Privacy Preserving Web3 Identity with Daniel Kelleher

Transcript

foreign [Music] ation how you doing on the Pod today we have Daniel Keller who is VP engineering at Civic which is a privacy preserving web 3 identity layer aiming to build a more convenient secure and Equitable future with digital identities was really excited to talk to Daniel about Civic because this is a thesis that I have about regenerative web 3 is that with identity then we're going to have more positive some games through repeat interactions with individuals who can identify each other and so because we're going to be able to identify who we're playing the positive sum games with we're going to be able to build more positive some economies and that's how

we create a more regenerative crypto economic internet so really fun to talk to about to talk to Daniel I was a VP engineering CTO before I got into web3 and and um so I really just deeply appreciate people who can go go really deep on the technology and that knowledge allows them to see empirically and from principles what is possible in the design space around them so the technologist should be really like nerding out on this episode with Daniel who is a VP engineering at Civic and and really knows his stuff so we talk in this episode about Civic pass Civic me which are two products that Civic is launching around identity we talk about Soul bound tokens verifiable credentials dids we talk about civil resistance we

talk about uh just many many different use cases for identity and what our respective Visions are for rolling out identity and at the end we compare and contrast get coin passport and the Civic ecosystem and talk about how we're all climbing the network effect together of building a more identity based web 3 that people can opt into in a responsible way and I I think that it's it's just a really fun episode if you're into digital identity so like I said I think digital identity creates a more regenerative crypto economic internet if you believe in that thesis then this episode is for you without further do I'll give you Daniel from the Civic team enjoy working in web3 is awesome but working outside of the typical W-2

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globe Reserve to give directly's basic income program give directly is a charity that gives people money no strings attached to people living in poverty and is a charity that vitalik has previously donated to and supported in the past with glow you can reduce poverty just by holding a stable coin glow is launching in early 2023 and you can join the waitlist at glodollar.org greenpill that's Gro dollar dot org slash green pill what's up Daniel Hey Kevin how's it going pretty good I am excited to talk about identity and Civic with you so take us down the deep end what are you all working on oh yeah well so um thanks for having me on first of all um so Civic we've actually been around

for a while we're kind of ogs in in crypto and identity on web3 um but we've been working most recently on uh two things one's called Civic pass which is like uh I guess the crossroads between Soul bound tokens and verifiable credentials um it's a kind of an access control mechanism for uh for smart contracts based on uh on identity and we're looking forward to bringing that out onto a number of chains in q1 of 2023 um we're currently native on Solana but we're bringing it out on the evm chains in the next couple of months and the other thing is Civic me which is like your web3 identity portal where you can go and look at your identity manage it share it and show off the you know your

favorite nfts and and even chat to people um through your wallet all safely encrypted and so on so um we're really looking forward to Bringing to adding features to Civic me and to sharing that and with the rest of the uh the web3 community got it what what is Civic pass and Civic me built on top of are we using dods verifiable credentials Soul bound tokens something else that's right so it's all based on dids the IDS um so I think your audience are pretty familiar with the concepts of dids but just like really the 32nd um refresher I guess um the IDS are decentralized identifiers and they're like a uh I guess you like

just think of them as any other identifier like an email address or like a Twitter handle and that sort of thing but the big difference is that it is uh self-provisions and you own it you position it to yourself you don't have to request that somebody ascribes it to you therefore there's nobody who can take it away from you um and it is usually uh anchored in some decentralized storage which basically means you can you can mutate it it's mutable you can change it over time you can add for example different keys and you use those keys so they prove ownership of the ID and it'll make change what decentralized storage solution does Civic use so we use Solana for that it's not really a decentralized storage right it's a smart it's a

blockchain yeah but it is um it is important for this because it has a consensus mechanism so you need to have you don't need to have a storage mechanism mechanism that has a um consensus mechanism but it's quite useful to have it so you if you have that for your storage layer of the IDS then you can add keys to it you can revoke Keys you can add what are called Services which are basically like endpoints that let you discover information about somebody find out their credentials which we can get to next even send them messages um so we we host that all on Solana it's small amounts of data with a lot of importance on access control and consensus which is why it makes sense to store it there

