June 24, 2021. Idena AMA transcript

On June 24, 2021 the Idena core team hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session in Idena’s official Telegram chat. In case you missed it, here is the AMA transcript. We have also added the answers to some questions that were asked but not addressed during the AMA. The questions are given as found in the original.

Technology

The last 4–5 validations resulted in a big number of failures to validate due to network congestion, when is a substantial scalability upgrade expected?

Network congestion is not the main cause of validation failure. The main reason is the connection problem and weak routers.

At present, validation sharding is in active testing. All the key functions are implemented. We plan to release validation sharding as soon as we finish testing, presumably with one of the upcoming forks.

Currently, it’s relatively easy to do 2–3 Short validations simultaneously which makes it easy to have multi accounts. Any plans on stopping this and how?

No, because we don’t see semi-uniqueness as a big threat to the network. On the other side, increasing short session requirements can create a barrier for some users to enter.

Additional rewards for good quality flips through a yet to be chosen method or through a voting system during the long session: e.g. You’d get 3 votes. 1, 2, 3. One being the one that you consider the best.

A community-created list of suggested criteria for a good flip could be provided. Some criteria examples:

- The creator of the flip takes into consideration what psychology defines as Theory of Mind ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind )

- The creator avoids images with lots of small details or other things that make it hard to recognize what’s in the picture etc…

Technically, it is easy to implement voting. The question here is what a good flip is. From the user’s egoistic point of view, a good flip is a flip that is easy to solve. On the other hand, a good flip for the common good of the network is a flip that is also hard to solve for the AI. And we want to introduce scoring mainly to reward the users for creating AI-resistant flips.

Will all of Ethereum’s smart contracts be possible on top of Idena too? Or are there going to be limits/differences to Idena VM?

We will try to ensure compatibility with Solidity as much as possible so that it is possible to use the whole mass of dApps developed in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Can we expect a wallet encryption feature similar to qt type wallets where we can unlock it exclusively mining only, requiring a password?

Yes, but this task is not on our priority list.

Are you thinking of implementing the same actions from the desktop app for the web version? (Creation and deletion of invitation code, oracle vote, mining, ..)

Yes, we want to make the experience with the web app and the desktop app similar and to add the functions of the desktop app to the web app.

Do you plan to adapt the web version for smartphones as well as the possibility for smartphones to connect to their desktop client?

The adaptive layout of the web app that will look good on smartphones is one of our priorities now. Although, we see the shared node marketplace as the main option for node connection.

Bad flips in a short session spoil the validator score and thus lose the possibility of having a second invite but not through his own fault, how to fix this?

This problem can be solved by better reporting mechanics during the long session. We are aware of the problem and we are working to improve the accuracy of the reporting system. We still see a lot of room for improving the quality of reporting and will introduce more mechanics to stimulate the users to do reporting work during the validation session.

Can you begin to buffer the flips 5 minutes before validation? So we have no problems with “not loaded flips” during validation. Thanks guys 😊

Flips are now buffered 5 minutes before the validation. Meanwhile, to decrypt a flip, the client needs to get the key from the author of the flip. The keys are sent at the beginning of the short session, which causes network congestion. The users who run weak routers can experience technical difficulties. If you face connection problems during the validation, we recommend using the Web App and rent a shared node running on VPS for the validation.

If someone reports 1/3 flips u lose everything. but can that be changed to: if 1/3 get report u lose 50% of all rewards, and if 2/3 get report u lose everything?

Flips are the key element of Idena network security. As flips are created by people in a decentralized way, it is necessary to have an efficient system to keep the quality of flips high and prevent unwanted content. That is why we don’t want to decrease the penalty for bad flips.

Would it be possible, in the future, to solve flips on validations that are made by same-aged nodes? ..like an age 10 node makes flips for another age 10 node

This will create inequality in the network and reduce the randomness of flips. If the cause of this suggestion is to improve the quality of the flips, we prefer the way of incentives like rewards for good flips and education of new network participants.

What is the cause of the ‘empty blocks’ issue that we encountered in the last dozen epochs? What could solve those issues?

Empty blocks appear because the network can’t reach a consensus about a block. We have a solution already, it will be added in one of the next releases. Even now it doesn’t affect the validation.

