[Applause]
all right welcome everyone this is my
name isn't LLC co-founder of democracy
earth were a nonprofit organization that
basically tries to understand what
democracy is in the information age and
we have been doing a bunch of crazy
Democratic experiments over the last
five years we tried everything from
liquid democracy direct democracy
participatory budgeting quality building
you name it we work with all kinds of
organizations we work with political
parties we were with the parliaments
congresses nonprofit organizations and
also decentralized networks and here's
the thing I can tell you after five
years of doing Democratic experiments
usually when people go out there for a
boat it's because it's a very high-risk
decision and the higher the risk the
higher the need for
when it's a contentious decision there's
also the interest in trying to corrupt
or subvert or manipulate the
decision-making processes over these
five years we have also been hacked a
lot of thanks democracy is one of the
most hostile environments to deploy
assistance so we learned a lot and today
I want to talk about the core of the
problem that is a decentralized networks
we know very well what happened with
centralized networks with centralized
networks there's one company one Silicon
Valley corporation that brought
democracy and that's Facebook and the
recent Facebook growth democracy is
simply because they were the best ones
at formalizing humans on the web and
that means that Facebook today has a
database with 2.7 billion people larger
than the Chinese government by than any
government on earth now they're even
considering their own currency so when
you become the largest repository of
identity with people they consult be
straining your face AI algorithms every
day you you you'll likely end up
breaking whatever technology is present
technology
democracy's being made with me now when
we look into blockchain space there's a
tremendous amount of innovation
happening but there's one key missing
ingredient which the way God in an
utterly languages identity humans were
are the humans in the merchants we are
blocking tools to promise humans over
these networks so the problem with this
is that it's limiting the social impact
of bludgeons blood Chiefs have been
extremely good and the financial part of
the spectrum of the economic activity
the promise of what budgets can achieve
in terms of transforming our society
beyond finance beyond capitalism out
there
if we look quickly a group of work which
inaugurated our whole space within
satoshis paper the explicit mention of
Satoshi and in his paper in relation to
governance is one CPU one boat and it's
basically one CPU one ball this ruled by
the machines not by the people ruled by
capital not by society and this has no
this makes sense in the world of finance
for privacy is a fundamental right and
this has spent and the design of these
protocols around finance and around
protecting privacy but at the same time
were still witnessing how democracy is
being disrupted and very broken all
around the world
because of digital technology as well so
the protection of disinterest and
logic based networks who use this this
tremendous destructive capacity of this
technologist to improve our democracies
or to level up or democracies for the
challenges of the 21st century must not
be lost now when we look in to proof of
existence something we all know here in
this room is a group of state systems
voting with your money
whoever has more money wins it's a good
authentic way of governance and maybe
this makes sense for private companies
where you want the largest shareholders
with the largest skin in the game to
have more influence in the
decision-making process
and when it's about public goods when
it's about public infrastructure not
necessarily skin the game is a good
alternative to wait the conflicting
interests we find within society and
even if the skin the game argument was
to be put under
sometimes investors have scheme in
multiple games and sometimes you want
some games to lose for other games to
win so scheme the game it's not
compatible under contract of interest an
interesting case this here is in the
governance of animal on one of the a GPS
you know this is a time line but on the
on the x axis you see the different
balls of people staking tokens on the a
peahen at the last minute a whale appear
and not seek single whale pretty much to
control of entire election now the other
goals became relevant because their way
simply waited until the last moment to
decide how he she or it would allocate
its tokens and bring the election in its
own interest so who will stay can work
for certain certain aspects but it's
it's you know they have the prophetic
and way of governments so here's the
question that we're facing and this is I
would make a disclaimer right now I'm
more confused than ever about this
problem of trying to fill out proof of
human which is whether but we have
identified after five years of doing
work at democracy earth as the core
challenge to sort out in order to
understand how we can do democracy over
the Internet is proof of human possible
under more confused than ever
but I'm convinced that we forget this we
will get all of these stops that are
that have tremendous potential if we
sort out proof of human we will get
democracy universal basic income portal
craley
better alternatives to kyc firm
electrons even love sri communism who
knows a lot can happen if we can do
proof of human I don't know
I read involved with some we're going to
say
the party leader in Argentina support Li
I have had the increments will suit to
found that eight years ago the mobility
he tell you by which is exactly like the
popular reading when cells and they are
running for the presidential election
this year or a Lou Young who is trying
to make ubi this this is the demand side
these are the folks that we don't need a
technology like proof of human in order
to deliver on some of the promises in
order to take watching based technology
beyond the means of the finance and
start building technologies that and
also print solutions to society but
here's the principle that we must abide
with here here's a very important that a
consideration that I think it's great
that Edward Snowden in doing what three
in Berlin this year he said this and I
think was you know definitely highlight
of that extraordinary conference give
FDA in the summer we don't need to
verify the entity we need to verify the
right face
