While doing my weekend research, I’ve been looking for reputation systems and how to implement one using blockchain or decentralized technologies.
I found Upala, which is
Upala is an anti-Sybil system for DApps and a decentralized digital identity.
Provides a digital identity uniqueness score in dollars (Price of forgery).
Utilizes the social responsibility concept (“Invite only trusted members, or lose your money and reputation”).
Hierarchical social graph. Built with groups. Stored on-chain.
Simple off-chain graph analysis and on-chain proofs.
Upala is a protocol. It enables to build different identity systems united under the same scoring standard.
The protocol can wrap over existing systems (Bright ID, Humanity DAO, Idena) and unite them.
Which is interesting, because it involves a Proof of Authenticity (in this case an unique digital identity), it is kind DID but more meta (ie related to social graph). Why not a simple KYC then?
If we then read DemocraticEarth Paper, it says:
Current blockchain-based identity certifications may be categorized as strictly objective: they consist of cryptographically signed statements that go no further than timestamping a hash with an encryption algorithm. The failure to provide an input for subjectivity accounts for a central challenge: the inability to address the question of “Who verifies the verifier?”. Looking at identity outside of the scope of centralized or governmental verification, requires the construction of new status functions embedded in collective intentionality that can substitute for the shared subjectivity legitimizing former sources of validation.
In our Identity Ring or Web of Trust, the vouching of your identity is in the social graph or group. This is quite interesting, because then you can use as an alternate way to digitally, use Decentralized Law smart contracts and even for things like Universal Basic Income and Impact Delivery Agreements.
And this is not new, back in 2008 just before Bitcoin, when I worked with Admios, we did a proof of concept of something called SharedValues. Same idea, just that there was no cryptocurrency back then (or well, soon) and it was based on equity.
In a next post I’ll dig more into future work assets contracts and more about UBI and IDA.
— Rogelio
