Genuine Personal Identifiers and Mutual Sureties for Sybil-Resilient Community Formation

While most of humanity is suddenly on the net, the value of this singularity is hampered by the lack of credible digital identities: Social networking, person-to-person transactions, democratic conduct, cooperation and philanthropy are all hampered by the profound presence of fake identities, as illustrated by Facebook's removal of 5.4Bn fake accounts since the beginning of 2019. Here, we introduce the fundamental notion of a \emph{genuine personal identifier}---a globally unique and singular identifier of a person---and present a foundation for a decentralized, grassroots, bottom-up process in which every human being may create, own, and protect the privacy of a genuine personal identifier. The solution employs mutual sureties among owners of personal identifiers, resulting in a mutual-surety graph reminiscent of a web-of-trust. Importantly, this approach is designed for a distributed realization, possibly using distributed ledger technology, and does not depend on the use or storage of biometric properties. For the solution to be complete, additional components are needed, notably a mechanism that encourages honest behavior and a sybil-resilient governance system

Using a memory test to limit a user to one account. AMEC

Abstract. In many Web-based applications, there are incentives for a user to sign up for more than one account, under false names. By doing so, the user can send spam e-mail from an account (which will eventually cause the account to be shut down); distort online ratings by rating multiple times (in particular, she can inflate her own reputation ratings); indefinitely continue using a product with a free trial period; place shill bids on items that she is selling on an auction site; engage in falsename bidding in combinatorial auctions; etc. All of these behaviors are highly undesirable from the perspective of system performance. While CAPTCHAs can prevent a bot from automatically signing up for many accounts, they do not prevent a human from signing up for multiple accounts. It may appear that the only way to prevent the latter is to require the user to provide information that identifies her in the real world (such as a credit card or telephone number), but users are reluctant to give out such information