The Sybil War

Okay, we've got a clicker, right. Welcome everyone. Just a bit of a warning, this covers some pretty dark themes at times and there's a bit of naughty language, just as a warning. Yeah, my talk is called The Civil War. It's about civil resistance.

It's also, I've added this subtitle, I didn't know whether I was gonna stick it to WorldCoin today or not, but I decided to go full tilt. And why you should learn to start worrying and hate the orbs. You should hate this technology and I'm here to persuade you that that is the case. So what I'm gonna do is basically overview what civil attacks are, throw a bit of theory at you, nothing too heavy, but there's a couple of key concepts that I want you to use as a kind of analytical tool. By the way, these are just my opinions.

This is, my opinion's only not affiliated with anyone. And yeah, so broadly, what are the challenges? And even more broadly, fuck WorldCoin. So what do we know about civil attacks? Well, a civil attack is basically just the act of duplicating an identity with the purpose of gaming a reputation system for gain.

So the reality of blockchain systems is that they create pseudonymous identities. I can spin up a public-private key pair, represent a public key that is linked to me, and only me knows that's my public identity, it's a pseudonym. Civil resistance is an attempt to crush pseudo-anonymity. It's to limit the amount of identities you are allowed in the system. And there's reasons for that, right?

It breaks voting systems. I've spent years building voting systems. It's a pain in the ass. It breaks review systems and people farm airdrops and stuff like that with it. It's a desirable property in some systems.

Key bit of game theory, the Civil War is an escalation game. So there's ways of modeling game-theoretic systems. One's called the Stackelberg Leader-Follower Game, and that's what I think this is. Works like this, I build a civil-resistant system, and you, an adversary who wants to break my system, build a strategy that counters my defense. So I then go back and say, ah, these guys have broke in.

I'm now gonna add a strategy. And then they add a strategy, and it implicitly escalates, right? The reality of it is that this system is like adding hops into the game, and all parties have to play that game, whatever it is. So the way that we deal with this in the kind of current status quo, I would say, particularly centralized exchanges do this, but banks and most financial systems will have to do this. They dock to you.

And you will have seen this escalatory game over the years where you used to be able to sign up with an email address, but then it's an SMS. And now you need my passport, and then a utility bill, and then et cetera, et cetera, all the way up from letters from HR in order to get my money back. Now the problem here is that once I've done all this, I can just sell my account to someone. So you have to cyclically re-docks over and over and over again. That's the escalation game.

Another key point, you cannot win the civil war. This is a war of attrition. This escalation game knows no ends. The more you escalate the game, the more atrocities that you create. This is a key argument I'm trying to make, is that chasing perfect civil resistance is the path to hell.

You are simply escalating this game into territories where only the worst villains on the planet will win. And they will. Core bit of theory. I want you to sort of understand this idea of affordances. This was a paper by James Gibson, an ecological approach to visual perception.

This guy was during the World War responsible for like helping planes land. And he realized when he was designing the sort of markings that go on runways, that pilots don't look, is this a runway? They look, can I land on this? Right, so he altered the markings to pass information to the pilots to show that it is landable. And he called this an affordance, right?

How it works is, man here, cat, mouse, rock. The man's looking at this system going, what can I do here? So the mouse. The mouse here uses this rock to hide behind it. It's a hiding place.

The affordance of the rock to the mouse is hide. The cat knows this. And he's thinking, is there a mouse behind there? To him, the rock is somewhere where there might be food. To the guy who's holding the rock, he's thinking, what can I do from this?

I can smash things up with it. I might trip over it if I'm not careful. It affords throwing, smashing. It affords the creation of cat and mouse games, which is very much what the civil resistance game is. So society, as it interacts with technologies, changes the technology itself.

So affordances of technologies emerge as the technology is used, and not all of them are good. So what I call this is a kind of technological inversion. When the technology makes it into society, unknown affordances emerge, and they're often pretty shit. So we've seen this with like social inversion tools that are designed for things like productivity become a kind of surveillance tool, a corporate surveillance tool. We think, right, we're gonna make DeFi, but what we create is Ponzi's.