and it's a very important distinction
because if we put our identity on change
in a mutable ledger further to zero
forever and it bins happen and there's a
totalitarian regime then regime can use
the information in very dangerous ways
so when we're working they were working
with a very sensitive piece of
information but we - we - prepares us
for the future we need to design systems
that can help us understand in you know
what context in a world of our
computation will be far more abundant is
today which is far more about that it
was yesterday
how much computation look in that world
and found that world we can create
systems and we are sure that we will not
be taken away by a is and all kinds of
machines and also we must avoid recreate
the auto Berg and Facebook for the
Chinese Communist Party which are the
two largest thanks to privacy
our identities in the world right now
when they wealth began 25 years ago the
work was also this dream of free
information of connecting humanity no
one ambition during the 90s even though
there was a lot of people trying to make
money but no one envisioned that
something like Facebook will come out
out of the way and you know Facebook
started breaking the burger ceasefire
way before Donald Trump they started
bringing the Morrises actions during the
Obama election Facebook was critical for
the election of Obama the the exercise
was not be stuff because well done
because there was the Americans using
Facebook to elect an American president
when the Russians are using Facebook to
elect an American president or any
foreign powers using this Trojan horse
to elect an authority over another
country then the very concept of the
nation-state start exploring the very
concept of non-domestic intervention in
each other's affairs is no longer there
so we're in a very new political reality
and we must prepare ourselves for a
world of abundant competition now
another computation is showing us
something that is a very scary and is
that the cheaper information gets the
more truth becomes manipulated and I
think an extraordinary example this is
big Bates
he takes all of these pictures of these
guys that you see here don't exist they
can be generated by what is called a
generative a parcel network which ISA is
to machine learning algorithms or to
neural networks that reinforce each
other and learn from each other and once
the network is able to understand the
properties of human faces I guess the
final a chibi is in the room
[Applause]
actually I don't mind I can talk louder
among friends here there might be some
spice but that's okay so the weird thing
about this technique of Gans is that
usually in technology there's this thing
called the uncanny valley the uncanny
valley and in CGI computer graphics the
uncanny valley is that moment where you
can see the thing tries to be so
realistic that you see it start seeing
the glitches rather than their realistic
attempts of the graphic or the 3d
animation that you're looking at in
these pictures there's no more antenna
valleys extremely hard to tell if these
pictures have been generated or not my
algorithm there are some tweaks that you
can look very closely that might tell
you that this has been generated by
others but otherwise we have to prepare
for a world where this can be done with
any place in video format and also with
our voices and the better Gans get the
weirder reality gets now this is not
necessarily all bad this is this
actually can be weaponized and to break
existing political reality
I mean testing example and effects is
the under medium campaign which is in
Casa pal called the yang Tao which I
would encourage you to check it out and
become a member you have to pay 40 light
to put to become a member of the yang
now one of the first experiments that
came out of that is doing deep fake
videos about Andrew yes I think this is
brilliant because you know in a McLuhan
when Lupin said the medium is the
message
Andrew Young is this guy talking about
universal basic income because
artificial intelligence is going to take
all our jobs and we get to communicate
this display exactly what the power of
the artificial intelligence is doing
with reality itself so the main message
defects
let's use them to break existing
political reality but let's be aware
that this can be used this is the space
that the world that were gonna be living
in the next couple of years another big
problem for a decentralized identity
were verifying humans on Cheney's
serials Sybil's that might impersonate
multiple identities usually a technique
to prevent this is using reputation
algorithms PageRank a very well-known
reputation algorithm that gave us Google
but the problem with reputation
algorithms is that they are really in
mathematical terms algorithms of
centrality they identify they start
making more notes more central than
other notes so it starts centralizing
all over again
well when we've what we want to achieve
is a decentralized protocol then there's
how we store identities or how we index
miss identities if we narrow down
identity to a one dimensional piece of
information whether it's a user name or
an address or or you know any kind of
one dimensional identifier whoever has
no knowledge of that the list of
addresses can become you know can start
exploiting this information or
anyway so we maybe would have to also
think about how we store the information
related to identity or how we refer to
identity in in digital space so because
I'm very confused what I thought I'm
gonna do here at Def Con is just show
you everything that I've been looking
around that's happening there strength
to do a proof of human approach and
these are all prototypes or very
interesting demos and and experiments
that are trying to take different angles
of how we verify humans over
decentralized networks so a very very
nice experiment since humanity now
humanity now is a token curated registry
you've staked tokens and you nominate
candidates and this get approve or
disapprove or you can challenge existing
candidates by using a simple token
economy humanity now is based on Twitter
so you evaluate the candidates by
looking at their Twitter profiles and if
they're due to proper looks like it's a
unique human then you can vote in favor
of that profile it has some box I was
able to generate five identities with it
simply changing the username of the of
my Twitter account but first it is a
nice first step where we can start
playing well how can t see ours up with
this runner and I encourage you to check
