The issue of identity is a major issue for cryptocurrencies and when it comes to creating new accounts for Steem that are free to the end user, we need a way to prevent abuse - but do we support anonymity or requires some form of id?
Steemit Inc. has toyed with the idea of using external third party companies to provide 'Know your customer' (KYC) services to Steem that enable a '1 account, 1 human' feature that protects the blockchain against abuse. This, though, means that we cannot have anonymous accounts and also probably require new users to have government ID or something similar. For me, these requirements go against some of the basic principles that make blockchain and cryptocurrency and evolution over the systems they may one day replace. The design that is being worked on for @steempassport will not require any kind of ID to be provided by the end user in order for them to access a free account, yet should still result in a system that is difficult to abuse/game and this will be done in several ways.
Accounts that are incubated will be effectively filtered by the Steem community and only those users who produce great content will be able to receive free accounts. This solves, to some extent, the issue of abuse and empowers the community to be it's own 'doorman'. The alternative solutions for account creation, that do not involve an incubation process will benefit from realtime monitoring to analyse abusive behavior by new accounts - potentially allowing for any delegated Steem Power to be undelegated in the event of certain rules being breached. This is essentially how Steemit inc. operates today, except that our system will be more automated.
A design document outlining the plan for @steempassport will be made available soon.
Andreas Antonopoulos (@aantonop) just uploaded a brief video addressing the issue of identification on the blockchain and why his position is the same as mine with regards the use of ID documents on blockchain systems. What do you think of his thoughts? Let us know in the comments below!
Our aim is to make joining Steem simple and fun, while enable everyone to access free accounts that also have enough Steem power for them to be functional.
Join us in our Discord Space if you have questions, feedback or want to help out with time, resources or a delegation.
Good it’s way, until the community is populated with bad actors working together to push racist or mid-information.
I don’t know the solution to this without using oracles for fact checking (fact not belief).
Centralisation of 'truth' is never a good idea. Information needs to be free in order that we can have all voices heard and all angles can be considered. Just look at the way that totalitarian governments and dictators effectively control the people with an engineered and biased version of the truth to see why everyone must be allowed to come to their own truth freely.
Steem is designed to allow self policing by those with the most stake, in the form of downvotes which ultimately lead to a loss of potential to be seen and to receive rewards. I have not seen much evidence that this doesn't work - so for now we are focusing only on the process of providing free accounts and protecting the value of the Steem Power used to do that.
Having balance in a community is an issue of respect for each other and that comes from the heart of each individual. No technology can solve this for us, we need to be wise enough to learn how to find real balance and to guide others to find it for themselves too.
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More and more will ask the KYC, especially good when crypto will reach the mainstream.
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More and more will ask the KYC, especially good when crypto will reach the mainstream.
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Good to hear that your project is not introducing KYC to new users. I think the idea with having delegations invested into new accounts under certain rules is the way to go! Looking forward to your first MVP.
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Interesting project and looking forward to details as there may be other uses withib the ecosystem as it continues to expand in the future.
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There's a fairly new site called https://notabug.io/
which is a decentralized version of reddit which is a really interesting experiment in human interactions.
It doesn't require anyone to have an account or user-name or to log in in order to post or comment or chat etc.
Posts and comments can be voted up or down by anyone including the posters and and commenter can vote anyone up or down as much as they like (including their own posts or comments).
There's no censorship whatever.
At first the voting system was abused somewhat so they changed it to a Proof of Work (PoW) system which requires a certain amount of CPU work for each vote.
There were lots of trolls as first but after a while they got fed up and left.
The site is now very clean and healthy as far as I can see and most people there are not logged in.
Very interesting. and appears to suggest if people are allowed to speak freely and anonymously and have little or nothing to gain from running amok you can have a decent healthy site.