um got it um anything else to say about the tech before we talk about the use cases oh I mean I could go all day on the tech but let's not go too deep too early um the other thing I wanted to point out because you mentioned it a minute ago was um verifiable credentials so yeah the Civic pass mechanism is kind of backed by verifiable credentials um so again the refresher on that is these are basically uh the web 3 version of kyc and that sort of thing where in the non-web three world this information you send it to uh to a third party and they keep it and do whatever they want with it um and you don't really have any control over it um verifiable credentials uh they kind of democratize and decentralize that

model essentially a credential or a claim is just one person one did saying something about another did and then that's signed by the What's called the issuer of the credential and usually sent to the subject of the credential to store and then that subject can send it out to whoever they like um and that there's more to it than that but uh That's the basis of Civic pass and then we add kind of what what is now being called a soul bound token layer on top of that right well you know it's interesting to me um as verifiable credentials get stored on chain do they sort of approach what an nft or a soul bound token is um in some way yeah they could do if you're if you're not careful about it

um so uh so I just want to stress the verifiable credentials themselves don't get stored on chain but they get stored enough storage that uh of course there that they use a um effectively controls themselves but I just inferred I'm sorry that was my mistake uh I just infer because the IDS were stored on Solana that yeah maybe the Bible credentials were choose because it's easy to to infer that so yeah the the did basically says who has ownership of that identity and then it will point to a file store that contains the verifiable credentials so that if you're then sharing if you want to share your I know residential address with me um you just share with me your did I can look up your file store from there and

then I can make a request for the credential that contains your your residential address and you can then approve or deny that request that's essentially how it works okay got it yeah um I'm curious you know where you see this all going um basically what what does Civic pass unlock for the user and for ecosystems the that Implement us like take us over that Horizon yeah well I guess there's two aspects this the the kind of peer-to-peer um aspect where you're sharing credentials with each other in order to um establish things like proof of proof of humanity right I'm talking to a real person and not a bot I'm not sure I would necessarily be able to tell the difference these days with GTP gpt3 and so on

um uh civil resistance which I'd love to talk about later as well um and and uh maybe things like proof of age which are important in a lot of use cases as well but then there's the Civic pass aspect where these credentials then get in some form or another tokenized this is where the Soul band token aspect comes in unlock um a lot of powerful uh use cases in the smart contract world so um one of the ones that I'm most interested in is quadratic voting on daos where you need to have some some form of civil resistance and to avoid sock puppets and we also use it for botch resistance during during um high profile nft drops and you also also have on the horizon or the

regulatory possibilities where D5 is essentially controlled you you effectively can only interact with defy if you are not in certain jurisdictions and certain oh facts sanctioned countries and so on um there's a huge I guess risk there and that all of D5 will basically be kind of I don't know held back it's already being held back to the absence of this kind of identity there and that's what the Civic past does it basically integrates with these smart contracts to provide these sort of checks on chain yeah which of these use cases are you seeing the most Traction in right now I mean purely by numbers the nft minting um because it makes sense yeah but that

the the past we use for that is like I I started talking about credentials um by describing the kyc use case but that's like the the furthest extreme of the kind of like heavy-handedness of the of the kind of credentials that we that we provide On The Other Extreme is the bot resistance case which is literally just you fill in a capture the um the important thing is then that the fact that you filled in a captcha correctly is registered on chain as like a like this this effectively soul-bound nft and you present that nft to the to the smart contract that's minting the the the tokens um so it's uh by the way that's sort of thing that's

one of the reasons why we've been spending a lot of time on Solana because this idea of every single capture and we're talking about thousands over a period of a couple of seconds really in these busy mints the fact that this will be registered on chain as an nft kind of a disposable Soul bound token is uh it would be super expensive on other chains most of the chains anyway yeah that's um it's sort of an interesting use case um maybe it makes makes sense to dive in on some of these use cases but before I uh I do that I want to come up for air and state why I'm so interested in in decentralized identity and that's the the green pill podcast in the region crypto movement is all about creating more regenerative internet

