Thoughts about authenticity on the Steem blockchain - Volume #1: Identity

Thoughts about authenticity on the Steem blockchain - Volume #1: Identity

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Introduction

Recently @the-gorilla posted a series of articles that revealed some apparently deceptive behavior by some highly influential personalities in the Steem ecosystem. I'm not going to revisit the details of that series, but you can read about it here:

• ⚠️ "The Priest and The Contest-Monkey" - Another Privileged Scammer?
• ✍️ The Priest and The Contest-Monkey - Episode 2: The Accountant
• ✍️ The Priest and The Contest-Monkey - Episode 3: Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary...
• ✍️ The Priest and The Contest-Monkey - Episode 4: Plagiarism Reigns Supreme
• ✍️ The Priest and The Contest-Monkey - Episodes 5 & 6: Determining Breakout Points

And I recommend that you do. You can also read the replies from @simonnwigwe, here:

• Is Mentorship on Steemit a bad thing?
• Basic Mistakes you must avoid as a Moderator in the steem blockchain.

I don't want to spend much time recapping these articles because I have a feeling that this post is going to be pretty long, even without digging into the background. In a couple sentences, @the-gorilla was spot-checking the legitimacy of a vote from one of the "booming" accounts, and it led to a whole group of interconnected accounts that were publishing some amount of inauthentic content on the blockchain. The exact amount of inauthentic content is open for debate, but there was - at a minimum - some plagiarism from two very influential Steemizens.

The problem of influential Steemizens posting inauthentic content is bad enough, but there is also circumstantial evidence that multiple identities may have been assumed in order to direct contest prizes and other engagement rewards from one or more contest host to him/herself under an alternate account.

After reading this series of posts, I've been thinking about this from a process perspective. It's clearly not scalable for a single person to go through this exercise at large scale. This sort of thing is the reason why banks and financial institutions hire entire departments to root out fraud. So, how can this sort of problem be dealt with on a decentralized blockchain? From a comment that I posted on the thread, here are some of the topics that occurred to me at the time:

• Of course I'm back to the rewards algorithm, and the ease of overvaluing a post. If Steem has an Achilles Heel, I think this is it.
• Recognizing authentic content, vs authentic people (looking for inclusion of relevant quotes and links between accounts, articles and sites can help with this?)
• The "ideal" whale's job is self-contradictory: be selective and also spread rewards widely
• Time, scale, measuring and automating.
• How does something like Dunbar's number apply to curation?
• This is not unique to us. All social media has content farms. I think the typical response is building an AI system to detect as much as possible before people need to be involved.
• Ways to use the following/follower graph as an hint about authenticity?
• Contests, in particular, create incentives that favor Sybil posting.

And I've had some more thoughts after that. When I started this article, I thought it would be a stand-alone post, but I'm already at 2,000 words and nowhere near complete coverage, so let's call this "Volume #1". Here we go....

Identity: Steem is not a KYC blockchain and The Honor System doesn't scale

Challenge

There has always been something ironic about the way that Steemizens begin to break into the ecosystem and build a reputation. For as long as I've been here, Steemizens have asked newcomers to post Verification photos (which I never did, I don't think). However, one or both founders and many of the early adopters were advocates of Steem as a censorship-resistant place where anonymous people can have a voice.

So, there is a natural tension here between the ability to know someone is who they say they are, and the ability for people to preserve their anonymity. By definition, without Know Your Customer (KYC) or some other identity solution, we simply can't know who the other players are. As @the-gorilla revealed in excruciating detail, the verification photos can be gamed without much difficulty.

IMO, there's nothing inherently wrong with a single person using multiple accounts... After all, I operate the accounts @remlaps and @remlaps-lite. I initially did that when some microblogging applications were created, and I wanted to separate my blog style content from shorter content. In fact, in the early days, when proof of work mining was possible, it was mandatory for people to create numerous accounts in order to compete as a miner. Heck, even professional novelists use ghost writers and/or pseudonyms. (funny side-note: Until his alter-ego became public, work by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman was highly discounted in comparison to work by Stephen King writing as Stephen King).

But, when someone uses multiple accounts in order to divert rewards and prizes in a deceptive manner then it becomes more of a problem. Deceptively posting from multiple accounts could be considered to be a form of a Sybil attack. Here's what the Steem Whitepaper says about Sybil attacks:

Centralized websites prevent spam through rate limiting and some form of ID verification. Even something as simple as reCAPTCHA is sufficient to limit the creation of fake accounts. If someone abuses their account then centralized websites are free to block the account.

In a decentralized system there is no direct way to ban users nor centralized provider able to host a reCAPTCHA and enforce rate limiting of accounts. In fact, the inability to censor users is one of the main selling points of blockchain technology.

So, flaw or feature, this tension is designed into the blockchain. When contests and incentive programs are devised, the project's sponsor must account for it. Whatever the facts of the particular scenario that @the-gorilla uncovered, if incentives are misaligned, some sort of antisocial behavior will always emerge.

Note

This also applies to abuse-detection. If I provide a reward in upvotes for the discovery of plagiarism, it won't be long before a new class of "abuse detective" emerges who posts plagiarized content with one account (or more) and collects rewards for "discovering" it with another.