out humanity
play with it yourself it's already like
on the main an evolution of this
approach and this is still under the
wraps I think it's you know it's still
being worked by the team of klaris we
are democracy art we are collaborating
with them is to do a web of trust with
using TCR with video groups
the interesting thing about clips is
that it introduces an element which i
think is very important for evaluating
these groups which is randomness if you
know if we look at page rank in page
rank you will an define validators that
are gained more reputation and other
validators and as you gain more
reputation that means that maybe in the
future you can bribe those highly
reputable validators and those highly
reputable validators can corrupt the
system so we need to do a system where
Random randomness is an important
element and the jurors or those who are
evaluating the proofs you know cannot be
predicted because they are the
consequence of sortition
which is one of the properties of the
original Greek democracy sortition and
claryce is definitely the one technology
in the space that is really playing with
with randomness and electing jurors to
evaluate evidence in very interesting
ways and they are you know working in
the direction of the helping figure out
how to do proof of human another
approach which i think is one of the
most approaches in this space is doing
synchronous tuning tests this is a
project from Russia called Idina and
what idea has identified is tuning tests
our machine learning resistant or our
very hard
Peters to do but very easy for humans to
and here is a very simple example they
call these flips so you have two flips
the same four images on each strip and
in one of the images the correct is the
right order and the order is the is
correct and the other image the order is
not correct so you have to decide which
one is right
usually you can do this right now
yourselves usually humans get this right
95% of the times over 90% of the times
computers get this right 70% of the
times why is that because we humans we
have the cultural background to
understand what might be the narrative
or the story of the cat and the flowers
and what might be going on their
computers might be able to recognize
some of the patterns inside the pictures
but computers don't have the cultura
background to understand how these
pictures go room together so this is a
very interesting exercise and this has
let's do the guise of idea to be able to
actually a research and here's another
one if you want to do it to actually
research machine learning resistance
tuning tests and they have found out
that these types of tests they need to
have certain properties to be machine
learning persistent one is these
programs need to belong to them what is
considered AI card programs AI heart
problems are problems that do not
consist of pattern recognition anything
that is based on pattern recognition can
eventually be explained it with anomaly
these are problems that will
abstract thought or some kind of insight
that they know it's color for a machine
to grasp also this means that these
problems must not be generated by an
algorithm because anything that is
generated by an algorithm can be
reverse-engineer so this need to be
products that are created by humans and
not by algorithms so what I dinna does
what I needed us is they put this during
tests in the network and participants of
the network have to solve this during
test at the same time so this is how
they prevent civil attacks they have a
party where let's say actually the next
one is in two days you can go to the EDA
website thanks yeah I guess for the API
outside the so you get people solving a
problem that is easy for humans
- machines at the same time because this
during tests partly solving problem a
solar project party is happening in
simultaneously
in a synchronous event you might have a
genius that is able to solve three or
four or five of these superfast but
that's why it's not exactly a proof of
human protocol more of a proof of
personhood protocol you might get some
signals but because it's the resolution
of these problems happens at the same
time it prevents the civil attack
problem assuming that these during tests
are still hard for machines to figure I
think that we need to look deeper into
this time creativity or how we think
about this but this is a very
interesting approach of some of these
ideas is your research in your social
graph there is a very good paper by a
while we'll define identity as a social
intersection persist on evaluating or
your social graph assuming that identity
is a consequence of the different social
intersections or the different groups we
are a part of and it's interesting
because for example usually cities a lot
of people will belong to a lot of groups
so you have many many narrow
intersections and then each one of these
intersections will describe a part of
your identity whereas in rural areas
usually a lot of people below
same group so you have populated few
populated intersections whereas in
cities you have many intersections with
few people in them and that's the
difference between living in a city and
living in the countryside intersectional
identity is a pretty formal way of
identity and the claim of this paper is
that we can formalize some aspects of
this identity model and start basing
identity or creating even a new
political subject that is not making a
link to the individual but it's also
linked to its communities or its
multiple communities which is an
interesting approach I will recommend
checking on this paper there are some
implementation of some of these ideas
this protocol called brain ID right ID
you you have score which begins with 0
and you start making hot chicks with
trusted contacts and if those contacts
belong to a group and you can you 50% of
the group you have already established a
connection with and you become a member
of that group that will beat your score
in a civil right score proprieties is an
implementation of graph analysis and
blue graph analysis establishes a score
that tries to estimate your your the
lightness of you being a unique human so
they have a working version on
you can play with it there's you know
something that we ask ourselves is you
know can we actually piggyback piggyback
government infrastructure what about the
piece of information you provided by
governments which have already done a
lot of the proof of work to this in mind
know that you're a unique human in a way