um an internet where you can get rewarded for working on public goods where we have more positive sub-interactions with each other and sort of one of my sort of first principles ideas about identity is that when we have decentralized identity um that enables more repeat interactions with people um and positive some games because you can see through the Dark Forest and you can see who you're interacting with or at least and hopefully what which what we think is a privacy preserving identity thing you could see certain attributes of people that you're interacting with and that enables all sorts of new new types of interactions that we don't have when we have to treat every user as or I guess every wallet as the same as every other wallet so for me there's a connection point between

identity Technologies and being able to have repeat interactions with mutual win-wins and positive some games and this regenerative crypto internet that that we want to build and so um uh I just wanted to say out loud the reason why I'm connecting regen crypto to Identity before we dive in on any of those use cases but uh if you have any feedback on that I'd be open to hear it before we do go down that Reb Hole uh yeah my feedback is that it is in my view the correct way to to view it and it is actually one of the ways that I find is the most convincing because there are obviously there's a world of different people that that use web Suite but there's two kind of archetypes that I find meeting a lot one is like the the purely and on you know I am just my

wallet um person and um and those people tend to want to be treated like just any other Wallace and they want to treat other people it's more on the financial there really for that group and then there's the people who see like the huge possibilities of web3 as a social layer as a way of um meeting and exceeding the expectations already set by web 2 and those people are already or the first thing they say to me is it yep you know it's obvious that you need identity to be the not just in the mix but a pillar an important pillar of of the Next Generation web 3 in a way that is as you say privacy preserving in a way that does give you the the power and freedom and control over your identity

um the ability to to choose who you're what what information you share with with whom and to revoke that trust at any any time and one of the things I've been thinking about we may want to talk about it as well later is uh is how reputation fits into all of this because it seems to me like once you've cracked identity that that's kind of reputation is kind of level two of how do you actually provide some kind of meaningful structure around these repeat integrate interactions Beyond just I recognize this this person and I trust them because if I see them in Discord channels a lot or whatever just for the sake of the audience many of whom are probably not thinking about uh decentralized editing reputation for most of their days what is the difference between identity and

reputation uh well I mean identity is effectively your uh it doesn't even even I have to be associated with your real world self only real world attributes like how old you are or where you live but it is this idea that you might have a number of Wallets on a number of chains and you interact in a number of ways and you synthesize that up into one or more identities that you may or may that then not choose to add real world aspects to so I'm logging in as Daniel Kelleher and I'm interacting with other people and I want them to see my real name or I'm logging in as my my on-chain uh online avatar and I want them to see that it's beyond the wallet level

um but it doesn't associate in that layer anyway any sense of this person is trustworthy or this is even this organization is is is trustworthy or anything like that so reputation would be would come along when you start to think about um divestments or payments from from Dows if you do a lot of work in one organization does that ascribe you some kind of global reputation or does it describe you a local reputation to that that Dao or that sub that area um a lot of people just want to kind of solve this problem so they can provide different voting power in in Dallas it goes beyond Dows as well though you might imagine uh under collateralized loans

um in in the non in traditional Finance you are given different uh rates depending on your reputation effectively depending on your credit score and so on what is the web 3 version of that do we want to web3 version of that probably we want a totally different Paradigm um but if you can spin up multiple wallets and you can basically wipe the Slate clean at any any point that's also an issue um so it is in inextric inextricably linked with identity for that reason got it yeah one thing that's sort of interesting for me as we go from what I I guess what I would in my real life think about identity not not real life but non-digital life

um and in my Digital Life what I think about identity is just how many different vectors there are of it in in web3 um you know I felt like in web 2 there was my Facebook connected and I would you know connect out to all these these different sites and it would probably share a few much about me and that would be that but within web3 there's it feels like identity is more of a n-dimensional vector where I might use like I get coin passport for one use case and I might use my Civic pass for another set of use cases um and and you there I may even have multiple persistent pseudonymous identities that all occur reputation with each other depending on what I'm trying to do so it just kind of gets interesting how uh

yeah how multi-dimensional identity gets in this space and we should let it get that way as well it's one of the powers of web3 um but what you also want to do is attract you know the the users who are not familiar with with the web 3 space and its power so what we're doing in Civic need for example is is you connect to wallets and that gives you uh that connects you with your did but you could connect a second wallet and have a second identity you can link those to this those two wallets together under the same Identity or you can have multiple identities um we want to make sure that it feels like a familiar uh space for people who are not uh who who are not as kind of familiar or like who don't think about this from day to day

