, the software can track how many accounts a real-world person has registered, and bill them accordingly. This obviously has other unrelated problems, but it does make it possible to penalize asshats more and more harshly for each infraction. I was suggesting that a blockchain could be a useful building block here, since it already exists, is widely deployed, and costs money to write state. A more practical approach than the strawman could be to implement a username registration system on a blockchain, such that each registrant must burn some of the blockchain's tokens to register a username (thereby imposing a cost to doing so). Crucially, the number of tokens burnt per name would increase as more and more usernames get registered (or as more and more time passes), and in doing so make it more and more costly for asshats to circumvent a shadowban. This would also make it so asshats would lose a war of attrition against admins, and could be implemented today.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    > Crucially, the number of tokens burnt per name would increase as more and more usernames get registered (or as more and more time passes) This is just a tax on the young.
    - jude- 5y ago
      More like a tax on the latecomers.
dane-pgp 5y ago
How do you make a username non-transferable? It sounds like all you've actually invented is "identifying people by their bank accounts", only with more steps. I suppose if the NFT could be registered using an anonymous cryptocurrency, it might end up being a more privacy-preserving system than getting people to pay for an account using traditional methods. It also might be cheaper than paying to join multiple services, if you only have to pay once and can use your NFT username across them all. On the other hand, a single malicious admin could try to extort you by threatening to ban you from all those other services. A better approach would be a blockchain-based anonymous identity system, which is apparently what BrightID is: https://www.brightid.org/ https://www.brightid.org/
- jude- 5y ago
  > How do you make a username non-transferable? Trivially. You make it so that there's no recognized way to change the private key for a username. > It sounds like all you've actually invented is "identifying people by their bank accounts", only with more steps. I've created a layer of indirection between usernames and bank accounts. The system doesn't need to know or care about how you managed to burn tokens for the username. > A better approach would be a blockchain-based anonymous identity system, which is apparently what BrightID is: Does BrightID guarantee that asshats have an asymptotically worse time registering usernames than admins have shadowbanning them? If usernames are easy to come by, then so are sockpuppets and one-off spam and troll accounts.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    > You make it so that there's no recognized way to change the private key for a username. Making it impossible to rotate keys doesn't sound like it follows cryptographic best practices, but in any case, there's nothing stopping someone from selling their private key to someone else. If you just want to avoid squatting/speculating, you could make the user IDs be random unique values but associate them with a non-unique human-readable name. > If usernames are easy to come by, then so are sockpuppets and one-off spam and troll accounts. I haven't used BrightID, but I believe it works by having users meet in person and mutually verify each other as being unique humans. It should be impossible for someone to pretend to be two people in the same place at the same time, so that does seem viable.
rakshazi 5y ago
no one used blockchain for this because: 1. it's slow, requires insane amount of storage, power and traffic 2. nobody wants non-transferable username for real
- jude- 5y ago
  > 1. it's slow, requires insane amount of storage, power and traffic Compared to the infrastructure required to uniquely identify every human in order to stop them from registering lots of troll accounts, and implementing a fair and accountable law enforcement apparatus to make sure the rules are followed? The blockchain might be cheaper. > 2. nobody wants non-transferable username for real Which is the worse outcome -- you can't transfer your username (but you can register a new one for a fee), or trolls and squatters can trash the system?
  - rakshazi 5y ago
    I prefer Matrix way - open network of different servers. Don't like spammers? OK, close registration on your server. Have public rooms? OK, block servers with open registration. No problems with spammers or trolls at all. And that's literally my experience with 20+ homeservers that I configured Again, nobody wants unique permanent ID per human. PS: regarding "a new one for fee" - I hate services that work this way (hello, Blizzard), IMO.

by jude- 5y ago

southerntofu 5y ago

Most dweb startups you hear about are precisely marketing their "solutions" as such. You hear stuff like "but if there's a financial participation for registration you can't have spam so that's why you gotta use our tokens", which is really ridiculous considering the most nefarious actors usually have a lot of resources at hand.