In the GitHub code we can find a maximal shard size of 3000 and a minimal shard size of 1400. Why has the team chosen those data?

We are testing different size limits of shards. Probably, the maximum shard size at the beginning will be bigger than 3000. We plan to fine-tune the size for the mainnet after the release in a series of forks that will follow.

How can we grow the conversion rate from candidates to newbies? Those 55% are not all ‘real’ newbies, some people run and terminate regularly multiple identities?

Low conversion rate is a big issue, especially when invites are limited by protocol rules. And the biggest problem is that many people take the invitation and don’t attend the validation at all. We are considering different solutions to increase the conversion rate. The goal is to increase the level of commitment of the candidate and introduce the tools that can motivate candidates to attend. Here’s a couple:

• The candidate proves the commitment by doing useful work and spending time: learn how Idena works, create some promotional or explanatory content, volunteer to help the community in some way. If a person spends the time to do that, it is more probable they will attend the validation, because missing would mean wasting time for nothing.
• Candidate locks an affordable stake in iDNA to get an invite and gets their stake back in case of attending the validation.

We invite the community to start a discussion on how to solve this problem. If some viable solutions arise, we can consider funding the implementation.

How likely is it that AI will break Idena? If Idena becomes popular, more effort will come from hacking. Is the flip system really AI-resistant? IMO this is the key.

We see a number of issues related to the risks of AI attacks:

• repetitive flips in the network created according to templates (seed-tree, child-grown-up, etc.). We consider this to be a serious threat and an opportunity for an AI attack.
• We see problems with the reporting system — for example, people do not report flips that are irrelevant to the 1st keyword.
• The current vocabulary of keywords does not provide enough diversity of flips. There are many abstract and synonymous words.
• Also, people are reluctant to use collages and drawing tools.

We are planning improvements to mitigate these risks and provide AI resistance to the flip system.

Will it be possible to run token on top of Idena this year? What will be the deployment costs?

Running tokens requires smart contracts. We plan to release smart contracts by the end of this year, and we want to make Idena smart contracts as compatible with Solidity as possible.

Will there be an official testnet to try out sharding? Or will you run those experiments on the ‘experimental’ mainnet first?

No, we don’t plan to use testnet to test sharding. Full-scale testing requires the whole network to take part. It makes no sense to test sharding on a smaller network because we run multiple tests on our botnet in advance.

The Flip Qualification Commitee size should have the same number of participants for everyone, to uphold the principle of equality.

The committees are made the same size. Although not all the participants attend the validation, that’s why the committees could be smaller. We can introduce mechanics for excluding random decisions for small committees (e.g. when 2 out of 3 identities report, it doesn’t cause a penalty). Also, we can increase the committee size, but it will lead to more flips that every participant has to solve during the long session.

Is the pool mechanism for human farmers finished?

Currently, we don’t plan any changes. We want to have more pool-related analytics to decide if any adjustments are necessary.

What will be the unique benefits of implementing a web-assembly-based smart contract engine? Will that hinder adoption since most developers use Solidity?

We will try to make smart contracts as compatible with Solidity as possible.

How did you just test the network limits to define proper shards size?

We test the network on our botnet. Although, this environment is not ideal and doesn’t reflect the problems of the real network. On mainnet, we plan to start with shards of around 6K nodes and analyze how the network works. In case of overload, we will reduce the shard size by forking the protocol.

How weak nodes affect time to reach consensus after validation

We see that network desynchronization is due to weak nodes that cannot withstand the load during validation. This leads to a longer wait period at the end of the validation. We are planning some improvements in this area in the coming releases.

How to avoid Vercel centralization during web validation?

A reliable and secure solution is to host the Web App on IPFS.

Is there a limit in pool size? Is it possible max size as a percentage of total nodes on the network?

The size of the pool is not limited by the implementation.

If once per epoch a delegated account leaves the pool to vote as an individual, and after goes back to the pool, how that vote is counted?

This vote is counted the same as the vote of an independent identity that is not a part of the pool.

Running the same ID on 2 different nodes simultaneously, do not receive penalties nor more nor less mining rewards, how does affect the network?

Running two nodes for the same identity results in losses of the block proposal rewards.

Applications

Idena is a jack of all trades (UBI, airdrops, oracles…) but a master of none. What ‘killer app’ will break Idena into mainstream consciousness? How & When?

