The Web of Trust: Bringing Trust to Our Trustless Network

Transcript

um so our our next talk uh is called the web of trust bringing trust to our trustless networks uh and uh the the speaker is a web 3 researcher simply named Adrien so give a round of applause for Adrien it's right there um welcome and hello everyone uh my name is Adrian uh I'm also known as Cipher and uh today I'll be talking about an interesting idea an old idea actually called the web of trust and specifically what I'm interested in is how do we build Trust online the question I want to ask us

today is who do you trust and I'm looking around and I actually see people that I trust and I want us to take a moment and put our hands up and find someone next to you and ask the question would you lend them $5 like would you put your hand up if the person next to you borrow you would would you lend them 50 keep your hands up if you would lend the person next to you €50 what about €500 right now would you lend the person and so it starts to get a little bit dicey right so you know who do you trust then in what context then it doesn't necessarily have to be Financial like would you trust them to invite them

to a party would you lend them your car this is a very you know contextualized uh thing and so the question I am thinking about is um trust and in what context and the Catalyst for this was a house party that we had and you know we've been doing a few of these parties and uh uh in East Denver we had a party where you know this is Sho house you know people took the respect of taking their shoes off and like uh um in a very you know warm and trusting um house party but the problem with house party is a very interesting social experiment in that um it is a in a location with a finite resource there's only so many people that can have in the

party e Denver has 15,000 people you can't have all of it Dena in your house and so what we did is that we created an Excel spreadsheet we wrote some of our names of all of the friends that we wanted to trust and we opened it up into our telegram group and we said hey if you want to invite some friends let us know and we'll add it to the Excel spreadsheet and so we kind of started writing down who was allowed to come to this party and uh obviously way more people came than expected 150 people jammed into this little Airbnb and uh you know it was awesome and uh we learned a lot at the time we didn't appreciate it but afterwards we learned

a lot and so some of the lessons that we learned is that trust can be decentralized and the story with this is there was a lady who came late at the party drunk obviously from some other party rocked up and we're like you're not on the list who vouched for you blah blah blah Tony and like who the hell is Tony something about Venture Capital this Venture Capital that I'm like I don't care about any of that stuff this is my house people are taking their shoes off off and people were coming who who are you and who vouched for you and emerging from the party a guy in a biker jacket

comes and saves the day and says you know she's with me and so the friend that I was with at the door said don't worry let him in and to be honest I wasn't happy with the situation and what I said is listen Jesus looking dude I'm not happy that she's coming to the party but she's allowed and if she causes anything cuz she was drunk if anything happens I'm kicking her out and I'm kicking you out too and so he assured me that you know if anything happens he's going to he's going to take in charge and so the intuition is that like trust can be kind of delegated out ah this is another lesson um unfortunately in the morning I

discovered that someone had graffitied our house the Airbnb someone on four different panels had screwed dribbled their stupid nft project blah blah blah. net on four separate walls and I was like who who would do this to my house and we posted on the telegram chat and uh sure enough someone snitched it was very interesting why they snitched and so obviously he earned some trust for snitching but the context was was that we were having another Hacker House in Breen rich and he was invited and he didn't want to lose his spot in the house had he found out that the person he vouched for committed this crime he

was worried that he was going to lose his spot and so obviously he snitched and um he did it in a way which was really nice he said look my friend did that and if there's any problems I'll pay for the damages sorry about that they were drunk and and so that everything was fine and the Curiosity came with is it important that the that the events happen continuously do you do you perform in a more trustworthy manner when the game is like a multiplayer game when you play the game multiple times over time you're going to the same events you're seeing the same people is it the fact that like trust is built iteratively over time and so um

normally if you have like a burner wallet it's very hard to trust something that doesn't have a lot of history but maybe you might trust an ethereum wallet that's like 4 years old has voted on a few governance things has done a few things so the intuition here is that trust is built um over time and so it leads us to the next question when we actually vouch for that person in what context do you vouch them for like why do you vouch them I might vouch for someone that you might not vouch and so um we started to continue these experiments and so um at our time at Z we uh played a game called the Bolivar

experiment and uh instead of doing a little Exel spreadsheet what we were doing is that we were giving out uh Venezuelan bolevard and here you have Manu playing this shamanistic ritual where like people get to like magically pick um their bolivard it's actually a fun game they randomly get assigned a uh a Venezuelan note and the likelihood that they would have a Venezuelan Boulevard in Montenegro the day before the party was just so absurd that like it is some soft Cil resistance say I you can come to the party not because I trust your word but because you have this physical item and so um people get to register and they come to the party

and they get to vouch and so people's we started uh doing this game where people would like uh self-issue their identity and So like um here we have a person who actually missed out on a bouevard and he exited himself and actually came to the party and he registered a Euro and so because he registered the Euro he can actually uh be attested to and come to the party Manu starts playing this game where he does the bidirectional vouching this is a fun idea um there is a sense of trust when you do a selfie together who's been in the Privacy game and be like respectfully asked can I take a selfie you know we live in a very

privacy conscious world and so um the intuition is that there is some sort of trust that goes into making a selfie um and to make this game a little bit more fun and uh simpler to play instead of having a telegram group um we actually made this little app where um you register your note and you can uh collect all your vouchers and you can um you know share your QR code and it's much easier to play the game and so the game becomes um uh like this trust building exercise in the back what we have are some nfts and really the a vouch is just an ethereum sign message it's nothing more than that

