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awbvioustoday at 5:51 PM0 repliesview on HN

It is a false dichotomy that abandoning anonymity must happen with verifying humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge-proof . The only trick is who holds the infrastructure for the proofs. A single person or small group like, oh, the one(s) behind World Coin? People on ycombinator might know that one. Sufficiently decentralized, FOSS, /true/ non-profit (like Wikipedia), maybe. (Ironic I mention Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales' WT.Social never did take off.)

Further, the challenge is not completely autonomous bots that are somehow separate of humans, never has been, all code on Earth has and will have a human imprint even in the wildest AGI fantasies. The first false dichotomy is anonymity and veracity, the second false dichotomy is human and bot. And tho biggest challenge comes from a specific human-bot combination, the Cory Doctorow Reverse Centaur (though Centaurs also complicate things). One human can suddenly impact the "volume" of discourse, like a magic hidden megaphone that somehow no one can detect at a dinner party where the lights are too low to see who is talking. /And/ if there's a door check at the party, it's easy to transport someone who makes pennies a day to show up at the door, look like anyone you want, and then come inside with a magic hidden microphone that you provide them.

I think it's less about proving human, more about proving /reputation associated with an entity/. It's not about whether "awbvious" is human, but whether "awbvious" is committed to acting human. Committed to not use a hidden, magic megaphone. Committed to not using hidden, magic megaphones with others. Which I am.