Tribler / tribler

Privacy enhanced BitTorrent client with P2P content discovery
https://www.tribler.org
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Lab goal: "Distributed Trust Design" #3571

Open synctext opened 6 years ago

synctext commented 6 years ago

overall aim of the lab for coming 10 years.

We now have the ability to create trust with software, as shown by Ebay, AirBnB, and Uber. Key is the star rating mechanism. We want to generalize this. Our audacious ambition is to establish a new scientific field, we call Distributed Trust Design.

Distributed Trust Design provides a coherent framework to transform mutually non-trusting people into trustworthy online communities of arbitrary size, that have a process for democratic decision-making, the ability to punish those who freeride on the community or are dishonest in order to manage a marketplace, govern a resource sustainably, schedule activities, or achieve a common purpose in general.

Underlying issues:

synctext commented 6 years ago

The Internet is sick. We need a formula for Trust and Truth. Our cure needs to prove itself and work on a large scale. A killer application is needed to bring "distributed trust design" to a wide audience. Options to further explore:

ichorid commented 5 years ago

Let me try to put your point a little bit more Martin Luther way :grin: :

" I envision a world where all the knowledge produced by humanity is available to everyone for free.

Knowledge is power. No greedy corporations with their opaque algorithms or governments with their power-hungry politicians decide what information they feed you. Only you decide what you get. It is your natural right that is with you from birth till your last gasp. What, when, and why to watch, listen and read. Any other outcome is a covered-up agression against you.

You decide what knowledge you share and with whom you share it, on your conditions. And by knowledge I mean everything: news, songs, movies, books, pictures, designs... Everything. In the world I envision, creators are not confined by their producers' whim. Instead, they are directly connected to their audience. In the world I envision, there are no "fake news" - everyone instantly knows if the source is trustworthy. In the world I envision, no bank decides your trustworthiness - your record is just there to share it with anyone, if you're willing to.

In the world I envision, there is no price for knowledge. It is just there for everyone to use, as the air is there free for everyone to breathe and the sea is there free for everyone to swim in. And if someone tries to pollute your air, you immediately see the smoke trail and trace it back to the offender. The word "paywall" is forgotten in my world. The only paywall left there is the demo one, to show schoolkids how frustrating it was to use the Internet at the beginng of the 21th century. It is a harmless boogeyman, like a tiny section of the Berlin Wall left as a monument for children to paint on.

There are no "social networks" in that world. The Internet is the social Network, just as it was at its wake, and as it was envisioned by its creators. This Network constantly generates trust between its peers, facilitating democratic self-organizational process at all levels. People actually get into the Network to make friends. Contrast that with how we use our current "social" networks to shun the old enemies and compete in the exhausting race for social approvement (who gets more "likes"?) And mind you, the Network I envision is not fragile. It is anti-fragile. Every strike against it eventually makes it more resilent. Surviving a battle, platoon's trust between brothers-in-arms become stronger.

Collective action based on mutual trust brought humanity to its glory. During the 20th century mutual mistrust almost resulted in our species extinction. If we want to prove ourselves as truly sentient beings, if our ancestors' lives and sacrifices and hopes still mean something to us - the time to act is now. We need to build Trust between us. All of us."

Hope something like this manifesto will be a nice fit for some hacker-ish news-site publication. This kind of things is good at selling stuff to people, I've heard :wink:

synctext commented 5 years ago

We now have a basic design which may be implemented in 2019 and deployed to understand the fundamental of engineering online trust. First "coherent framework to transform mutually non-trusting people into trustworthy online communities of arbitrary size". It is based on the following principles.

My first draft of a layered "incremental trust growth algorithm". It is a three-step defense against various known attacks:

cuileri commented 5 years ago

I have been reading many papers this week on trust design as well as Seuken et al.'s work paper attesting the impossibility of preventing Sybil attacks. I have doubts on accepting his impossibility result as our guideway, because:

For every accounting mechanism M that

  • satisfies independence of disconnected agents,
  • is symmetric,
  • has the single-report responsiveness property,
  • and is misreport-proof, there exists a (...) sybil attack.

Let me briefly explain them in a very very rough way, for the ones who have not read the paper:

Independence of disconnected agents: Existence or inexistence of any other node at any time does not affect the trust relation between two nodes. (e.g. My trust score for TU Delft does not depend how many universities there are in the world)

Symmetry (They call it anonymity here): Trust scores depend only on what you have done but not your identity. (If A and B do the same work, they will have the same trust score from me.)

Single-report responsiveness: Trust scores may be affected by a single report about the agent. (If I do not know anything about you, I will believe the first thing I heard about you)

Misreport proofness: If you want to consume work from me, I neglect all your reports about the others.

Yes, only a system which satisfies all the above assumptions is proven to be open to sybil-attack.

