Blockchain-ing the Future towards an Abundance of Trust. Part III

In the first part we discussed how a scalable global trust solution is the missing link in creating a global community and in the second part of this post series, we discussed how we can relate to trust as a resource and saw how different social structures influence the level of trust present in the community.

For this third part, I want to dive into something more concrete. Although I am not a programmer or a technical person, in general, I will try to discuss how we would need to build a blockchain based trust mechanism that fits humans and human behavior. Because such an application would need to be ergonomically fitted to facilitate human interactions with as fewer limits as possible. The goal would be to create a complementary digital extension that is in tune with our needs and provides relevant information. Keep in mind that this is just my opinion and I am not sure what is technically possible or not, but I will try to keep everything within the realm of possibilities.

Firstly let’s get into blockchain in general and try to sum up a reasonable and concise description of this revolutionary technology. Without going into the technical details here are some of the things a blockchain must do in order to be a blockchain: have a form of consensus, transparency, decentralization, permanence and guaranteed possession. Consensus means that all the information that is stored on the blockchain is reviewed by the nodes in the network and a consensus is reached that the information is correct, only after that it's stored into the next block in the chain. Not everything on a blockchain needs to be transparent, but it needs a level of transparency that can prove the fairness of the system. Decentralization refers to the structure of the network, instead of having a centralized authority running all the hardware and software that supports the network, you have a public protocol that can be openly accessed by people that wants to support the network and be rewarded for their work with tokens. Permanence refers to the fact that once information is stored in a blockchain it cannot be altered and it will exist as long as that blockchain does. The guarantee of possession means there is only one way into your account and you have full ownership of that key, but this comes with full responsibility because there is no other way of accessing the account. These prerequisites and other need to happen in order for this to be a sustainable project and it also has to have an open source nature that allows the ingenuity of the crowds to contribute.

Now let’s break up trust in its components and see how we can modulate each to be fitted on a blockchain solution. Trust is mainly made up of the three elements we discussed in the previous two parts, which are identity, skillset, and reputation.

Identity and blockchain

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Our human social structure is more complex than ever, the number and variety of interaction we have is quite impressive, and this is possible because there is a central authority that gives you an identity and forces you to adhere to predetermined laws, for which you are responsible to uphold. It’s a reward and punishment mechanism in which if you play by the rules you have access to all kinds of services, but if you break the rules there are consequences. This is something that helped us make real progress as a human race, but it’s just a concept. And because this form of identity is just a concept and the information is centralized, this state issued abstraction of identity took different forms around the world. Because each country has different ways of keeping this identity, there is no international standard and this is quite imitating today. You need all sorts of extra layers of identity like passports or bank statements in order to prove that identity in a different country than yours and a lot of problems can occur with identity theft.

When talking about identity we need to be realistic and understand there is only one real identity that we have, which is our biological distinctiveness. This means that if we were to implement a blockchain based identity, the safest bet would be to tie it to the biological identity. This means that biometric information would need to be the starting point of the digital identity, as well as the way to access it after its created. Luckily we now have access to this types of technology in our smartphones. This is a very tricky part with securing identity and we have to face the facts that there will probably be no 100% safe way of doing it, but we need to minimize the chances of it going wrong as much as possible. To my mind, we would need to have at least three biometric pieces of information in order to generate and access and identity, the easiest and most natural to implement would be fingerprint scan, iris scan, and voice recognition. These three would need to generate a unique public key that acts as the account and digital identity and the way to access that account would be through a combination of the pieces of biometric data. This is only a superficial explanation of this concept of transforming biological identity into digital identity, the final mechanism must be highly refined and will certainly have nuances I haven’t touched upon.

Skillsets and blockchain

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Identity and skills are fundamentally different, while there needs to be only one, never changing identity, skills will change and need to be updated constantly. So this type of information is something that needs to be stored from the outside world and this is not a very easy thing to do and keep a high degree of accuracy. Because the only way such a blockchain project would work would be to provide real and accurate information.