but you get to put whatever you want in the message and you sign it and it's up to the person to decide if they want to Mint it out as an En entity and it becomes like a public message it's kind of like your LinkedIn recommendations or something like that and the idea is that if you start to build up this trust you get multiple nfts and so I could meet someone in this room and go oh my God you got some nfts from one of my best friends you've got four of them what like you actually uh he said that about you and just that contextualized message builds a bridge between us and so um at the time when we were doing it we didn't

appreciate the power of this but people loved this and so of people played this game at zalu um minting all these things and so um what we learned um is that the the community becomes very interesting with this game uh we had a party that was the Afterparty for Grimes and so Grimes was doing a talk at zalu and um we knew that she was playing at one of the beach clubs and we organized the after party for her it and we knew that it was going to be very popular because that week was a lot of people but we said hey you can come to the party but you needed at

least three vouchers we didn't just want anyone to just come people that we didn't know we said hey if you want to come to this party go make some friends and uh wow that was fun uh what it caused was all of this like intermingling this interweaving of people people trying to like get each other's vouches and say hey I want to come to this party it wasn't about um getting on the list it was actually like saying did you actually do the work to make some friends when you come to this party who wants you here oh six people want you here come in welcome friend and so when you kind of distribute

the I wouldn't say ownership I wouldn't say responsibility but when you delegate you know some of the when when you institutionalize the um these events people who are involved have this tendency that they want to contribute they don't know how they don't know in what capacity but the tendency is that people if they're involved and they've told three of their friends to come they feel emotionally invested in the in the event and they want to try and contribute and I've never been to a house party where in the morning someone mopped the house the beers were put in the fridge like it was incredible and the it it went so viral that Grimes heard about our Afterparty and exited

herself and she's playing in my basement in like on the water and and it was one of the best parties I've ever had and it wasn't because it was Grimes because we saw her at the beach club before it was a very different environment seeing Grimes at the beach club knowing that it was a transaction or that she was there cuz someone paid her and then she was at our house and people are losing their minds like what the hell is Grimes doing here it's because the exuism that uh caused it to come someone talked to someone and was emotionally invested to make the party as good as it be and so we start to learn about this web of trust and the power that it has and speaking to a lot of people smarter than

me people who've been playing this game a lot longer people who are older than me people who are wiser um have been talking about how this is not a new problem this is a very old problem and I was told and I I know some context but here what we have is some Cipher punks who have self-issued their identity 0x1 uh someone's got a barcode you can see the same story rhyming in in this and so uh what we've discovered is that in the '90s people used to play this game called a key signing party because they didn't trust each other they didn't trust the government they

didn't trust their encryption they didn't know who the pgp keys were and so what they did is they came together this is an event in the two early 2000s where they signed each other's pgp fingerprint and if you can imagine it is a very similar scenario for us who knows who these ethereum wallets are could we play a game um and so what we realized is that these C photographers actually wrote academic papers this is from the web archives uh something about uh different protocols I've looked at about four or five different protocols I like this particular protocol it's the projected version of the Zimmerman prot key signing par protocol and so we can actually take some lessons from the past

these cryptographers who have solved this game and thought about different ways and so in this old protocol you know you email all the participants they do their check some they send it key or key coordinator it involves the trust of a centralized entity called the keyer and uh and a key signing server and the question became could that just be a smart contract do we need to trust this key coordinator and so instead of emailing uh your your your fingerprints we can play a game uh we can do a protocol in which you know we can start to play these webs of trust but in a more sophistic at in a more technically correct way and so you can

imagine a scenario where um in in this in this protocol everyone has to kind of vouch for each other and they use two forms of digital ID and so we don't particularly like the whole self-issued identity we like the idea that you can take a Fiat note €1 out of your wallet and self-issue your own identity the fact that it's Fiat is beautiful it comes with all this security the verification ability and the fact that we can turn something worthless like a Venezuelan Boulevard and play this game using smart contracts zero knowledge proofs however you wish to do it it depends on your lack of trust and your trust assumptions and

your what you want and so my hyperstition is that someday soon in the future that we can all play a game not a game but like have a system in which people can come together somewhere private by a fire and play and and do a trust ceremony in which we form webs of trust not just once but multiple times over time and start building what we call a web of trust something that is interwoven over time and allows us to to to do things that we couldn't have done before and my hope is that someday uh we get to have these webs of trust because

you never know one day you're going to have to trust someone in this room thank you my name's Adrian and uh add me on Twitter and uh happy to answer any questions we got four minutes trust you thank you how much do you trust me I need to borrow a car this weekend can you help me out are you planning an after after party if yes can you invite me no context here the context is key when someone asks you a question I need to know who it's from um but um one thing that is another interesting

point is that your trust isn't always the same you know I I give the example of uh I have two friends right one I want to give 100 he's my best friend from school I trust him like that money is as good as God he will pay me back in three 3 days without me even asking I have another friend if I give him €100 that's gone the likelihood that he pays me back 50% whether it's one year or four years and how much effort I'll give it like 10 cents on the dollar and so the same trust assumptions but different people have different context so um it is very contextualized my questions are gone but

we can keep playing go for it can this be used uh funny question I had a I tried to be a senator in New South Wales in 2018 I was trying to like doing a blockchain based political party uh I don't necessarily think it works so well at like the Senate level there's different games that we can play this is more for like um lower forms of trust and you might want to think about games in which uh you might air drop a token and that becomes a dow um and and the question you want to know is if we did a key signing party we know that there are 133 people in this room there are us we

can't just sible and have like a wallet full of bards because the way we play the key signing party it's one person in the room and so if I aird drop us saw I know that there's some soft Cil resistance that you know we can have a dow so we can work towards doing governance but I don't think it's at the you know Senate level yet no good question thank you I'm going to yield my time thank you very [Applause] much