as you as you said but also not not curtail the power and the freedom of the user right um well I'd love to dive into some use cases of what you can do with this I know that we've talked about uh nft stuff we've talked about civil resistance we've talked about a few different things where does it what's most exciting for you to jump in on yeah I want to talk about two things I want to talk a bit more about silver resistance especially when it comes to Dows and voting um and I also want to talk about maybe the less uh the less obvious use cases for the idea of a dead which is about key management and um making sure that web3 is a safe A place to store your information and your

funds as like a traditional bank and traditional file storage um because I think that's also one of these kind of unsung powers of of did especially mutable ones so you can choose Kevin which one do you want to then dive into first well let's start there because I can Riff on civil resistance for for quite a while so let's go in reverse order through them yeah yeah um so what there are kind of two different flavors of dids in the market these days there's um there's immutable and mutable ones I guess is the way you can describe it the mutable ones are typically right only or like right once um you might create them once and then they can't be changed or more frequently these days they're just

derived from Key material so um the the typically I did is derive from a key so you can by present presenting the key or by signing something you can prove you own it that's a really powerful feature of it did but you can have add multiple keys to dids and they get stored in What's called the did document um but because the on chain dead document has gone a little bit out of fashion you're left with either having like off chain dids like web stored in some web 2 storage like uh GitHub or something like that or having um on chain but immutable did and by immutable dids I mean you literally can't add a second key you can't revoke

a key you can't do anything that the kind of the did standard allows you to do um and the reason the way they went out of fashion is because um uh on-chain dids work kind of slow and expensive on like things like ethereum on bitcoin and so on but they were that was the original idea behind this like the the did spec or the dead concept and blockchains uh smart contract blockchains developed roughly around the same time and um the the dead standard that we use which is on Solana is it I think kind of gets you back to the original principle of the dates of being able to add multiple keys and revoke keys and there's a couple of interesting things that come out of that which I think have

a huge benefit for onboarding uh people who are not kind of native to crypto into Tech in other words they're not necessarily going to be very good or willing to uh to have good private key hygiene to keep hold of their keys um one of them is social recovery and another one is like uh some like trust accounts and things like that and um a third one I will talk about is account abstraction I think that's the the kind of the the most interesting one from my perspective yeah so it seems like those things are pretty important because if we're going

to be storing our reputation and these um in these documents then there's going to be be need there's going to need to be some some way of managing uh reputation is active and getting access to it in a social recovery kind of way the managing your identity and managing your wallet or just choose what slightly separate things and it seems like it's important to have account abstraction and that sort of social recovery in the identity Pace you shouldn't lose your identity if you lose your access to your wallet that's the the fundamental um and that's where you can have for example a social recovery key on your did that will under certain circumstances allow you to recover your identity and not recover your private

key it's it's not a key shining system or anything like that it's a layer of abstraction above that where you can recover your identity by having a new key added to it and then a lot of the work that we're doing at Civic on Civic me and so on and we have this is one of the things that we've been focusing on since the very start although the tech layer has changed over the years has been making uh making your identity and your website experience in general more safe and more secure by avoiding that need to kind of tie everything to a single wallet but let me actually add to that like uh the this idea of account abstraction and um uh because we we have this uh kind of prototype out at the moment called Cryptid which is a an account

abstraction uh kind of you could call it an execution layer on top of it of an identity on top of it did so it's a it's like agnosis safe um but it's controlled by the ID and you can add middlewares to it to add constraints to what um like you can have spending limits added to it you can have multi-cigs attached to it you can have um like I said a social recovery there attached to it even have things potentially in the future like uh subscriptions so you have like like direct debits that can draw a certain amount from your account based on what the constraints that you add at the did there I think there's lots of potential there that has been has yet almost

completely on unutilized by the space yeah it seems so um anything else to say about the tech before we dive in on I think civil resistance um well I want people to try it out um like I said we're going on to multiple chains for civic me and Civic paths in q1 so um by the time this airs you might well be able to trade out if you don't have a Salina wallet if you if you do then you can try it out right now so the best place to start on that is just to go to Civic dot me and connect your wallet and start having fun got it so Civic got me we'll have a link to that in the show notes sure already well uh I think that there's probably a lot of fruit for us to uh to pick in talking about civil resistance

