How a Decentralized Trust System Could Help People Vote for the President of the Galaxy

This post is an invitation to discuss the concept of decentralized systems. It is only a study of interest, feasibility discussion, and reliability. In order not to burden readers with abstractions, I will try to describe a hypothetical decentralized network through several applied tasks.

Decentralized trust system: tasks

• Task 1. You have lost the key to your personal data, including your wallet, information storage, messenger, social network accounts, etc. You need to regain access to the data.

• Task 2. Deepfake technology has reached perfection, and you must distinguish a real person from scammers or bots for your safety.

• Task 3. You need to hold a vote and elect a representative of your group, for example, the president of the Galaxy.

• Task 4. You need to protect your savings and transactions from the "51%" problem that exists in blockchains.

• Task 5. You know some undocumented person in need of help. You want to help him socialize.

• Task 6. The information stored in the most significant blockchains has grown to an incredible size. Every small transaction is replicated across a billion equally sized nodes in a decentralized network. You want to save computational resources and storage and thereby help the planet conserve resources and ecology.

• Task 7. A person declares a will and wants to protect it from the encroachments of intruders and even from his own weakness. For example, bequeaths a large inheritance or testifies.

• Task 8. Technologies of lying in the media have reached unimaginable heights of "mastery". You want to get [more or less] reliable information from public sources, subject to your personal credibility criteria. That is, you want to minimize outside influences on your worldview.

  
  

Decentralized trust system

Let's try to solve these problems. In essence, all of the above, despite its diversity, boils down to the problem of trust and secure authentication. Here is a way to implement a decentralized trust network:

• Each person has a certain number of friends and family whom he trusts to varying degrees. The essence of the solution is locally decentralized authentication.

Algorithm of realization:

1. A person using a mobile app creates a container-safe with personal data and a set of heterogeneous digital keys - for documents, certificates, accounts, wallets, and more.

   
   

2. The safe is encrypted using a strong master key.

   
   

3. Your unique personal identifier is created based on the hash of a certain set of personal data (e.g., full name + birthday, citizenship + place of birth + uid).

   
   

4. A set of N (e.g. 20) random key parts is created. These key parts are distributed to those people you trust according to your personal degree of trust.

   
   

5. A security level K <= N is chosen such that when K keys are connected, a master key from your personal safe container can be retrieved. For example, you can put copies of the master password into a set ([a selection K of N]) of containers, each of which will be protected by a password consisting of the selection of key parts.

   
   

6. Similarly, weaker key sets 1 <= K3 < K2 < K < K < N are selected for operations less significant than accessing the master key. For example, for communication on social networks, microtransactions, or granting access to personal data.

   
   

7. You select services that you personally trust. You generate trust tokens that can be verified from your account. These tokens are sent to the services on your behalf.

   
   

8. Your master safe is encrypted and copied to the nodes closest to you: trusted users' computers and trusted storage services. The number of copies is chosen according to the principle of guaranteed data safety (hundreds of copies in different Internet segments). However, it does not create a base like Bitcoin or other popular blockchains.

   
   

9. Different services with unique addresses are registered in the trust network. Each service stores a chain/blockchain of transactions it receives from users. In fact, each of these services is a full-fledged blockchain with smart contracts. For example, passport issuance service, humanitarian aid service for the homeless of city N, intellectual property registration service, virtual banking service, etc. All services among themselves can be organized in a hierarchy. Each service has rules of use and membership embedded in smart contracts. For example, adding a new user must be approved through a trust level of more than 50% of existing users or verification of real citizenship/residence.

Decentralized trust system: tasks solutions

Solution to Problem 1. You need to regain access to your data when you lose your password. You ask your trusted people for the K parts of your master key, either in a physical meeting or by some other secure method at your discretion. And you recover your master key.

Solution to Problem 2. In digital communication, you need to verify the authenticity of your interlocutor. You connect a plugin to your messenger that checks the interlocutor's degree of trust through the trust network. The nearest trusted nodes are recursively queried, from them to their trusted nodes and further to a given depth.

Solution to Problem 3. The initiator of voting chooses a service (blockchain) that it trusts, selects a typical smart contract "voting", and sends a request to all voters. In case of collision, if the election is initiated simultaneously on several services, the service with a lower level of total trust of all its users either accepts the results of the more authoritative service or isolates itself and works autonomously, serving only its regular users. This procedure is also carried out by voting for all users of a given service.

Solution to Problem 4. All your transactions are stored within your own “cloud”—within the network of users and services you trust and recursively on those resources trusted by your trusted ones.

Solution to Problem 5. You give an undocumented person a smartphone and register them in the trust network by a name they will give you. For example, "Alex from Fontanka". You register him at the nearest suitable service: a digital passport office or a service for persons without residence/citizenship. Then everything depends on what kind of personal trust network this person can build up with your help or on his own. Then, he connects to social and humanitarian services, which also assess him according to his trust network, or simply collects handouts digitally. Through the trust network, it will be easier to weed out scammers.

Solution to Problem 6. A decentralized network consisting of relatively independent segments will be more optimal than a single blockchain. Information related to localized transactions in New Zealand will not load thousands of servers in Canada and the Netherlands. Interactions between segments will occur only as needed. At the same time, segments with a high amount of fraud will be gradually rejected and marginalized, losing rankings to more trustworthy segments.

Solution to Problem 7. A person publishes his will in specialized services in any convenient format: a video message, scans of documents, or a smart contract and signs it with his personal key.

Solution of task 8. Similar to message verification in messenger, your news application ranks and/or filters incoming news from different servers depending on your trust level and the trust of your near-trusted set. That is, if you initially set your trust levels high for scientific journals and Nobel laureates, then all sorts of crap from astrologers and chiromancers will be filtered out.

So, I propose to discuss the feasibility of such a decentralized trust network, the complexities of implementation, its pros and cons, and the prospects of including AI in such a network (as who?).