ID

Introduction

In order to defend double-spending attacks in Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto designed and awarded incentives to those who contributed in preventing them. Similarly, in Bright-ID that works on decentralized unique IDs, incentives need to be designed and awarded to those who help securing the system against sybil attacks. Prevention of sybil attacks has always been sought through improvement of complicated algorithms. These algorithms function only with high numbers of trusted nodes and their connections.

Subsequently, there should be incentives in these projects for trusted nodes that flourish trust in the system by making connections to others. The ID project recognizes this essential requirement for incentives and aims to create and distribute incentive tokens called ID-Coins to those who prevent sybil attacks to Bright-ID, and, pave the path towards creating a decentralized unique ID system in the world of blockchain.

Activity Score

The incentives in the ID project should be paid to users according to their activity in making connections or vouching for others. Trust score can not represent activity, because, it results from the connections made by others or receiving a vouch. Vouching increases trust score for the vouchees. However, activity is not receiving a vouch, it is rather vouching for others.

Therefore, unlike trust score which increases when users receive a vouch, a new index called activity score increases when users actively vouch for others. In other words, trust score represents the uniqueness of IDs, while activity score is a representation of their active contribution to securing Bright-ID against sybil attacks and expanding the system which deserves receiving incentives. Subsequently, trust score has a limited range of zero to a full hundred percent, while, activity score can be increased indefinitely.

Moreover, different vouches receive altered amounts of activity scores. Vouchers gain more activity scores if they vouch for individuals earlier than others. So they are incentivised to vouch as soon as possible and recruiting new members to network. Vouches for fake IDs result in fines and exponential loss of activity score.

The trusted zone

Bright-ID users who want to gain incentives by securing the system act as a trust spring that flourishes truthfulness in the environment. But there’s always a risk of some of them being sybil and not trustworthy. To eliminate this threat, a trusted zone with more difficult conditions is designed and tokens are awarded to users who accept these conditions and join the trusted zone.

In order to join the trusted zone, one has to provide collateral and his real photo hash to the smart contract that creates awards. These two requirements are utilized when and if users are reported as sybil by others. Reported users provide the actual picture behind their registered hash and a structured video to a limited number and randomly selected highly trusted users of the trusted zone to have their IDs verified. And, collaterals help secure the system by being used as a fine for dishonest activities and also as an incentive for others who actively search for them.

In order to report a user in the trusted zone, one has to make a certain amount of deposit in the smart contract to support his claim. If the reported user turns out to be sybil, his whole collateral plus a part of the collateral owned by his vouchees are transferred to the reporter. Vice versa, If the report turns out to be false and the user proves to be honest, the reporter’s deposit is transferred to the user.

This report mechanism makes it costly enough for casual users to report others inattentively. Gaining the collateral of sybil accounts, on the other hand is encouraging enough even for large companies to design and implement highly sophisticated algorithms to find out and report fake IDs.

Unlike the open source algorithm that calculates trust scores in Bright-ID, New algorithms that are developed by these companies are neither public, nor open source. Consequently, sybil nodes that usually review the public algorithm and figure ways to get around them, have no access to these sophisticated algorithms and have no way to get around them. This process provides the zone with a security on a higher level.

It is essential to point out that not all Bright-ID users are required to join this trusted zone. Only those who seek gaining incentives and have no problem in providing the requirements will ultimately join.