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You’ve struck on an interesting problem in decentralized systems, Sybil attacks [0]. How do you prevent someone from registering multiple accounts and pretendin
by null0pointer 3y ago
You’ve struck on an interesting problem in decentralized systems, Sybil attacks [0]. How do you prevent someone from registering multiple accounts and pretending to be multiple people? In Bitcoin, and other cryptos, the problem is ignored because it doesn’t matter at the address level since you have the same amount of bitcoin no matter how many addresses it’s split between. However, in other systems within the crypto-ecosystem it may be desirable to establish a 1:1 human:account ratio. This is exactly what Sam Altman was/is trying to solve with his WorldCoin thing which also uses biometrics (I’d personally not sign up for WorldCoin and advise against it for others). Largely it remains an unsolved problem AFAIK.
Jumping back to banking the homeless, I mentioned in the previous comment that if criminals tried to use these small accounts to launder money it should be relatively easily detectable by the banks. I would add that I don’t think it’s a problem if a given homeless person opens N of these accounts for small values of N since that would still be a small total cashflow volume. The main things I’m interested in with such a scheme would be allowing homeless people to have somewhere to store what little money they have without risk of having it robbed from them [1], allowing them to have a normal way to get paid from any job they might work, and allowing them to purchase things online (perhaps delivered to an Amazon locker or other pickup location). I’m not saying this idea is perfect, it certainly isn’t, but my point in the previous comment was that there are people who are underserved by the existing banking infrastructure.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
1: They could authenticate with an account number or card and a PIN at an ATM. Here opening multiple accounts would be an advantage for the security conscious because they could open a duress account and put a fraction of their money in it to withdraw if they were ever forced to by a robber.