Proof of Community

Economics
1

Problem to be Solved: How to help the under-staked and un-staked communities to get stakes.

The importance of stakes is bigger now, as Ethereum moves to staked universe and economy. We may end up with the similar (legacy centralized economy) imbalances if the on ramps or gateways to the crypto universe is heavily dependent on fiat to be converted.

Stakes are voices and votes, and life and power. Without it, the individuals will not be able to fully participate in the Earth 2.0

The core value proposition thesis:

Is there a need for Proof of Community? Well:

  • There are many projects targeting various aspects of the uns and unders (banked; lacking identifications). But all or most of the protocols are all designed on the individual or person basis.
  • There is a huge amount of solutions related to individuals – identity, attention monetization, exchanging data, profile, attention for value – thus, there must be a similar value and needs, and business opportunity for community basis.
  • The community could be more efficient way to target or deliver services vs. the individuals.
  • Examples of community or group are:
    • A village on the banks of the Amazon river, the various crypto communities
    • A church, a social-identity group (gun-rights, LGBT, etc.); cardiologists; pilots. (There are some 20,000 categories or identifying classifications in the US direct marketing industry, e.g. as granular as some “1,000-single engine licensed pilots in the state of Wyoming”, etc.)

TL;DR:

  • The community subject is hugely varied – e.g. there are some 20,000 direct marketing list (US market alone), and each household is being tracked by some 200 categories (education, single or family, type of vehicles, income, etc.) – thus, the founding organization to focus on the above problem and building the protocol framework, then let the rest of the world build their own tools on the protocol.
  • Proofing itself is challenging technically and in terms of use cases or applications: The proofing ground rules – would it be on some type of mathematical proofs (technical based); or oracle; or….? (If technical, then the village would be harder to Proof.)

Ideas for the project and protocols:

  1. The core
    1.1. ID or identification. (Vs. the individual identity, etc.)
    1.2. The About: Profile. Persona. Skills. The Classifications or attributes – which is what the Payers are seeking.
    1.3. The business model, use cases and the stakeholders.
    1.3.1. The classifications. The attributes which are of value to the greater world. Now, this can be hugely complex to sort out.
  2. “Proofing” mechanisms.
    2.1. The process for engaging with the community or group. (Vs. the individual).
  3. It’s a big world. If we choose to focus on the first Problem – to help the edges to earn the stakes; then, we can build to that as the mission.
  4. Then let the rest of the world build their own use cases on top of the platform. For example, a community of Rh-negative (blood type) would be valuable to certain types of researchers and solution providers.
    My contact: [email protected]
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Are you proposing a particular mechanism for someone to prove that they are part of a community? Or would the idea be that each community would just be a list of accounts that agree to some mechanism for determining membership and then that mechanism would attest to what the members are (which could be as simple as one-account-already-in-the-set-one-vote or something more complex)?

I think this is where a large part of the difficulty is.

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Yes to both.

One is a push by the individual (or preferably by the service/protocol that they being attested by) and the other is a pull by the market, both ought be utilized. But, the pull could be faster and more practical to deploy and commercialize. There are lot of complexities and conjectures ATM.

Push by the individuals or by their services:
There must be multiple ways for the “particular mechanism for someone to prove” membership in a community. One is that a standardize method is created where: as the data (academic, medical, professional, etc.) of a particular individual is created and those are relied upon a proofs. (E.g. by the current identity solutions; and those that are working on a decentralized mechanisms for university degrees accreditations.) Then, the database can be made available – either opt-in basis or non-personal identifiable basis (e.g. to a BRAVE wallet). The project would try to create the mechanism whereby the “hooks or tags” to such data can be standardized to the ecosystem.

Pull by the Asker or Market:
For the “to some mechanism for determining membership and then that mechanism would attest” – it would be something more complex. Here, the “one-account-already-in-the-set-one-vote” would not be of interest, that would be up to the higher level services. I think what I am after is a to append the “proof of concept” to be parallel to or right below the individual identity protocols, so that: to solve the problem of more efficiently targeting, identifying, and engaging a group or community.

There are say, two top needs or use cases to target:
The first is based on a premise that for business uses a community is easier to target and engage vs. individually. A multi-sided marketplace could be created where Payers seek a particular community, and the individuals proof their belonging. I am not sure if this would be more economically efficient in the industrialized markets such as USA where there are the some 20,000 categories to be rented in direct marketing lists (e.g. American Express offers access to their cardholders, Time magazine subscribers, etc.) However, a trustless model for determining and being able to engage a community or a group is what I am trying to propose.

The second is that a significant portion of the world’s population is both unidentified and the individuals’ attributes are not categorized in a usable form for commercial uses or other types of engagement with the industrialized world.

For both, the quid pro quo exchange would be data (passively and actively), attention and time/work.

To help with the approach and the mechanisms - we could combine expertise and opinions from the three fields of tokenomics, the traditional demographics and advertising space, and the new decentralized commerce models such BAT and the identity providers such as CIVIC. And the implementation objectives could be two: for the blockchain commerce uses or the marketplaces; and a model for the under-developed people, villages, regions to somehow be categorized into communities which can be then engaged for commerce to earn stakes or be to be more serviceable by the greater worldwide community.

4

Have you considered how segregating people into buckets for targeted advertising encourages censorship and manipulation? Being able to distinguish A from B allows you to treat A and B differently. That’s why systems that aim to uphold human rights and empower users (Tor, net neutrality, etc…) work so hard to make all traffic, tx, and accounts indistinguishable so that all parties are treated equally and endowed with the same rights and resources.