In the bitcoin blockchain, we only have transaction information stored, and that is something quite easy to do because everything is going on inside the protocol and no outside information needs to enter the system. But when we are talking about imputing information from outside the blockchain, we will never have the degree of certainty that equals monetary only blockchains. Because people will use this application and people will also feed it information, there will always be a level of gamification going on, the goal is to also minimize this as much as possible. To my mind, there are three types of skill certification methods that are valid today and can be implemented as inputs to validate skills, which are studies degree, direct testing and peer review.

The truth is that we are still living in a world where centralized proofs of knowledge like diplomas still matter to an extent or another. This would be one way of certifying skills, but there would need to be a direct relationship between the blockchain and the learning institution in order to get trustworthy data and minimize false claims. So diplomas can work as a skill certification mechanism, but it needs to be done in a proper way that prevents false information reaching the blockchain.

The second and most probably the best way skill can be certified is by people that worked directly with the users. Every project that would be facilitated by the blockchain trust mechanism would need to result in each participant rating the other participants with which they interacted. This would be a form of swarm certification and it would be something done completely by users. This is also something imperfect because the quality of work is something subjective, and people will assign different ratings to the same work. With this concept of collaborative certifications, subjectivity is something that cannot be taken out of the equation but needs to be minimized by using pertinent metrics in how users rate one another. This will be very tricky because you do not want to limit the ways in which people can vouch for one another, but you need to keep things on point to limit subjectivity.

And the third method, direct testing is something that needs to be done in an open source manner. There needs to be a testing mechanism build in the application that is constructed in such a way that cheating would be highly improbable. People from different domains would need to build worthwhile tests that are a valid measurement of understandings or skills, and these tests need to be delivered in such a way that cheating is prevented. Maybe something as easy as the camera and microphone being on while you are taking the test and if you move your eyes away from the screen or if anyone is telling you the answers, the test ends and you might be flagged as a cheater. But I have a feeling that it will be a little more complex than that.

All these three skill certification methods will work in conjunction with one another and hopefully, they will paint an accurate picture of what users are capable of doing.

Reputation and blockchain

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Reputation is not what you do, but how you do it. And there would be two input mechanism that could create this score, peer review and direct information from the app itself.

The direct information that could influence the reputation score would be something as simple as if you tried to cheat the tests, but it will certainly be more complex. The uses will have different types of interactions with the app and some of them will give the possibility of measuring metrics that could influence the reputation scores. If this will be an option, the information used needs to be as unbiased as possible for it to be really relevant.

The peer review way of gathering information will be similar to the swarm certification method. There needs to be a window of reference that tries to minimize subjectivity while allowing for a fair evaluation. But there are nuances that need to be addressed, like a user that has 5 stars with 10 reviews compared to a user that has 4.7 stars with 300 reviews. I would personally say that the second person would have a heavier word to say than the first because of his consistency. Regardless of the exact way of calculating how much a user’s vote should weigh, it would be best to be determined from their reputation score, the better the score the more trustworthy the vote. This prevents people that have a low reputation and might have a questionable behavior from inflicting damage to someone’s reputation out of frustration. While it rewards people that get good reviews from high reputation peers. This algorithm of weighted voting dependent on reputation metrics, if done correctly, can prevent a lot of gamification.

All these being said, we need to face the fact that this will be an experiment to facilitate digital trust at a global level, and for sure it will not succeed from the first try, if ever. During the unfolding of this experiment, there will be two ways of bettering the conditions, one would be its open source nature which allows for all sorts of ideas to be put forward and implemented and the second would be the culture which users create within the ecosystem. So we need to face the fact that perfection is something out of the questions. But this does not mean that we cannot build a decentralized, global trust mechanism that can make a real difference in how people are able to collaborate and bring forth a global digital society in which trust is an abundant resource.

This was the third part of this post series and I tried to paint a semi-concrete picture of how this blockchain for global trust can be structured to represent a digital extension of ourselves in a workable way. The fourth and final part of this series I will try to describe a trust enabled economy and all the opportunities that would become workable.