Gyrosoft All-Weather Simulator Level 2.5: Mission Control (Sybil Resistance)
At Gyroscope we’ve been busy behind the scenes, and you can expect some big announcements from us soon.
In the meanwhile, we’re asking our testnet participants for help in making things a little more Sybil resistant. In crypto, anyone can create as many accounts (e.g., Ethereum addresses) as they want, and so we can’t rely on an Ethereum address to represent a unique individual.
When someone uses a large number of accounts to gain disproportionately large influence in a system, this is known as a “Sybil attack”. Well-designed blockchain systems are typically designed to be Sybil resistant, for instance by adding transaction fees that make Sybil attacks too expensive to be worthwhile.
If there are to be any mainnet consequences from testnet participation, they will depend on accounts being “Sybil Secure”. Since on testnet, all tokens are essentially “monopoly money”, the cost of Sybil attacks are essentially zero without other controls.
To address this and maintain a fair and impartial Gyroscope launch, we are asking testnet users to commit, in a privacy-preserving way, the details of their unique internet identities. These can, in principle, be verified as part of a Sybil deterrence mechanism.
This level will walk you through how to report your encoded message back to mission control. So follow closely!
Step 1
Go to the sybil-resistance.exe section in the Game section of the testnet.
Step 2
Enter at least one of the following: your Twitter handle, your GitHub handle, your phone number.
A few guidelines:
- The more fields you fill in the more likely we will be able to verify you later.
- Enter accounts that you actually use (the final Sybil checks may involve anti-bot measures).
- Including a phone number is likely to be most reliable.
- If you change your Twitter or GitHub handle before the Gyroscope launch, this will likely mean we cannot verify you by that method.
We strongly suggest adding a salt — a string of characters of your choosing, like a secret password — to further protect your privacy.
Step 3
Once you’ve clicked submit, wait for the transaction to be confirmed. Once it is, you will see the option to download a .json file.
Download the .json file and KEEP IT SOMEWHERE SAFE! We recommend making a backup of it somewhere.
Here, you’re downloading the exact preimage of all the data you’ve input — i.e., the payload that you’re putting into the hashing function.
All of this is done locally in your browser — we don’t store any of the data.
Step 4
If you’re successful, if you refresh the screen you should see the Completed box checked and the hash, stored on the blockchain.
How the Privacy-preservation Works Behind-the-scenes
Your information is hashed, meaning it is transformed into indecipherable text. This transformation is practically impossible to revert, so no one else can recover your information if done correctly. However, knowing the input information, you can prove to someone else later (by having them re-hash it) that this was the information used to create the original hash.
Adding a salt of random characters makes this more secure. The reason is that, if someone wanted to recover the underlying information and knew the structure of the data (in our case, Twitter, GitHub, and phone numbers), then they could in principle brute force all combinations of Twitter accounts, GitHub handles, and phone numbers to see which users are connected to which accounts by calculating hashes of each combination and comparing to the hashes committed in the testnet. This is unlikely to happen or succeed, but adding a salt ensures that it is practically impossible.
The hash is computed locally in the browser and is the only piece of information stored on the blockchain — we don’t store any of the underlying information. This is why it’s critical for you to remember your salt, if you use one, as it will be impossible to recover it for you if you lose it.
About Gyroscope
Gyroscope is an all-weather stablecoin designed to be decentralized, scalable, and highly liquid. Gyroscope stabilizes by having a reserve of other assets, with carefully balanced risks, and applying it to balance the market for Gyro Dollars. Gyroscope combines three primary innovations to make this feasible in DeFi. The first line of defense is a risk-stratified reserve, aiming to 100% cover Gyro Dollars. The second line of defense builds on new AMM designs for liquidity boosting and resilience around the peg. Gyroscope also builds in revolutionary mechanisms for safe governance, with Conditional Cash-flows and Optimistic Approvals, which align governance incentives with the vision of Gyro Dollar users.
What to do next
- Follow us on Twitter @GyroStable and retweet for extra credit
- Join our Discord!
- Read about Gyroscope in our updated docs
- Read about how Gyroscope is different: Part 1 and Part 2
- Follow the story to continue the game
