Proof-of-Humanity Networks (Honest Bitcoin)
Bitcoin, Ethereum, IOTA and their likes, are all vulnerable to “fake nodes attack” — harm done by nodes that pose as valid traders, and bona fide transactional entities, while in fact they are “empty identities” — nodes that are established by an abuser in order to exploit the singular source of power of the network: nodes count, nodes majority. Bitcoin (and the others) claim to fame is in the notion that the protocol prevents any minority of nodes to take control of the network. Indeed, whether you go with proof of work, or with proof of stake, or with proof of past, or alike — the power lies within a community of nodes. And so, any network in which nodes can be “faked”, where a single manipulator can readily concoct hundred, thousands, and more nodes mimicking a crowd of bonafide traders, is a network that will fall prey to such node inflation abuse.
Say then that to defend any network protocol based on decentralized power, it is necessary to eliminate fake nodes. When it comes to trading money, we need to develop a “proof of humanity”, proof that any participating node is associated with a verified human being. Some humans could have more than one node, but all their nodes will be associated with their singular human being, allowing the protocol to account for that.
What about corporations? They will have to be listed per a human representative. Even today the lion-share of financial fraud is due to fake corporations, and other non-human owners of money, hiding the identities of their human controllers.
One way to accomplish this “proof-of-humanity” (PoH) is to associate every node with a partial bio identifier, which may be hashed or encrypted, and that will serve as a secret key, Kid. One cross verification solution calls for nodes to frequently identify themselves with their GPS coordinates, to allow near-by nodes to challenge their Id upon a specially developed inspection protocol. Id Challengers/Inspectors will be rewarded. The inspection protocol developed by BitMint will not identify the person, only his or her humanity.
An abuser could register a cluster of close-by fake-nodes, that would cross-verify each other. To prevent this, the network will have a rule that in the event that a node is found fake, then all the nodes it verified are declared fake, and all their money holdings is pooled for community purposes. This will make it too risky for an abuser to build a cluster of fake nodes, and will motivate any bonafide node to counter-verify its verifier.
In order not to surrender identity via the bio-key, the network will allow partial data to be used. The early registrants will identify themselves with very little bio data. Later joiners will find in the general ledger that a previous node shared their same partial bio identification data, and then will add some more data for distinction. So gradually later and later joiners will have to surrender more bio data so that each node remains unique. But still even late joiners will surrender only very partial data, and keep their privacy in tact. Securing the humanity of nodes will allow for easing up some power-sharing protocols, and revitalize proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, etc.
The detailed solution proves quite complicated, so partners are welcome! (gideon@BitMint.com).
