KLEROS: Blockchain-based conflict resolution system

offvic (41)in #cryptos • 6 years ago

Introduction

Since the advent of blockchain technology and its popular use in 2009 to host Bitcoin, there seems to be no day that passes without a new beautiful addition to its growth. Within this short while, it has grown from a mere cryptocurrency threshold to a place where people do virtually all kinds of businesses. This has brought the kind of beauty that redefines and improves the way people carry out their day to day business activities and they are happy about it. But it also brings a similar proportion of challenges that need to be tackled in order to promote safe practices amongst individuals and organizations.

First of these challenges is the absence of a reliable online dispute resolution system. This has been one problem that continued to gnaw away at the level of confidence needed for people to freely do their businesses without the fear of being swindled. Before the introduction of Kleros, people had no sustainable means of seeking redress in times of dispute between two parties who carry out transactions through online channels. Many portals like freelancing sites had made some weak attempts to create systems that would enable people find a common ground to resolve their differences but none of their architectures proffered the needed holistic solutions to this challenge.

Today, Kleros has taken over as the only efficient online court where disputes are resolved by jurors all over the world who are equipped with enough experiences in their respective fields.

What is Kleros?

Simply put, Kleros is a court where individuals and corporations take their disputes and justice is administered. This court is not like the traditional courts that sit within a building with some limited jurisdictions. Kleros is an improved kind of justice system.

It is built on Ethereum blockchain, specifically to settle disputes emanating from online transactions. There are thousands of knowledgeable jurors selected based on their level of experience in their respective fields. These jurors are drawn from all parts of the world provided he or she has acceptable level of knowledge to administer sound judgement.

This is so because Kleros is completely decentralized and fully automated to deliver sound judgement based on the contract agreement reached by both parties at the time the contract was awarded or the transaction was carried out without fear or favour.

Kleros' Operational Architecture

The Juror

Kleros is an autonomous interface on the Ethereum blockchain. It is developed to capture even the remotest corners of the world provided internet is accessible there and people are carrying out transactions online, so there is not limitations whatsoever.

From these different corners of the world, users will indicate that they want to join the team of Kleros jurors. Series of tests will be conducted to ascertain if such users are qualified or not. If they are found worthy, they will be added to courts that specifically suit their respective knowledge and expertise. There are several different courts under Kleros platform. A juror who is a graphic designer, for instance, will work in the Kleros graphic court. Another juror who is a video editor will work in Kleros video court, so on and so forth.

Pinakion token (PNK) is the Kleros domestic token that users of the platform need to buy to enable them carry out needed activities without hassles.

By default, each juror is required to make deposit of Pinakion tokens to make them qualify to rule on disputes. The more PNK a juror deposits, the more qualified he will be to rule on disputes and, of course, the more often he will be selected to vote on disputes.

This is part of the measures taken by Kleros to ensure fairness through its incentivization system.

The ideas is, if a juror can earn money through incentivization program when he delivers a good judgement, he can equally lose money if he delivers a bad judgement.

Because of this, every juror will be up and doing. They will commit the appropriate amount of time required to properly study a dispute and make right decisions.

Incoherent juror

The system does not keep incoherent jurors longer than supposed. An incoherent juror is one who votes wrongly in most disputes. Take for example, in a given dispute where 5 jurors are required to vote either option A or B. If 4 of them vote A and 1 votes B, the 4 that voted A will win and get paid from the arbitration fee while the one that voted B will lose part of his deposited PNK because he is considered incoherent.

Wothy to note is that these jurors can work from any part of the world and while their votes are used in deciding cases, they must not know each other or influence the decision of each other. As soon as any of them makes a decision and votes, the vote will go directly to the Kleros automated system and no other place.

The Users

User are people like you and I who carry out one online transaction or the other each day. Those who are tired of losing their money to fraudsters everyday and need a solution that will protect their interest.

For such users to benefit from this, they need to execute their transactions, using a smart contract that has integrated Kleros as its judge. The terms of the contract need to be spelt out and payment made through Kleros.

These users will be required to choose the number of jurors they want to vote on their case if dispute arises.

Because these jurors need to be incentivized, a certain fee will be changed from the users each time they lodge a dispute. This fee is even higher if they choose to appeal a case that did not end in their favor.

Kleros will brings a huge change to the way people settle dispute and save cost for both individuals and corporations.

These changes will come in a number of ways.

The problems with today's traditional justice system are so many:

They only sit in distant physical locations where both complainant and accused have to spend a lot of money and time to reach.
Because the process is manual, the court is often encumbered with case files, causing lengthy delay in their delivery of justice.
Litigation is expensive and could, sometimes, lead the affected persons into spending more than they are fighting to regain from the case.
Traditional courts are often accused of handling conflicts in biased manners.

All these are some of the shortcomings of our traditional courts for which most individuals often choose to let go of their money when they fall victim of fraudulent activities than take the burden of going to a traditional court to get justice. This is often the case when they think that the amount of money that is involved do not worth the stress, delay and pain that always accompany dispute resolution system when done by the traditional institution.

Kleros has eliminated all these shortcomings. Not only is Kleros delivering prompt and unbiased judgement, the process is cheap. And more importantly, instead of going to sit in a court room all day, all a user of Kleros needs to get justice is to click on a button that will convey their complaints to the Kleros automated system.

This awesome features are complete bait to both individuals and big corporations like amazon and eBay. This development will help to get criminal-minded individuals off the internet space, or better still, compel them to turn a new leaf.

At the same time, it will boost the confidence of credible online business people when they realize that their fear of losing their money to questionable characters has been healed.

On a broader scope, big corporation will save great deal of money yearly, which they originally spend on operational cost of getting their everyday numerous disputes resolved.

Use case

Donatus is a blogger who used to write articles to pitch some products on his blog. Sadly, he was not getting as much traffic as he had envisaged. Now, a friend advised him to try another kind of article called SEO. Because Donatus didn't know much about SEO, he awarded the contract to Charles from a P2P freelancing portal.

While negotiating the contract, Charles insisted that they must design a smart contract that will make Kleros their arbitrator in case anything goes wrong. Charles had learnt some bitter lessons in the past when some clients refused to pay him for jobs he completed.

Donatus agreed to the idea of making Kleros their arbitrator and they reached a deal. Soon enough, Charles completed the job and delivered to Donatus but just as the job arrived, Donatus started acting up, saying that he expected thousands of new visitor on his blog, having published SEO as his friend had advised. And since his blog was not receiving his expected volume of traffic, he concluded that the article Charles wrote for him must have been poorly written. Therefore, he decided to lodge a complaint to Kleros, requesting a refund of his money.

The Kleros article court receives the complaint and randomly forwarded it to three different jurors in three different faraway countries, giving them two days to examine the case and vote. These three jurors who don't know each other took their time to independently judge the dispute, starting from the binding contract agreement.

Before the two days was over, they had all voted in favor of Charles, stating that the article met all SEO standards. If Donatus' blog was not receiving good traffic, it could be due to other factors.

The Kleros automatic system sends a message to both Donatus and Charles, explaining to them that the article was actually of a good taste. Then it releases the fund to Charlespaid. It also paid the arbitration fee to the jurors. Case closed.