On the same work paper, they attacked the third assumption (single-report responsiveness), claiming that "The only property that we can reasonably relax for the design of useful accounting mechanism is the single-report responsiveness property".

However, I suppose we can attack other assumptions too, and in fact, what Johan wrote in the previous post and what we have discussed during the last weeks in the lab require the relaxation of some of this constraints.

In short, we can present a new model based on / derived from 'accounting mechanism' (which would automatically invalidate the impossibility result) and do our own theoretical analysis. And I have a sense that we can prevent or limit the effects of sybil attacks.

I have some immature ideas about that but they need to be formalized more before being opened to your discussions.

cuileri commented 5 years ago

I will summarize my thoughts on our trust research below. However for the actual collection of my notes, see here.

The eventual aim of our lab is to generalize the trust notion. Due to our practical way of thinking throughout the lab, we tend to define and interpret trust according to our technical lab problem, which I'd call designing decentralized, accountable and anonymous P2P file transfer systems. I think, to model and abstract our problem without completely generalizing it would be a good initial step for us.

I present below what I come up with through literature.

I suggest to analyze the dimensions of trust in our problem and detect the interdependencies between them. Then we come up with a complex model which outputs a node's trust 1) for all his neighbors, and 2) in each dimension. We can then attack the misbehaviors by updating our sub-models and tuning our parameters during simulations.

To generalize accordingly, the steps towards designing a problem-specific trust function would be:

The steps above actually give what I plan to do for the next sprints. Any comment, correction, suggestion is appreciated.

grimadas commented 5 years ago

Very related Blockchain + Trust: https://nem.io/xem/harvesting-and-poi/#proof-of-importance Technical reference Using EigenTrust++: Attack Resilient Trust Management

ichorid commented 5 years ago

AFAIK, NEM uses a variant of PageRank called NCDRank.

synctext commented 5 years ago

MIT is now also doing some initial work in our domain. Still at the early idea stage and no concrete steps towards implementation and community building. https://www.trust.mit.edu/projects

Especially the last bit of writing on social capital is vastly superior marketing compared to our work. With Delft+Harvard+Berkley we only came up with "Work Accounting Mechanisms" 10 years earlier. Ai.

synctext commented 5 years ago

Trust is what the Internet always needed, but never had. We are trying to solve this problem directly and have little competition. Very few team work on this because it is so hard, no solution is in sight, and profit-making models are problematic. TUDelft seems to be the only (academic) entity focused on building running code for the public infrastructure of identity&trust. Strong identities are a critical building block for trust. We aim to provide legal certainty around identities, digital signatures and multi-party signed contracts.

Trust is a difficult to define concept. We place trust in agreements. However, a business contract is nothing more than a promise enforceable in court. The power from a traditional contract critically relies on a functioning legal system. If power comes from higher authorities and laws, why do we need smart contracts? A naive though is that we can digitize all business contracts and don't need arbiters.

Bitcoin never succeeded because it is based on the "closed world assumption". Smart contracts are dumb if they can not interact with the legacy analog world and legal system. Before we have any smartness in smart contracts we need to integrate well known concepts such as: legal certainty, counterparty risk, investment durability, shifting business models, changes in existing laws, etc. Governance is vital: who actually owns and controls everything? Maintenance ability is a cardinal requirements, both in short term and quantum-proof hashing in the far future.

ichorid commented 5 years ago

Genealogical identity system

One solution to the trust problem could be "genealogical bootstrap", where users issue certificates to other users forming lineages. Every user will have one (or two, or several) "parents" who certified the creation of his account (essentially giving him the birth certificate). This will make it easy to distinguish Sybil regions.

In this system, you will only crawl subtrees of your family tree. You can ask other people for peers with the specific chain of predecessors. We can run two bootstrap certifying instances (Adam and Eve :wink:) and only give certificates to real people who ask for it. Then, these people can give other people certificates, etc.

Example

When you want a "birth certificate" you create your private key and send it to one of your parents, say, Adam. Adam then "proposes" to whomever he wants to procreate with, say, Eve (or maybe the child selects both parents instead). Then, Adam sends to Eve the proposal to sign his block. They both sigh it and put on their TrustChains. Then, the child gets the certificate. Note that Eve can reject the offer if Adam looks suspicious to her :wink:.

This system has some interesting properties. For instance, it naturally rejects inbreeding, because the progeny of close-relatives pairing has shorter paths to the most recent common ancestor (MRCA), which makes it more vulnerable in case MRCA is found to become corrupted.

So, the system promotes diversity of connections. In a sense #4481 is a particular case of this system, where instead of a tree we use the Internet traffic exchange graph. But #4481 looks more like bacterial asexual reproduction system which is more about producing clones. From this point of view, @grimadas's accountability protocol #4719 looks like a horizontal gene transfer, and double spend detection system is analogous to CRISPR.