Opportunity

As I said in the comment above, this problem is not unique to the Steem blockchain. There is vigorous research and development in the area of identity, and even decentralized identity. So, the opportunity is for an entrepreneur to build on that body of research and apply it to the Steem blockchain.

I am reminded of an early service that was available on the blockchain, SteemVerify. Obviously, since they're not still here, the pricing model didn't work. Also, NFTs weren't a thing yet, but that service used to give people a SteemVerify badge in exchange for a fee and some sort of verification action.

Presumably, someone could have contacted the folks at SteemVerify (before it went belly-up) in order to confirm an account verification. (We see something similar with Twitter's $8 per month blue checks.)

So, my thought is that entrepreneurs could revisit this model and make verification into a competitive product. One possible avenue for this is the use of self-sovereign identity with verifiable credentials or other decentralized identity solutions. Then, people running contests could require their participants to be verified by a trusted verification service. Over time, the ones who do it well would remain and the ones who don't would fade away.

Of course, another option is for people running contests to allow participants to enter as many times as they'd like. If I can submit 5 posts under my own name, I would have no less incentive to run any alternate accounts. The rules would be fair, but the drawback here is that the contest judges might have more work to do. This, in turn, could be mitigated through the use of an "entry fee". Participants could be asked to burn some amount of STEEM and/or SBD as a contest entry fee. The burn would have to come out of the wallet, not as a beneficiary reward (beneficiary rewards fall in the category of "easy come/easy go" for someone who is running multiple accounts.).

Another idea for promoters is to learn a lesson from the "proof of life" concept by linking the promotion to some sort of information that only became available recently, maybe a newspaper headline, weather event, or sporting event for example. Of course, this can't stop all deceptive split personalities, but it adds additional friction to the process for someone who is trying to operate multiple accounts, because it takes away the ability to recycle and spin content that was created two or three years ago.

In addition, one of the anti-abuse techniques that I've heard about in the finance industry is that employees are rotated through departments every year or two in order to prevent them from building the kinds of knowledge and relationships that enable embezzlement. Similarly, engagement programs and contests could be changed frequently, in order to create an obstacle to long-lasting abuse strategies.

Finally, lots of small contests and promotions might be better than a small number of large contests or promotions. The smaller the rewards, the less likely it is to be worth the effort to participate with multiple accounts. The larger the reward:time ratio, the more likely that deceptive behavior will occur.

In the end, it's important for 1.) the people who design contests, promotions, and challenges, to take the blockchain's decentralized nature into account and to carefully avoid creating antisocial incentive structures which lead to large rewards; and 2.) curators to closely monitor the contests that they support.

Conclusion

In the Steem Whitepaper, we are told,

The challenge faced by Steem is deriving an algorithm for scoring individual contributions that most community members consider to be a fair assessment of the subjective value of each contribution. In a perfect world, community members would cooperate to rate each other's contribution and derive a fair compensation. In the real world, algorithms must be designed in such a manner that they are resistant to intentional manipulation for profit. Any widespread abuse of the scoring system could cause community members to lose faith in the perceived fairness of the economic system. (emphasis mine)

And

Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency. (emphasis mine)

So, we can look at all episodes like this as opportunities to re-balance things in the ecosystem. Re-balancing can be done at the social layer by behavior changes from participants in the ecosystem, or at the algorithmic layer by the witnesses and development community.

Something that became clear to me after the launch of the STEEM WATCHER community, and was reinforced by the posts from @the-gorilla is that it's not enough to say, "we eliminated abuse cases X, Y, and Z". More importantly, if we're not going to lurch about in a long-running and unproductive game of "Whack-a-mole", we (the community) must come up with some sort of way to measure the types and amounts of abuse that are happening on the blockchain, and use decentralized levers in order to drive for an overall rate-reduction over the course of time.

Clearly, a perfect solution is not possible, but creators of contests, challenges, and other promotional efforts can take certain steps to reduce the likelihood of misbehavior. This article proposed a number of solutions for addressing identity-based antisocial behavior. These include:

• Requiring verification from a reputable decentralized service (assuming that entrepreneurs make such a service available)
• Permitting multiple entries per participant
• Requiring an "entrance fee" by burning STEEM and/or SBD "out of wallet", not just in the form of beneficiary rewards
• Design promotions that incorporate the use of recently available information to prevent the recycling & spinning of historical content.
• Change the nature of contests, challenges, etc. frequently to make it difficult to establish long-term abuse protocols.
• Limit the size of contest rewards so that the risk of reputational damage outweighs the potential for deceptive reward gathering.

As a community, it seems to me that our immediate goal should be to start seeking best practices from among these (and other) options in order to minimize the blockchain abuse potential. In order to accomplish this, individual promoters of contests, challenges, and the like should describe how they're dealing with the potential for identity-related abuse in their contests, and curators should include that information in their decision process when choosing whether or not to support a contest, challenge, or other promotion.

This post has also highlighted an entrepreneurial opportunity for decentralized identity services to establish themselves on the Steem blockchain.

That's it for Volume #1, and I probably won't have more on the topic for at least another week. When time allows, I hope to follow up with one or more additional posts that delve into other aspects of the problem - such as plagiarism, spam, the rewards algorithm, automation, and measurement.

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Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

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^{Pixabay license, source}

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