so let's go there um you want to talk about how Civic pass and Civic me help you manage civil resistance sure you start there and then I can sprinkle a little bit of what I know about Bitcoin passport and we can compare and contrast yeah I like Capcom passport a lot um so that there's um kind of a few ways you can do civil resistance um the we have the first version that we've got is is a kind of a Biometrics based one um so we have a face scan which checks for uniqueness and then it will issue a pass on chain that Associates your that kind of Biometrics with with a particular wallet so that you can't associate the same Biometrics with a different wallet

um it doesn't store any of the information but it kind of distills your biometric information your face into a single point and then it does comparisons against other points that are stored so it's a kind of a almost like a hash function you can't reverse it um and so on the other the other ways of doing civil silver resistance um protection that I know that get a git coin passport synthesized with a lot of these together um uh are things that we're contemplating adding later for example as kind of social graph based models as well um also ties in with reputation and so on but are kind of out the door use case or out the door kind of version of this is the Biometrics one what I what I like

about it um is that it's uh there are a few people doing um kind of biometrics-based civil resistance but this is kind of in your browser if you go to a um adapt that uses it then it just basically brings up a button adds a button to that dap that they click and lets you scan your face you sign a transaction and then it will add the the token to your wallet it's very very quick and um and very low uh overhead in terms of integrating with with that so it seems like primarily also we did an episode with Professor Brian Ford who's uh an academic who's been studying civil resistance yeah

yeah and for for 17 years he's been studying it actually 18 now that we're in 2023. and um he he talks about civil resistance there being four sources of civil resistance that you have to connect an actual human to the computer system and he talks about using kyc which is nation state documents um he talks about using Biometrics which you know is like the world coin stuff but also it looks like with the facial recognition stuff you're doing there's web of trust which is I've met Daniel he's a real human and then there's presence-based which is you're literally right in front of me I know that you're a real person kind of stuff and so what I heard putting that frame on how you're solving civil resistance I

heard that since you're doing the sort of like webcam uniqueness stuff uh that you're starting with Biometrics but then there's going to be a way to like roll in web of trust from there did I get that right yeah that's correct and I think I think I see this as kind of a spectrum anyway so um you'll never I mean maybe with the absence of the present space you're never going to get full 100 confidence um that you that um of civil resistance but different layers and this is a very good example of where I think Bitcoin passport does it really well where you collect these stamps and they give you a certain confidence level um I think that you you want to allow the uh the end user to have uh a choice of different ways improving themselves

some people might be fine with the the biometric scan some people won't some people might want to leverage their their web of trust some people won't so all of these things will contribute to an overall civil resistance score and we're starting at fairly high end of of confidence um with the with the biometric scan um but uh there are there are lots of different options in between right I'm wondering so the the passport architecture as far as I understand it I've disaffiliated from Bitcoin but I still follow it I still use it I still care about civil resistance um is is basically verifiable credentials stored on the ceramic Network that the user self-sovereign can manage through passport.getcoin.com then

there's another layer that is a scoring service where basically I can say okay my Civic pass is worth x amount of civil resistance my bread ID is worthwhy my world coin is worth Z together their X Plus y plus z um and and so there's a scoring service that d-apps can integrate in and they can say okay I've got uh X Plus y plus Z of civil resistance on this user and just with a couple lines of code the uh the services can um can get those scores and you know there's this forkability thing where if you think get coins governance is full of on the scoring you can Fork it out and maybe you think it's X Plus y minus Z or something or did they go coefficient of something uh and and so

like there's this there's this forkability and modularity between the the storage layer um and then there's the the scoring layer and then there's the um and the DAP layer that integrates with it and and I'm wondering if there's an equivalent in the Civic pass ecosystem of some sort of scoring layer or way of adding up the the biometric and the uh sorry the web of trust stuff that you're going to build in the future uh there is um so first of all as soon as we start issuing these passes on on ethereum I want to be uh integrating with Git coin passport I think that's a really good uh example of kind of uh Lego bricks that's kind of that are consistently