that we don't reveal information about
the government so maybe our technique is
your show is that you want a
government-issued ID and you take the
typical picture unit a will see of your
face and showing your government issued
ID but we have technology that is able
to automatically blur from that
government ID any piece of personal
information you know the same technology
that can automatically blur bits of
information in your government ID is the
same technology that can actually paste
a new information into the internal
government ID what we want to verify is
you know not necessarily who you are or
what specific information that is
personal about me that I be but we will
do verifies that you hold a government
issued by the ID we don't care about
your name username
your surname or your address or anything
like that we only care that you are a
legitimate older a government-issued ID
but you know this technology can also be
used for other other purposes the other
is sticking with hard work not only
thinking about this with software using
tracking devices that never ask for any
kind of personal information technology
like this thing that I have here that is
constantly attacking my movement around
the planet or my movement are on the
streets
estimator actually moving around this
world so make sure that either I'm a
living being might be a way of trying to
to use a bit of information than to mind
some kind of proof of human assuming
that you know this this hard work is
antara which is a big assumption these
are some of the ideas of what's
happening with with proof of human so
look at all this looking at everything
that's happening and all of these
implementations have trade-offs some are
easier than others some are cheaper than
others
some are more is specific with be
workable let's not just focus on one
specific approach let's try to find out
how no how we can work with all of these
different approaches and kinda come up
with a common denominator or a common
score that comes all of us wait is
different ways of abandoning identities
so an idea that has been injected to me
by Albert Wagner actually is going to
the rearmost pin you know that entity in
a probabilistic way not fidelity either
you know you are a human or not human
but begin an identity or human is a
spectrum and the chances of the landing
code that you're a human based on
different certificates or different
schools so the problem of myung
basically when and it is very hard is
because it's this thing that lives in
these two universes no one is the
subjective universe that consists mostly
of our attention and the other is the
objective universe and is it is
something that lives in between this so
considering the proof of human things I
showed you before we can see that in the
object inside of the spectrum basically
we're doing planes as strings of bits
any string of bits we have pictures
fingerprint video you know these
districts of pills come from nowhere
entropy entropy
yes they are and we have different
verification mechanisms that rely on
computing some running more on computing
and the balance rule a more on a conical
attention like a be Einstein stands
intersections machine learning during
tests and TC arts so can we waste all
this in a score that can help us make
sense out of this something that no even
any medium address some kind of
heuristic that will tell me okay this is
this address is likely to be 92 percent
human and then people can write small
contracts using them input in order to
evaluate a creditor or ever with any
kind of a human based service but the
bigamy classes were doing an algorithm
like this is who watches the watchman
who is determining how this algorithm
works so this algorithm must not be
simply had a blank machine must be
something that can take into
consideration you know how we want to be
observed how we want to decide how we
want to be observed how we know already
is the source of something that comes
from a process that is legitimate so to
understand legitimacy underneath that
you know it's interesting and we have
been researching under that democracy is
quality building how many of you are
familiar with quality building okay I
would encourage you to the Riverina high
quality coding basically you can both
agree on
Miami PD boats but the more boats you
put on the same issue the cost of that
increases nonlinearly by quadratically
so you put two votes on something it
would cost you four tokens we put
people's it will cost you
nine talk ins and this means that with
vanity building you are not only
measuring the Preferences of the boaters
you're also mentioned the intensity of
those preferences and a consequence of
quality boating is that it tends to
generate the normal distributions of
preferences in tests we have done using
Likert scales the Likert scale follows
this typical service where you have
strongly disagree strongly agree and
balance in between when it without
quality holding people tend to go to the
extremes to strongly disagree strongly
agree but when it's week was a debugging
we have this Gaussian burst dismissed
normal distributions and people tend to
go closer to the center so there's less
polarization and the data is a much
better organic distribution which helps
to miss birnley actually perfect balance
for machine learning algorithms we have
done an implementation in quality coding
the first implementation the u.s. for
the state of the United States and we
can exactly that we got an organic
distribution of 41 state legislators to
resign over a hundred and seven bills
and we have a distribution of the how to
rank these bills throughout time so when
we compare this with participatory
budgeting with participatory budgeting
this illegal distribution of tokens or
post with participatory budgeting
legislators found the 50 60 % of the
bills have the same amount of tokens so
they were not able to prioritize among
the long tail of bills with one big body
we were able to prioritize a very long
tail of bills so we're working on
bringing some of these ideas together
we're building a democracy down below so
I'm gonna put my shares of all of the
subject to this democracy doll
experiments and we you know there's more
to this like zero knowledge proof and
year 675 and LED standard come look for
me on Twitter and ask Santa City on
Twitter and there's a group of humanity
meet up if you want to come is tomorrow
at 6 p.m.
take a picture of that and we'll talk
more about this thank you very much
[Applause]