Also, most people in first world economies with access to resources and data don’t even understand how their data and information is being processed and used, yet it influences and manipulates them everyday. If you’re seeking to build a system that onboards and classifies millions of people who have no prior experience with sophisticated targeted marketing, you’re just taking advantage of them, and they won’t know until it’s too late.

In order to create permission-less innovation, censorship resistance, and real value for communities you have to educate and empower users through opt-in systems that maintain privacy and control. You hinted at this via the example of sharing proofs (zero knowledge right?) to a neutral 3rd party like a Brave wallet, but even there you’re trusting the 3rd party and that still leaves ample room for monopolies or cartels to create “opt-in” mechanisms where there really isn’t any alternative.

Sorry I don’t mean to be overly cynical here, but I don’t see how this would benefit users or communities at all. What am I missing?

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Hi. Thanks for the interest and the perspectives. But…we are on 2 different tracks. And yes, it is still being ideated and there are some core unknowns.

The main challenge I am trying to solve for is: For indigenous people, who do not have individual identification (at least recognized beyond their village) – how can the greater industrial world (NGOs, corporations, UN, etc.) engage with them? In part, because they for one may culturally put a greater weight on their community identification than the people in industrialized cultures. And secondly they don’t have individual identification certifications (documents, etc.) that their industrialized counterparts have. (The bigger question, and which you brought up, maybe: Do we want to bother them (e.g. quantify and identify them) and to draw them into the industrialized world at all, or leave them be?)

Thus, how can the industrialized world engage in some sort of commerce or exchange with the identificationless people, in the absence of the individual-identification attestations that the industrialized world operates on. Thus the idea is, perhaps it is easier to deal with them on their community basis.
Again, the premise is that I am not trying to do business with a particular individual of such village-community (because that requires individual identification, and is much harder task). I am first postulating that in practice, it maybe easier to do business with them on a community or group level first. (BTW – I do not know if this targeting of the community is practical at all - because of one big weakness of this approach. The weakness is that, in the absence of means to individual identify the members of such community, there “must” be an oracle which attest to the properties or characteristics of such community, and that the system must then accept the oracle as the truth.)

Also, that in a “staking economy” or world, where stakes equate to voice, how can we then empower members of such community to earn the stakes and do business with the rest of the Ethereum world. In order for them to earn stakes, there needs to be first solved a way to identify the community, imo. This means for them to have a community-wallet, and wallet control or responsibility to be in part by the oracle, etc.

Now, let’s do a second use ideation for the “Proof of Community” solution for the industrialized world where we each have our various individual identities. The question is, are there use cases for a solution which enables targeting or engaging on a community-basis?

Assumption: People belong to a variety of communities and the more economically active a person is, the more communities she/he belongs to. For example: one or more religious groups or communities; one or more schools; typically, multiple professional groups; etc.

Now: some are more active than others at a particular time. Some alumni belong to a school community, and it is important, but may engage only very infrequently. Whereas, as professional belonging is more frequent. Thus, at times it may be more efficient to target or engage the community rather than the individual members.

1 Like
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You may find this recent paper interesting and relevant: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3375436

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Lane, thank you. The topic of identity is one of the most important in the blockchain space.
My ideation above for the above “Proof of Community” is still being worked on, but very slowly. In part, b/c I am stuck on the part where it will require oracles to represent or certify “the truth” of the community. This can be done, in part, by using gov. licensed oracles. But, this blends with fiat world and on the other hand that may be the way to go.

I am working on two things currently. The Identity matter, and the matter of the private-key management or responsibility.

Give us the Cake: On the topics of Identity and The private-key management or responsibility.

  • Identity solution must include the commerce (UCC) interests b/c the entire fabric of fiat commerce is woven with the identity as its source of the energy and the life force. Our identity is a license from the government. So the big question — how to have our cake and eat it too, i.e. how to also do commerce in the decentralized era without the benefits of this license, and only as an opt-in. We now have a great tool which we did not have before, the “self-sovereign currency”.

Most of the public and businesses are not ready nor want self-responsibility of the keys or ownership of their identity. With great decentralization comes great responsibility, as much as we can eat. Solutions will have to include that in the near future robots and AI agents will start to gain their own identity — some will even benefit from the license of citizenship from their governments. Interesting times.

  • That pesky key ownership thing: “My mother” will never — ever, forever more, for at least 2 more lifetimes — want to or even know what private keys are, nor make the effort to own the responsibility or to know the difference of her PIN from her private key. Thus, until the blockchain space solves for this reality, the great decentralization will not happen. The blockchain space can’t have our cake and eat it too. (Excuse).

If we want the world to increase the pace to become aware and use this decentralization thing, we have to hold their hand — maybe for at least one full generation more — and provide a managed key solution and an account recovery user experience equal to FB, Gmail, and Amazon. We have to create solutions and services to be responsible for their keys. On the other hand, we gain from the faster adoption, and that they will experience some of the “great decentralization”. and acclimate without knowing any better. They will slowly change their behavior and thinking. This, IMO, is more important than forcing the private-key ownership, annoyance, and friction on them. The friction of private key management will very much slow the velocity of crypto use…, and businesses cannot afford that if they want to stay in business.

BTW — IMO, technology will never solve this in its entirety. It’s in the business model and user experience or at least a blend, IMO.

On the other hand: technology CAN solve part of this IF we limit and frame the variables, “benefits and privileges”.

I am exploring an approach where there is a “safe zone”: Where “my mother” would not even use a password to her wallet. Yes. Start with that as the goal, and step backwards until things firm up and jell. Etc. Looking for mates to help solve this!