reinforcement capability so let's do that I know I I don't need to be talking to you for that I'll talk to the git team um but so the the uh the equivalent to the uh to amalgamating different signals on in the Civic parts ecosystem would be something that we call derive passes so um by the way there's Civic paths ecosystem as you say is based on um what's called the gateway protocol which is run by identity.com which is um uh kind of Open Source sister company um that we work closely with uh so anyone can issue a pass they don't have to ask Civics permission they don't they're not called Civic passes they just issue passes and they all work

together and so then you have this extra smart contract on top called uh uh the derive pass contract and you can the input to that is a number of passes all these passes are effectively spts um and the output is then some synthesis passed so let's say you as a Dap have a specific recipe you want you know a times X plus b times y plus T times Z you create a derived path that takes those three those three coefficients takes those three passes and then spits out your kind of bespoke past and that's the one that you use to gate access to your dap with or that's the one that you use to give and now we're coming towards

the kind of the the boundary again um reputation positive or negative to your to your users right so it's a deterministic algorithm that given a few inputs draws a curve between them and creates one output that is like kind of a new pass built on the old passes exactly it reminds me in a way of how Shamir secret sharing Works which is which is well I've actually done I don't know if I'm articulated to it to explain that but it it reminds me a little bit of like cryptographic operations the way you you said that those uh those three things are deterministically Computing the the output yeah although I say it's it's simpler than that and the cool thing

about is all it's all happening on chain so you can so it's very kind of uh um yeah you can almost think of it as well as like kind of Step Up authentication um so you if you've imagined like the decentralized version of a of a an exchange or um uh that you can you have like spending limits or you have uh withdrawal limits uh and you get past one and it will give you certain access you get past two on top of that it'll give you additional access and so on what's cool well you know I think that simple resistance is just a core money Lego for building more regen web3 if we can go from one token one vote Dallas to one human one though Taos and I I just think that that's a key thing for

building more democratic web three and if we want to get the early majority late majority into web 3 the most of humanity their financial lives is not their bags it's not their Investments it's not their um it's not Capital it's labor um and it's being involved in their community and it's building stuff for each other and it's Community um Community oriented web3 I think is a way that we can onboard the masses and so I just think that this is a huge area of experimentation and it's cool to see a thousand experiments Blossom I hope that in the next Market cycle we start to see this really become a trend a last Market cycle felt like it was about dafi and nfts what would have to be true for more democratic use cases more

mainstream use cases of web 3 to be the lead of the next cycle I I agree I I think that I think that the um the regenerative movement uh is a really a good draw to like let's say we let's let's assume we've exhausted the uh potential pool of people that would be would come into crypto in order to make a quick buck in order to speculate let's say that everyone who was that way inclined uh has already done that how how do we draw the next bunch of people I think the the regenerative movement the ability to have uh um Fair decentralized coordination in order to actually enact real positive change um societal change

um comes through the the the the refi and the regenerative movement and it would shock people who are coming in for that reason like what to to find themselves interacting with Anonymous wallet addresses and not having a clue who they are and not having any way to establish those those layers of trust that you need in order to real really you know make a difference for people's lives on the ground so I think that they that's why it also really encourages me to see such a blossom of of identity and related um organizations and projects in in the space and I would add to that the saying that we we all really need to think as we do about integration about collaboration making sure that

credentials issued by Civic work on bitcoin passport uh likewise and uh and that we can really start to benefit from each other's perspectives rather than compete and so on yeah totally um and I love the pluralism involved in that uh you know the idea that get going passport and and Civic past can be integrated with each other and the Civil resistance you get in one of these ecosystems can be ported uh or at least used in the other and vice versa is just is just huge I I think uh for building well I really think that this is the key point that I see is the network effects of all of these tools in web3 um are really important because the reason the web twos are so in web 2

