First of all, as a ‘reputation systems fanboy’, I’d like to say that I loved reading this discussion. I agree with a lot of stuff that’s being said in here, and also understand the complications that you guys are running into.
I started working on my theory for a peer-to-peer identity & reputation database back in January. It took me approximately 6 months to come up with a theoretical solution, and when the last piece of the puzzle finally fell in its place, it really felt like an epiphany to me.
Not long after that, I bumped into the Bitcoin dev 0.2 - 0.8 video, which left me wondering who the hell “sirius-m” was, so I googled this nickname, which lead me to a developer named Martti Malmi. He tweeted a verification of his identity from Keybase.io, to which I replied “When are we going to see truly decentralized identification?”. He then showed me a project he was working on, “Identifi”.
After looking at what he was doing with it, I realized that my theory could actually be right, and that he had actually already been building the proto-type of this system for over a year. He even came up with a few things I hadn’t thought of about myself up till then (like “non-violent justice” for instance).
As you can imagine, I was as stoked about this from the first moment. So, from that moment on I’ve contributed a fair amount of effort to help Martti getting this thing out into the world. In September I decided to start working on this project full-time, after which Martti asked me to become a co-founder of Identifi (the soon-to-be business), to handle the business development as its new CEO. It didn’t take me long to reply with a solid “yes”.
^ All of that is just to give you notice on me being unbiased on this topic. Please, feel free to break the theory that’s coming up, it would actually be much appreciated. This is already the second post in which I’m writing about Identifi, so I’ll try to summarize it and keep it brief (I’m feeling dirty for spamming this already), to then answer any of the questions you may have. I think it would be much more constructive this way, than me simply typing out all of the details.
About
Identifi is basically an address book with anyone in the world in it, which makes it possible for you to basically rate anyone/anything in the world. By organizing identities and reputation, it becomes much easier to find out who you can trust.
The bit more technically advanced explanation would be: It’s a P2P identification & reputation network, a protocol and therefor an infrastructure by itself (like Linux or Bitcoin). This way, anyone can build new products/services on-top of it, run their own node, or fork it to build something completely new (try “open source decentralized credit rating agency” for example).
bitcoind fork
Identifi was originally forked from the Bitcoin daemon, so it contains Bitcoin’s crypto, command-line interface, etc., even though there is no blockchain and no need for it in this case. On Identifi we have Proof of Human as our algo.
Solving the Sybil Attack
You only add people you trust yourself, and thereby only people that you actually trust influence your personalized network, or you can even choose to trust the people they trust, or the people they trust; it’s a white-listing principle. This is how it solves the Sybil Attack among the human Web of Trust.
“You can just discard any identities that are poorly connected to your real social networks and don’t have the long history of interaction that real identities usually have. When you visualize the trust graph, Sybil nodes show up as separate swarms that have few links to real nodes. If there’s a real identity that links to lots of sybil nodes, you can just down-vote it.” – Martti
Privacy & Security
Last but not least, it doesn’t look at your sensitive data, since there’s no need for it. Since it doesn’t look at it, it also doesn’t store it.
Summary
Privacy-friendliness, security, decentralization, lesser need for authorities to tell us whom to trust, and more freedom for anyone +1
For additional information, there’s our GitHub or Alpha version.
Feel free to ask me any question, I’d love to explain the details, and/or listen to any of your feedback!