The Price of Forgery.pdf (968.6 KB)
Proof of Personhood has run for over a decade without a way to measure itself.
We pick human-verification methods - BrightID, Worldcoin, Idena, a passport scan (each a real feat of engineering, with all due respect) - on intuition and private trial-and-error, then route millions through them: quadratic funding, DAO treasuries, basic income, governance over AI. What’s missing is a shared number that says this method costs $X to break.
The paper argues the only objective measure is the one the market sets - no committee or expert panel will produce one - and proposes the price of forgery (PoF): the dollar amount required to forge an identity a given method will accept. It’s objective because it isn’t anyone’s opinion. It’s set by whoever is cheapest at the forging, and they don’t need to be polled.
To discover that number, we describe the Upala protocol - where any user can voluntarily mark their own identity as Sybil in exchange for money - and the Gentle Methodology, a dual auction over score and pool size that walks the market upward in small steps until forgers reveal the price.
It also includes a breakdown of the common misconceptions the idea has collected over the years - “but you’re paying bots,” the bot tragedy of the commons, whether this is just oligarchy with extra steps, the avalanche-exit / bank-run worry, and why Upala isn’t a Proof-of-Personhood method but sits underneath them. If you’ve objected to this idea before, that section is probably where your objection lives.
Feedback welcome!