We create governance tools, which are designed to emancipate, but end up centralizing power on someone who can kill, rug everyone button. Cognitive inversion, we've seen the monsters that have been unleashed by social media. The like allows you to like, but it also has created a kind of cloutocracy that we live in now. A bit of latest research in civil resistance, highly recommend this paper. It's called Compressed to Zero by Pooja Alhavir and Mikhail from Edina.

And they kind of analyzed this network that was designed to get away with all that pesky kind of like money involved with validating crypto economic systems and replace it with an identity system. And they did that by creating this thing they called a filter of intelligent persons, or flips. And you needed to basically, it was a little puzzle that only humans were really good at. Problem is it got civil attacked. In fact, the network got took over by civils.

By the end, it was just civils in the end. And what happened was these kind of pools emerged. Core mantra of mine, every game will be gained. All of these are like any game, any crypto economic game is effectively temporary and needs to evolve in order to match the market. And in the world of civils, this turns into a kind of strategic game between you and the adversaries.

You can think of this as control of information. I don't know what's going on, but I'm in control. That means I've got my private key, but don't really know what this game is or what it's doing or whatever. And I can sell my private keys to someone else. Again, low information game, but now someone else controls my private keys.

That happened a lot. But then what really started happening and what Pooja called puppeteering, which is this process where people would round up humans. If you need humans, you will farm humans in order to do it. And in fact, there's pictures here of a little child labor setup that was there for like farming, Adena. So, that brings me to the core affordances of WorldCoin.

WorldCoin directly incentivizes the creation of human slavery. That is a fact. In this very city, people got rounded up by Chechen gangsters to take into orbs to be farmed for coins, aka human slavery. This is happening a lot. And in fact, the more that you ramp the value of those world IDs, the more valuable those eyeballs become.

All we need to do is turn that into some kind of airdrop shitcoin factory and people will be getting rounded up all the time for their eyeballs. In fact, the more value it becomes, the more the game escalates and the more eyeball farms that we will get. To what it actually states its purpose is, right? It claims it's civil resistance. It's a bit fuzzy, but really what it does, it affords apps perfect control over the number of accounts that their users can have, right?

So, what this means is I orb into the application. It's a privacy-preserving layer at the bottom. It uses some nice ZK, et cetera, et cetera. And what this means it does is the app has no knowledge of which world ID has logged in. But once I'm in the app, it's up to the app what they do with me, including dox me and all that sort of stuff, right?

So, they can collect as much data. In fact, most of these will be Web2 apps, so we'll farm the shit out of you when it comes to data. And it also gives them the ability to say, you can have just one account, right? Come to this later, but they're just gonna deal with Match Group and Tinder, et cetera. Obviously, don't want you to have more than one Tinder account.

That would be terrible, wouldn't it? So, we're just gonna give one pass to this person. Now, if you get de-platformed from that, if you get banned for whatever reason, it's over for you. There is no way back. This is a highly desirable affordance for technologies.

So, one affordance of Worldcoin is that it's a high-fidelity rug button. I like to think of this as like a sword of Damocles hanging over you when any world app that you are in. If they ban you, it's over. You're out. Now, fair enough, right?

I've been banned from Reddit or whatever. Who gives a shit? But what this does is it basically just elevates the power of an already powerful system, Big Tech. Now, they are in control over whether I have access to this technology with perfect fidelity. I've been banned by Claude.

I don't know why. What I've said to him. If I'd orbed, it's over for me. I can get, I've got burner phones for this kind of shit and VPNs, so what, right? But if I'd orbed, gone.

So Worldcoin affords Big Tech to become even more powerful. How lovely. It doesn't stop there. The problem is, is when these world apps become much more powerful than even Big Tech. I think this is gonna happen.