Idena is a cryptoidentity blockchain in the first place. We believe that cryptoidentity is the next big thing. It’s the next step towards the evolution of decentralized systems on the Internet. Bitcoin brought peer-to-peer cryptocurrency payments. Ethereum developed a virtual machine for running decentralized apps. Idena introduced cryptoidentity enabling people to build decentralized governance on the Internet.

As a blockchain, Idena aims to become an ecosystem where cryptoidentity-powered dApps are available for everyone. Compared to the other blockchains, the key difference of Idena is that iDNA can be mined by anyone without initial investments. Consequently, Idena dApps will be available to any user. Killer apps will be built as smart contracts on top of the Idena blockchain and will be available to every user.

Will we see Slido with Idena-login to avoid fake-upvotes next AMA?

Good idea, hope we do!

Private wealth transfer through micromixers could be possible in future. How you are prepared that these might be used for criminal activities?

Criminals do many things that common people do: they use Telegram, they speak English, they fly by plane… This does not mean that all these activities have to be prohibited. We should not sacrifice privacy to deal with risks that may or may not exist. Criminal networks find hundreds of ways to circumvent any restrictions. At the same time, common people can’t hide from the eye of Big Brother.

Do you see Idena anonymous publishing platform could be spilled by hate speech, racist, and disinformative publications? How to fight against these?

The core team doesn’t intend to restrain the freedom of speech and filter the content because it contradicts the freedom of speech. Instead, one of the models for filtering inappropriate content could be content pre-selection done by oracles and funded by the target audience. Another solution can be promoting the content via the Ad Network. The content gets more exposure, but for that, it has to be censored by oracles who verify ads.

Core team

Is the core team careful about possible black swan event (example: core team in the same airplane -> airplane crashes -> project RIP)?

Satoshi can possibly be dead, but Bitcoin development is going on. The code is 100% open source. We invite everyone to review the code and ask questions.

Do you have a plan to attract and keep developers to build around the ecosystem? Some may be discouraged by the lack of availability from main developers.

We want the Idena community in general, and the developers community in particular, to grow self-sustainable. That means that people can self-organize and create an environment that they need: if they need answers, they figure it out and create public documentation. It is one of the aspects of decentralization as we see it.

From our side, we try to write self-explanatory code. We are ready to support and co-fund initiatives. We plan to attract developers to build dApps and initiate competitions for developers like hackathons, bounties, etc.

How many developers work currently in the core team?

There are 6 key developers in the Idena core team, the activity can be seen on Github.

What is the goal of the core Idena project members? Obviously, miners want $$$price increase and sell some of their funds for profit. What does the core team want?

We want to reach the ultimate goal of Idena. We want Idena to be the biggest and the most democratic exchange. We want Idena to become a collaboration platform for people from different countries:

• For reaching a consensus on any question,
• Funding cross-border impact projects,
• For solving cross-national problems and affecting the governments.

We want to unite people in a highly segmented internet.

Why have you guys decided to stay anonymous?

The core team decided to stay anonymous to prevent authority concentration and formal leadership in the Idena community. We want the Idena ecosystem to stay decentralized and democratic.

Are women part of the core team?

Yes, Idena is a woman 😊

Marketing and product

Do you have any plan to launch a marketing program to kickoff the price? Because I don’t want to see it runs on WINTER.

We don’t want to spend resources on hype marketing. Neither are we afraid of winter, we have enough runway for a marathon, and we’re here to stay and pursue our goals.

At the same time, we want to keep the decentralized onboarding system we have now (community invites). And we see that the community is not ready yet to onboard a lot of new users, as the Gitcoin campaign showed. So all in good time.

DEX and P2P Messages be developed ahead of time? Judging by the number of participants so far, these two are better than advertising

The ad network is a priority because it is iDNA utilization scenario, and it is a means to give iDNA fundamental value. It has been under development for some time now. We want to soft-launch the ad network to give some time for live testing before it will be ready for business use.

“…we have contacted several Tier 1 exchanges…listing fees are not feasible…” Consider dialogue with your community re: (quadratic) funding T1 listing fee.

We are looking forward to any proposals from the community. If and when the community will self-organize and come up with proposals and actions, the core team will be happy to support and co-fund the initiative.