Giants are so insurmountable right now is because they have the network effects if more users are on Facebook therefore more people use Facebook connect therefore more people integrate Facebook connect therefore more users on Facebook and it just spins like that but with web3 you almost have this thing where like there's more people on Disco and get coin passport and Civic pass that are integrating that with sign in and ethereum and um sign in with ethereum as an open standard uh creates more dapps that can use this stuff which means more users use Civic pass and get coin passport and disco and like we spin the network effects together and I actually think that's really important uh like David and Goliath way of of fighting the the web 2 Giants there yeah yeah it has to be a refreshing alternative you know

that the people are so used to the idea of lock-in now like having a different friend group on one Social Media Net Network than another and um the the kind of antidote to that is to to go on to even even without realizing you're going into specifically the web 3 domain just having your um your identity be portable across these different applications uh without you really uh having to do anything um there's an argument for uh again I guess this is kind of the the Luna so so the punk uh this this um discrepancy as well it's like should you should that be by default should it just be you go to a second app it's like oh it knows who I am already and it

knows who the people I'm talking to are or should it be more so that would be more the solar Punk kind of everything's open everything's great and wonderful or should it be more the lunar Punk assume nothing about this person but give them the option to connect their identities in order to give them a richer experience if they wanted um yeah I'm just really excited to get that Flywheel spinning of more users more dapps more use cases more users more adapts so that it just kind of it spins from there um but I'm also a little bit terrified uh I gave this talk at Devcon about how civil resistance is this infinite game between the people who want to build utility into civil resistant mechanisms um and the attackers who want to siphon off that utility uh by making up new

identities and it's almost this red team blue team this red team blue team is this thing in cyber security where you have the blue team which is defending a system and the red team which is attacking the system um and and I I I I think that we need to have the blue team needs to have a good immutable decentralized sovereignty and privacy perspective uh protecting way of Defending against the red team before we can responsibly start to inflate this economy of civil resistance apps and um that's the thing that that I think I I I I think that we're we're still trying to figure out in in 2023 um you know it depends on your verification mechanism I think what the surface area is is for attacks but but I

I think with things like chat gpt3 um you know it changes the way we have to we use like captchas to to verify humanity and it just feels like there's gonna be this ever moving line between how you designate a human from a bot and and I I'm not exactly sure how we create a sustainable defense against the red team with the blue team yet but it's great to see all these experiments Blossom so um yeah I don't know if you have any comments on that but that's where I've spent a lot of my time space headspace the last nine months well me too I mean uh yeah you want to find a way of not making it an arms race I guess that's what I mean by the infinite game right you want to find a way to make it uh regenerative rather than just

like the the more time you spend the fewer returns you get I mean we were deep in the coal face of that um first couple of months 2022 uh when there was again like I said we're working a lot on Solana and there was a insane explosion of bots on Solana of nft drops on Solana and uh the thing is on the the downside of low fees is that it's infinitesimally uh cheap to spin up a bunch of bots and attack us and we were being attacked you know we were we were providing the service for nfts and uh and we were literally being attacked and we'd be like looking at the data the following day and okay do we tweak our model this for this do we spend a week building this new layer this new mod component in

order to block this particular type of Bot um or is it is it worthwhile us doing that compared to uh building the next layer of of protection which turned out to be the uniqueness paths and then putting more focus on the next layer Bill a bit above that which would be that the kind of as you say nation state kyc identity document and what we've come down with it it has to be some kind of spectrum where you kind of as a as a as a project as a as a Dap as a web 3 organization you choose what they are comfortable with um but I wouldn't say we've totally solved the problem that you're talking about which is trying to avoid the arms race effect because that wherever there's incentive there's uh there's going to be people trying to game it

well I do have hope that uh so I've actually got a slightly different scope which is not solving the infinite game but at least addressing the infinite game and the way I think about this is that I hear vitalik talk about proof of stake insofar as you know you've got a 100 billion dollar economy in ethereum and the way that you protect that the consensus layer is that you have to stake eth and then you're you can get slashed if you do anything that causes a fault on the network um and and so basically what vitalik and the proof of stake researchers have done is they've engineered a system that's much cheaper to defend than it is to attack um and so crypto economically statistically over time attackers are going to lose money and so that words them off from from doing it and so

um you know when it comes to the red team Blue Team game that we're playing with civil resistance that's the question that I keep landing on is what's the way to make it much cheaper to defend the system than it is to attack the system and and I think that that's kind of the Holy Grail of a responsible way to inflate this civil resisted uh economy that we're trying to build I have no doubt that there'll be people who are irresponsibly inflating the Civil resistant uh ecosystems but uh but that at least seems to be where where I think the get coin ecosystem is I think that's the right way to do it I think if you can make it exponentially more expensive to attack than to defend then then that's probably a good pragmatic solution I think Brian Ford you were talking about earlier does