We are so close, it's not even funny. If that was Worldcoin, and it could have been, well, it probably is at the next one, we're in big fucking trouble. So, Worldcoin affords the states to become even more powerful. Because I can, the app can centralize all my identity, and the EU is working on a project called Glass that does just this. It's effectively an SBT with IPFS hashes to all my useful data, such as my medical records, my visas, and so on.

All I need to do is collect this to a CBDC or some access where I can revoke my ability to access public services, and I'm eating out of bins. It is over for me, right? So as these apps get more important, the worse the decentralized rug button becomes. And in fact, Worldcoin affords the creation of systems of terror. I mean that by this system, and the app that comes on top of it, the primary affordance you need to create a totalitarian state and system of terror is the ability to remove access rights at the push of a button.

And that's what this technology creates the ability to do. This is happening. So in the UK, they're rolling out digital IDs expressly for foreign nationals. The government there was all lovey-dovey lefty about six months ago, and now is massively far right. And now they're just planning to effectively just add orbs not far away.

Worldcoin turns your Tinder date into an orb operator. This is, are they really taking the piss now? This is just getting ridiculous. Like it's actually just a real life episode of Black Mirror, and people are just watching this and like, just laughing it off, I don't get it, right? This is too far.

This recent mini orbs app, which they've managed to reduce the orbs, one of my things, oh, well, if it gets really bad, we can just smash the fucking orbs, right? The problem is that now they live in people's handbags. And actually what this does is turn your Tinder date, which is explicitly what is depicted in the advert for this, some dude getting orbed by his date, presumably being that you can earn some coins while you're dating on Tinder, right? That's like, what the fuck? So this is even more insidious because Worldcoin manipulates people into scanning.

So a nice basic bribe will do it for most people. But for some, I'm gonna need to make, basically say, oh, right, you're some kind of predator because you haven't been orbed on Tinder, right? Do you want this date to happen? You'd better orb. So it takes these existing social dynamics and manipulates them.

The whole thing is about, are you a human? Well, with the implicit idea that you are subhuman unless you orb. The whole thing is designed to flip you in. Don't you want your likes on Twitter? What affordances does Worldcoin not have?

Worldcoin does not stop deepfakes. Nothing could stop me making images like this and putting them on the internet. Certainly global prevalence of orbs does not do it. The idea is that, oh, the deepfakes are bad, right? You must scan.

It doesn't solve the problem. Not even close. Yes, the world will turn to slop, but honestly, it won't work. You're just leaving the, anyone who's not orbed can not use your app. That's never gonna happen.

So they'll always leave the Sybil door open anyway, thus leaving it frail to all the previous attack strategies. It doesn't work. You can ban open source models, orb every person on the planet or attempt to, and it still won't stop deepfakes. It's already full of Sybils. Who loved the target of this right at the beginning?

Villains who thought, oh, I can farm eyeballs and earn some coins. I don't know how much of the network is full of literally farmed humans, but I bet it's a lot. So it's not privacy preserving. They like to use the idea that it's a privacy technology. No, it's not, because the privacy collapses at the app layer and you can be docked to hell in there, and all that's left is the rug button.

Even more insidiously, they now claim that the Iris codes that they've created are their private property. You can't ever have them now. That's no longer your personal private information. It's our technology we've created using your eyeballs. It's ours now.

You can't ever have it back. Once you orb, you can't go back. They say this isn't personal private information, but if I come to an app and it knows I've been on there before and can deny me personally from signing up, that's personal private information. So this is a Sybil war. It's a war of attrition.

The idea of even trying to win this game is a bad idea. Every move escalates the game and each one gets more costly and totally fucking grim. So my argument is that we should not have any Sybil system that creates this outcome. If anyone's getting farmed for their eyeballs in your game, shut it down. So I've got a couple of minutes left.

I'm gonna quickly rattle these, but we can fight these without biometrics. We do it with Bitcoin. We burn 2% of the world's energy to build a Sybil-resistant system. That's how difficult this problem is, but you can do it with money and we should explore crypto-economic solutions. ZKTLS could be the way that we do this.