Applications

Remind that all highly complex organisms use sexual reproduction...

qstokkink commented 5 years ago

@ichorid Could you expand upon how the genealogical identity system is different from PGP's web of trust?

ichorid commented 5 years ago

@ichorid Could you expand upon how the genealogical identity system is different from PGP's web of trust?

synctext commented 4 years ago

Problem: Trust is too generic to "sell".

One of the hard things about getting adoption for distributed trust is that it is a general societal concept, not a specifically useful tool. In other words, distributed trust can be used for numerous of different undertakings. This is a strength long-term but a bit of a detriment short-term. We need to find the killer usage that drives distributed trust adoption now or we won't be able to stick around long enough to see distributed trust in action for all the various use cases (Youtube-alternative, decentralised Uber, self-organising Amazon, etc. ) we imagine. [1]

Key usage: global file system early USENIX work from nearly 30 years ago, Internet sharing. NFS was used to unify different FTP sites 30 years ago. Now the IPFS people are trying to create a unified hash space with the native ⨎, FileCoin token economy by Q3 2020

DEC VMS:
00README.TXT;7 6 9-APR-1991 18:14 [ANONYMOUS] (RWED,RE,RE,RE)
PUB.DIR;1 8 18-OCT-1990 07:20 [ANONYMOUS] (RWED,RE,RE,RE)
Unix:
dr-xr-xr-x 3 system 320 Jul 16 14:25 0.7alpha
-rw-rw-rw- 1 system 853 Jul 16 13:41 directory
IBM VM/CMS
FUSION BIBLIO4 V 80 2219 45 11/25/91 7:00:07 FUSION
FUSION BIBLIO5 V 78 132 3 11/27/91 10:01:11 FUSION
synctext commented 4 years ago

What is our 2025 or 2026 objective? We need a single concrete objective to guide the roadmap of the entire lab with 12 people. In 2026 our current funding also runs out, so a good focal point. Draft ideas:

  1. distributed trust design (current goal)
    Distributed Trust Design provides a coherent framework to transform mutually non-trusting people into 
    trustworthy online communities of arbitrary size, that have a process for democratic decision-making, the
    ability to punish those who freeride on the community or are dishonest.
  2. large-scale cooperative systems.
    Humans have cooperated for causes such as building pyramids, understanding the building blocks of life, and
    putting a man on the moon. We devised new mechanisms which build a cooperative networks online between
    millions strangers, thereby architecting another cooperation inducer besides currency, kindness and kinship.
  3. Durable existential autonomy
    Our trustworthy and leaderless organisational method relies on complete automation (e.g. DAO). Continuous
    external inputs are required for peer-production (Linux, Wikipedia). We achieved existential autonomy with the
    first sustainable DAO, operating by selling privacy-as-a-service and using this income for self-maintenance.
  4. Breaking monopolies with a protective "firewall"
    Private companies now control much critical infrastructure. Adversarial interoperability using open source
    solutions will weaken their stronghold. Our "monopoly firewall" with decentralization immunity will shield us
    from the resulting harassment, press slander, domain hijacks, DDoS, lawyer-based attacks and digital sabotage.
  5. The cure for hypercapitalism
    Economic disparities increased over the centuries and technology played a role. Society has never been more
    unequal than at present, in terms of the distribution of income and wealth. Our technology gives power to
    citizens by removing power from both companies and governments.
  6. Freedom to innovate
    Bitcoin pioneered permissionless finance in 2009. CloudOmate introduced permissionless computation in 2017.
    Our DAO offers the basic blueprint for sustainable economic activity and gives anybody the freedom to build 
    upon its foundations without asking any gatekeeper for permission.
  7. Technological sovereignty for Europe
    The European Commission has made technological sovereignty a priority. An alternative is needed for American tech
    giants and their dominance over everything from social media and online search to cloud computing and e-commerce.
    We will demonstrate with a million users that technological sovereignty is possible, trustworthy, and durable.
  8. Proof that we can overcome the Tragedy of the Commons at scale
    Depletion of our physical resources is the main threat for humanity. By showcasing a sustainable digital commons we
    provide hope for the future. Requires extraordinary proof with at least a million people.
grimadas commented 4 years ago

You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you play better than anyone else. [Albert Einstein]

Rules of thumb of Trust Design

As one of the main goals for the lab is to build infrastructure to foster cooperation, I thought it would be useful to know insights from the social sciences. These are very useful when designing any feature/algorithm that deals with humans.

There were many experimental and theoretical studies on the behavioural game theory, which models players as bounded rational. Although classical games (Prisoners Dilemma, Social Dilemmas, Trust and Ultimatum games) are useful models, Nash equilibrium is a only limited predictor of reality. Here are insights and heuristic s took from an excellent paper:

Prisoners Dilemma

People cooperate more than predicted in PD, but why?