point out that no matter what you do you're effectively just adding setting a cost of forgery you're basically setting a cost at which it's prohibitive and um that will Ward away people but it doesn't solve the problem but I think there's still in the space we are right now that's the most pragmatic way of of solving that problem or at least partially solving it well I mean I could talk about civil resistance for for hours but we are coming up on time here so we've got five minutes left is there anything I didn't ask that that you want to talk about or you know what should we spend the last five minutes on I mean two things um first of all when it comes to Identity I I do want to encourage people to uh to get in touch with us um not just if you're interested in any

of the things that I've been talking about but also in general I really believe that the the identity is a is a is a matter of where you need a pluralism of of opinions um there is a tendency in our space for engineers to to philosophize and talk about problems as uh as if we kind of have all the solutions and I really think that we need to invite more voices into the space so get in touch with us on Twitter at Civic key I'm at Dan B Kelleher and um I really want to hear more of a people's opinions about about whether we should be solving these problems or other problems on how we should be solving them um that's the first thing the second thing is I just wanted to really quickly

talk about another project of mine that I'm that I'm currently interested in it's not really so much to do with identity it's called Sunrise steak and it's a kind of a volunteer pro bono project which is redirecting steak fun stake yield to climate projects um I'm also doing that on Solana right now there's also a company called spirals that's doing that on other chains and uh I um I'm really excited it's it's been largely through your work Kevin but other people in the space have been really excited by the the possibilities of refi and regenerative economics on web3 this is my uh this is my non-identity attempt to to get involved there so I'm yeah just wanted to mention it as well yeah I think that there's a lot I I think that that's so neat I I will have a a link to your to

your website Sunrise steak in in the um in the show notes here but you know I I really encouraged by this pattern of hackers who in their day job are learning the Technologies associated with the regenerative crypto economics and are taking those skills and are building social impact Ventures nights and weekends and trying to get them off the ground because because the people who are going to Traverse the design space fast are going to be the ones that have the skills uh to build the technology that can make it happen they're also going to see the opportunities before everyone else um you can cut through the fog of War when you understand the tech but then taking that and then applying it to create impact factors um I think that there's going to be a

lot of fruit there um and it's the kind of thing where it's like you you just couldn't engineer that like it it you like I I could set up like you know you could you could just like hire people to to build impact vectors or like impact projects and you know give them uh give them like decent budgets and it wouldn't have the same heart and soul as people who are really pouring like know the tech in it for the tech internet for the movement and are still and are like organically bottoming up these ideas out of what they're building and out of their out of their hearts and out of their minds and I think that we're gonna see like this is my prediction for the next cycles that we're gonna see like half a dozen to a dozen Ventures that

start that start that way with just people being Civic hackers and then they grow into web scale projects especially if we get good at figuring out a way of sustainably funding these impact projects but uh yeah TLD are excited about Sun Ray's steak but also the the whole movement of Builders building stuff like that so yeah that that's that's true and the sustainably funding site is one of the is basically what we're trying to do at Sunrise which is like there's this this faucet that's opened with with stake rewards and the majority of people don't actually stake their you know their funds that are lying around so this is a way of of kind of seamlessly re-routing that into into regen projects on web3 yeah that's cool I mean uh yeah these

these these regen funding the region primary problem I kind of break down into where is their sources of funding then how can you legitimately allocate them to the best projects that are that are using that funding and so that's an interesting and promising thing quadratic voting with identity is a good start for that yeah totally um especially if the actors who are doing the quadratic voting are well versed on which projects are the good ones yeah so sunrisestake.com is where you can go check that out and then if people want to get involved in Civic I've got civic.com here and then Civic dot me I think is another URL that you mentioned yeah civic.com Civic dot me is your is your profile so that's um where you can

go to try out the tech um and then engage with us on Twitter at Civic key okay and then uh how about you where can people find you online personally um also Twitter Danby Kelleher great all right well thanks so much for coming on the show really appreciate your efforts in creating more regenerative crypto economic internet and I will see you on the internet likewise Kevin thanks very much for having me on peace and love foreign [Music]