jude- 5y ago
Fundamentally, a struggle between asshats and honest users/admins is a struggle of attrition. The honest participants only win the struggle if they can make it too costly for asshats to continue participating. To achieve this, it would be sufficient to make it so the cost of registering a user account is asymptotically more expensive than the cost of shadowbanning an account. If the software required that each additional account a user registers costs more in USD terms than the previous account, while keeping the cost of shadowbanning a username constant, then the honest participants will win in a struggle against asshats who must keep registering accounts to circumvent the shadowban. A strawman approach would be to require all user accounts to be tied to real-world identities. Then, the software can track how many accounts a real-world person has registered, and bill them accordingly. This obviously has other unrelated problems, but it does make it possible to penalize asshats more and more harshly for each infraction. I was suggesting that a blockchain could be a useful building block here, since it already exists, is widely deployed, and costs money to write state. A more practical approach than the strawman could be to implement a username registration system on a blockchain, such that each registrant must burn some of the blockchain's tokens to register a username (thereby imposing a cost to doing so). Crucially, the number of tokens burnt per name would increase as more and more usernames get registered (or as more and more time passes), and in doing so make it more and more costly for asshats to circumvent a shadowban. This would also make it so asshats would lose a war of attrition against admins, and could be implemented today.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > Crucially, the number of tokens burnt per name would increase as more and more usernames get registered (or as more and more time passes) This is just a tax on the young.
  - jude- 5y ago
    More like a tax on the latecomers.

dane-pgp 5y ago

How do you make a username non-transferable? It sounds like all you've actually invented is "identifying people by their bank accounts", only with more steps. I suppose if the NFT could be registered using an anonymous cryptocurrency, it might end up being a more privacy-preserving system than getting people to pay for an account using traditional methods. It also might be cheaper than paying to join multiple services, if you only have to pay once and can use your NFT username across them all. On the other hand, a single malicious admin could try to extort you by threatening to ban you from all those other services. A better approach would be a blockchain-based anonymous identity system, which is apparently what BrightID is: https://www.brightid.org/ https://www.brightid.org/

jude- 5y ago
> How do you make a username non-transferable? Trivially. You make it so that there's no recognized way to change the private key for a username. > It sounds like all you've actually invented is "identifying people by their bank accounts", only with more steps. I've created a layer of indirection between usernames and bank accounts. The system doesn't need to know or care about how you managed to burn tokens for the username. > A better approach would be a blockchain-based anonymous identity system, which is apparently what BrightID is: Does BrightID guarantee that asshats have an asymptotically worse time registering usernames than admins have shadowbanning them? If usernames are easy to come by, then so are sockpuppets and one-off spam and troll accounts.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > You make it so that there's no recognized way to change the private key for a username. Making it impossible to rotate keys doesn't sound like it follows cryptographic best practices, but in any case, there's nothing stopping someone from selling their private key to someone else. If you just want to avoid squatting/speculating, you could make the user IDs be random unique values but associate them with a non-unique human-readable name. > If usernames are easy to come by, then so are sockpuppets and one-off spam and troll accounts. I haven't used BrightID, but I believe it works by having users meet in person and mutually verify each other as being unique humans. It should be impossible for someone to pretend to be two people in the same place at the same time, so that does seem viable.

rakshazi 5y ago

no one used blockchain for this because: 1. it's slow, requires insane amount of storage, power and traffic 2. nobody wants non-transferable username for real

jude- 5y ago
> 1. it's slow, requires insane amount of storage, power and traffic Compared to the infrastructure required to uniquely identify every human in order to stop them from registering lots of troll accounts, and implementing a fair and accountable law enforcement apparatus to make sure the rules are followed? The blockchain might be cheaper. > 2. nobody wants non-transferable username for real Which is the worse outcome -- you can't transfer your username (but you can register a new one for a fee), or trolls and squatters can trash the system?
- rakshazi 5y ago
  I prefer Matrix way - open network of different servers. Don't like spammers? OK, close registration on your server. Have public rooms? OK, block servers with open registration. No problems with spammers or trolls at all. And that's literally my experience with 20+ homeservers that I configured Again, nobody wants unique permanent ID per human. PS: regarding "a new one for fee" - I hate services that work this way (hello, Blizzard), IMO.