Social Dilemmas

Can be viewed as an expansion for PD as n-player game. This extension has allowed identifying a number of interesting challenges:

Ways to solve the dilemmas:

The main incentives for defection are greed and fear, with greed being predominant. Typical ways to address them: guarantee a money back or design incentives such that defecting will not increase the outcome.

One way to solve the dilemma is to create a superordinate group identity. People believe that groups have a competitive advantage than individuals.

Intergroup conflict also increases intragroup cooperation.

Altruistic punishment encourages collective cooperation. People appreciate punishments and strong social norm, especially after they experience free-riding.

Relatively small punishments only decrease cooperation, might induce revenge and decrease interpersonal trust.

Might not be as effective as punishment.

Different labels affect cooperation: Take some (harvesting) is more cooperative than Give some(donating). Taking and claiming makes people think about fairness, control and responsibility.

Trustees felt obligated to reciprocate when trustors showed high levels of trust (for example, sending a lot of money).

synctext commented 3 years ago

... DRAFT ....

Current status of our civilisation

Once upon a time it was believed that the internet would lead to greater equality. Today we are less naive and see the real impact. The Internet eroded unity, wealth, privacy and security.

Once upon a time it was believe that our time was special and we witnessed the end of history. We now see the continued centralisation of our economies with monopolies that only increase in size and power. The dystopian vision that megacorporations would run the work has been replace with Wall Street steering our global economy. Within the industrial age we see a systemic move towards less competition in an increasing number of markets.

Once upon a time monopolies where rare. Now most digital markets have huge profits with winner-takes-all dynamics, Predatory pricing, monopoly formation, buy&eliminate competition, and market failure in general. Piketty showed that income from wealth is greater then income from labor. Systemic bias towards the elite. Inter-generational wealth is on the rise, https://hbr.org/2014/04/pikettys-capital-in-a-lot-less-than-696-pages Ref1 ref2 ref3

Outlook of our civilisation

Robot economy will further amplify inequality. Climate change may be the next upcoming financial crisis, great depression level. Will require trillions of investments. "Climate change-induced migration and violent conflict", https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2007.05.001

The new generation of citizens, those who have been born this year will face a radical transformation. Newly born citizens will see future technology beyond self-driving cars with access to space which is currently still "astronomic expensive". The Space Economy is emerging and expected to further amplify-the-amplification of centralisation. Single winner within the whole raw resource economy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2019.05.009, also https://asteroidminingcorporation.co.uk/aep-1

Alternatives to extractive capitalism

Economic principle for any economic activity, scales to any size. Alternative economic principle for the global economy. Common good as a first concern, beyond stockholder value. We need to develop global economic primitives which are permissionless. Real life issues:

Steps toward the first Economic transformation. Music industry, scientific publication and movie industry are vulnerable. This industry is expected to transform coming decades further into a live experience economy. Expect more meet-the-vlogger, liver performances, theme parks and ocean cruises with a theme (e.g. Disney++).

Explore an isolated microeconomy with "existential freedom" that serves as a training ground for alternatives to capitalism by employing large-scale collaboration between individuals.Economic system with democratic governance, no central authority. No fantasy project, real governance, running code with Blockchain, AI, and democratic voting mechanism which does away with winner-takes-all systemic bias in capitalism. Operating by selling privacy-as-a-service and using this income for self-maintenance. Feature incorruptible saints, alternatives to faltering institutions. compliance-by-design. Bronze age of our "Democratic Economy"... (Thnx @qstokkink). Introduce a Bitcoin-operated DAO economy around arts&sciences.

Early results

Operational voting system (content likes), Operational ledger, MusicDAO, etc. Data-driven approach, see example by Pinterest SEO

synctext commented 3 years ago

Lots of related work is appearing, similar to our Trustchain.

Nub2019 commented 3 years ago

E.N😃

Subject we are interested about clones Spotify platform streaming

How are you today ? I would like to speak with you by FaceTime on September 27 at the time that suits you Sir, because a group of musicians who reside in France I would like to have their website which will promote their cultural products which will be on sale as well as the various derivative products, such as albums, singles. Otherwise, you have not yet collaborated with you. Here is their current website MASAO mash.com I give you carte blanche to create a very attractive website for the group. Is it possible to get an idea of ​​the price for this Mp3 and mp4 project as a streaming platform that associates the different radios that broadcast their music? I remain listening to you sir in the hope of rereading you very quickly,Je reste votre écoute Madame dans l'espoir de vous relire très vite,

E.N whatsapp: +237620238057

synctext commented 5 days ago

Trust also relies on the underlying technology. Be ahead of the curve. Space-Efficient and Noise-Robust Quantum Factoring by MIT shows quantum-resiliency is nice to have. For instance, by seeing if the overhead is acceptable of SPHINCS+ solution. Huge change to IPv8.