On another note, the practice shows that Tier-1 exchange listing can not guarantee high exposure, stable community growth, and reliable positive price effect. There is a lot of examples when, after the Tier-1 listing pump, the price of a listed coin dropped even below all-time low. So, again, we focus on real applications to grow fundamental value.

There is a lot of examples when coin pumps and dumps. So, again, we focus on real applications to grow fundamental value.

When Idena will have a real use? Such as decentralized social network

There are two factors that affect how soon it can happen: the level of technology the network can offer, and the level of adoption (network size, activity, etc.) The core team works on the former. We hope the latter will come in due time.

From the technical point of view, Idena has all the possibilities to become such a social network. Every Idena node runs a distributed file system node (IPFS) which can store users’ content.

At the same time, there are many other real use cases that can be implemented. E.g. Gitcoin Sybil protection, which is live already.

Have you read Vitalik Buterin’s article ‘The Limits to Blockchain Scalability’? What is your take on it?

The key insight for us is that Vitalik instills the idea that the users should have the culture of maintaining a node, but we think the users should be financially motivated to do that, and everyone should be able to run a full node without financial or any other barriers.

Proof of personhood is the thing that makes this possible because without the proof of personhood the system where each participant gets a reward for running a node is susceptible to Sybil attack.

Can you, please, elaborate on the advertisement system? What will keep people’s attention?

It will be the publication platform that is on the roadmap that will keep the attention. The present Ad Network is more like a PoC. We want to check how ads will perform when people make flips.

Community

When the team will be able to pay for community Admins?

We are ready now, we want the community to nominate/vote/propose responsibilities, etc

OR

The community can fund admins (and we can co-fund), we have oracles and locks — all necessary for funding and voting.

Since Idena’s oracle voting already possesses the capabilities of a digital court (Kleros) as long as court segmentation is implemented, any plans?

Oracle voting can is ready to offer dispute resolution, for example, when blocking payment for work performed using an OracleLock contract. To use these tools, you need the appropriate dApps. We are ready to support developers who consider the development of such dApps as a promising economic model for them (for this, for example, there is an owner fee for voting).

Why don’t we have an idena DAO yet? Is it up to the community to start one (maybe once smart contracts are possible in Q4 2021)?

A full-fledged DAO requires smart contracts. However, this is only a technical component. You also need to come up with processes and economic incentives when making decisions that will not allow abuse (for example, spending zero wallet money in collusion). We are ready to support any suggestions and experiments based on Oracle votings.

What coin is Idena’s biggest competitor and, conversely, what coin is Idena’s biggest target to overthrow?

The proof of personhood (PoP) market is small, so we think it is more efficient to collaborate rather than compete. We monitor the other projects on the PoP market, such as BrightID, Proof of Humanity, and some others. But because the technologies used for proof of identity are so different now, they have very different application fields. That is why we don’t consider these solutions as our direct competition.

Idena seems to solve the PoS downside of an individual being able to buy a decentralized community. It seems like DeFi is coming to Idena, what are its plans?

DeFi on top of Idena will be available after full smart contracts release. We expect many cryptoidentity-powered DeFi solutions to be developed with Idena smart contracts.

How do we avoid that all social channels of Idena will be rendered useless with “need invite code, sir” messages in a few epochs with the growing network?

It is up to the community to decide how to manage the inflow of new users. With the invitation rewards system we have in place, we expect the community will come up with an efficient invitation workflow. The core team doesn’t want to dictate any solutions here.

Do the core devs plan ultimately to turn over all governance to a real decentralized DAO in a few years, or do you imagine some Idena foundation in control?

Decentralized governance is one of our goals. Idena controlled by DAO can be a good illustration that we have reached it.

The case of the Zero Wallet fund is a good example: there are 340K iDNA there that can be governed by a DAO. The network must reach a consensus in order to spend the funds. Governance mechanisms for zero wallet fund allocation are to be established in the future. If the community proposes an abuse-resistant governance system for controlling the zero wallet fund, the core team is ready to support it.

If community development on top of smart contracts doesn’t work this year as it is planed according to the roadmap: will the core team take over, or postpone it?

We are ready to support the community initiative about smart contracts at any time.

The community is growing faster but the invitation code is limited, how should we handle this in the future?

The total number of invitation codes grows with the network. The number of available invitations is always half of the network size.