This is a path to an all-bliss future and it's the stack I'm most excited about doing this and building a constellation of authentic human identity is the way that we do it. There's a whole raft of the way that we represent to our world, new data sources, new ways to attest our data. This is a set of data of students. Some of my students from a few years ago were voting on which project that we should work on together using kind of quadratic voting stuff. And these little patterns are like fingerprints for opinion.

And there's all sorts of ways that we can drag out information that can prove that you are human. The bot problem is a problem. It doesn't mean World Clean is the solution. We have something like the Turing test, which still works. The best way to detect a bot, you probably thought, that's a bot, right?

Because you're a human and you can detect bots. So we should do something like the socialized Turing test to detect each other's individuality. Final thought, we should start trusting more. This World Clean is a kind of manifestation of this kind of trustless, hard, sort of like immutable tool system that's gonna solve all our problems when in reality, humans are gonna human and the reality and trust is a kind of magic spell that we form amongst ourselves that helps us do magic things. So we should build social networks of trust.

This is the end game for this. It's about finding those solutions. If you're gonna work on anything in the next few years, please work on this. Quote from Peach, who has some brilliant ideas on this. Identity is who you are to the people that you know and is inherently a human compute.

We need to bring humans back into the mix and allow them to decide what our trust is. So to finish off, extreme solutions lead to extreme outcomes. This is the civil war, do not escalate it. Stop here. World Clean is extremely harmful emergent affordances which are incredibly dangerous.

We should shut the whole thing down. It can get far worse than it is and that's when the state gets involved which I think is gonna happen and that's why I'm out because as soon as this game steps into that arena, I'll now become a geopolitical dissident which I don't fancy. So I'm out. And we need to build systems that respect and value authentic human identity or they are not solutions. I advise you to do one thing, become a conscientious objector.

And if you wanna summarize this talk for people, it's this, fuck World Coin. Thank you. I'm really a bit scared about seeing Tom being after you. Like no one, let's have a go. So great talk, thank you very much.

One question I have is how you feel about, I know it's sort of a new technology so you might not be able to say so much about it but I think it's interesting because it's somewhere in between the things you talked about is Circles UBI where it has a web of trust model so it seems to be kind of in the better direction but at the same time, I could easily see how you could get farmable, you know, there's CRC to earn. There's like a mechanism that doesn't try to be perfect civil resistance so that seems nice in your framework but I just wonder what your thoughts on this. It's not a perfect civil resistance. I like Circles a lot. I think you should all play with Circles.

We need to get good at these things, find why it's good, find why it's bad so we can get that information back into the mix. I'm sure the teams involved and the community here will help it evolve but yeah, absolutely. This is a web of trust game explicitly about kind of creating these little micro currencies as a way to sort of incentivize the civils into making themselves visible which is very good. Not particularly private and does kind of like dock quite heavily. I would prefer a more private solution but I think it's a good step in the right direction.

It's in the world of good things that can happen there. Thank you so much for your talk. So I'm Julio. I'm one of the surrogate mothers of Circles. I did a lot of Intel looking into WorldCoin before and we have to say that it's not just like the CEO of WorldCoin is like, I think like some sort of feudal lord of Altman which is a feudal lord of Peter Thiel, volunteer and then you have the US government.

So I just wanted to mention that fact so people know it and the other thing is the Circles, like one reason I started doing all this stuff with privacy is to make this type of attestation systems that are privacy preserving because the problem is that orbs run on safes and I'm very scared that they will try to combine them with the Circles level of trust. So if you're here and if you can do something to influence that not happening, please do so. Yeah, I mean, yeah, be a conscientious objector, resist it. Yes, it is part of the Altman industrial complex which is incredibly powerful and scary. It got more scary in the last 24 hours and it's just part of the escalation game that is at play, right?

So yeah, this is the full force of the techno capsule machine trying to push this into existence and you can just see it happening, right? It's highly adjacent to extremely large power structures and that is what makes it really, really scary in my view. Thanks, Nick. A round of applause. Quick note, I was in my mind there was this idea that this is the first Instagrammable talk that we did.