Building a Sybil Resistant Passport to Web3 with Jeremy Dillingham & Kevin Olsen

Transcript

foreign [Music] on the Pod today we are talking about Bitcoin passport which is a primitive for creating more civil resistance what is civil resistance this is resistance to sock puppet accounts what are the ways in which we could go from a token weighted web3 ecosystem to a more democratic web 3 ecosystem going from one token one vote to one human one vote going from plutocracy to more democracy so Bitcoin passport is a tool that has evolved out of git coin Dao in order to support the Civil resistance the sock puppet resistance the Democratic Capital allocation at git coin

um and we are going to be going deep on what passport is and how it can be useful in your project how it works and all of the things get coin passport on this episode before we get into the episode just a quick reminder I am known as a co-founder of Bitcoin but I since disaffiliated from leadership in the project so I am in the role of podcast host this episode and I've got two really amazing guests on the episode to talk about passport so um Kevin Olson is engineering lead at get going passport and he'll be talking about the technology behind Bitcoin passport and Jeremy Dillingham is the product manager on get coin passport so um this is the this is the Dream Team

working on civil resistance uh Bitcoin Jeremy has been in tech for 25 years spent 16 years in product management Building Products across a variety of Industries most analogous products to passport was working in anti-spam projects 15 years ago and solving the spam problem in web 3. Olson is an artist turned engineer turned into engineering leadership has been building software and software teams for 15 years working with get Queen of the Dow for the last 18 months helping get coin decentralized modularize its tech-end products and built and shipped coin passport which is the Civil resistance tool and Grant stack and aloe protocol which are the public goods funding tools at Bitcoin so I think this is a fun episode if you're into digital identity

and civil resistance and I hope you enjoy learning about Bitcoin passport Athena Dao is addressing the underfunded areas of women's health such as menopause and endometriosis Athena is a Community Driven doubt giving women a say in decision making and funding the scientific breakthroughs that impact their lives with cutting-edge technology like molecules IP nft framework they invest in research IP that ensures exclusive licensing rights Athena Dao is Raising awareness to women's health research working alongside existing organizations so join Athena Dao today to help change the landscape of women's health research what's up Olson what's up Jeremy what's going on man okay really excited to talk about Bitcoin passport today so Jeremy first question to you what is the Civil attack problem

and how does passport remediate it yeah so the classic definition of a civil attack is the abuse of a digital Network by many illegitimate virtual personas and so in common layman terms and so that's a hot tip from the art the article who watches the Watchmen in layman terms it's a people using multiple fake accounts or puppet accounts as you've said before on greenpill to attack a system so that could be spinning up many accounts for an airdrop it could be it's been out many accounts to vote in quadratic funding to game the system or or to capture an airdrop but it's basically a place where humans are getting boxed out by Bots or fake fake people and uh what

passport is is a as a system that we've built that is a aggregator of identity provider solutions that helps to try to combat this problem by allowing an individual to share a capture and share their identity and reputation in a way that makes it easy for humans to prove they're humans and makes it hard for for sibles or Bots to get the same type of score and so what we've done is we've built a system that has sort of two sides to it there's a adapt which is a passport.getcoin.co where the end user has a really easy way of capturing those credentials or stamps that help to prove their identity and then we have a

systemat score.getcoin.com that allows integrators to be able to capture those passports or use those passports or create scores and do all sorts of stuff that helps them start to utilize passport to protect those communities Wilson anything dead yeah I think you nailed that definition I think you know some of the things that are important in this or we're we're trying to do a couple things one preserve uh for The Preserve um privacy here right so what what are the design choices we made really early on is that we won't store any pii or personally identified information right so everything we're doing is really kind of a an attestation just an observation that you have a Twitter account or you have more than

500 followers uh you have you know uh so much uh eth you know uh that you've held at what point or another and these These are signals that we're using to to build up a picture of a person's identity uh but we're not uh building anything that really doxes anybody there's maybe a concern around triangulation but even then we're trying to like obscure the exact numbers right so it's not possible to look at a passport and reverse engineer oh that's a walkie's passport the idea is that you have all these signals that can be evaluated without having to reveal anything personally identifiable and this goes like that's the design choices that go throughout the whole stack I can go into that if you want to but the main thing I think is we're trying to do a kind of a tricky thing here right build a very complete

picture of a person without revealing any like personal info information about them so it's it's it's pretty rad actually I'm pretty happy with what we've we've arrived at it's pretty unique in the space in that regard too yeah I would just add on stocks I think it's really important as we go down some of the principles that we're talking about uh besides privacy preserving we we really strongly believe in data sovereignty so it's also a say we don't store anything you know capture that information about your Twitter account or which followers you had or anything that would be uh anything close to pii we also enable you to decide if you want to publish that that attestation of those credentials right so you could possibly qualify for 10 stamps and decide that you only want to uh push the

fact that you qualify for five so everything is always in the industry always opt in so to play that back um the Civil attack problem is the problem of sock puppets and passport was devised at git coin in order to address start to solve the problem of sock puppets which is especially acute at git coin because the primary mechanism behind Bitcoin is quadratic funding a matching coordination a capital allocation tool that allocates funds to the projects that the poor and the many care about not the rich and the few and because your identity is kind of what you're voting for voting with in quadratic funding there's this there's

this attack Vector where if if I'm going to give a hundred dollars to a project the most Capital efficient thing to do is to make a hundred different ideas these and to give it to that project so it allocates more of the matching pool passport is designed to stop that attack system uh that attack Vector but within the constraints of we don't want to violate users privacy we want to create data sovereignty and um we don't want to create we want to create as much friction for the attackers as possible but we don't what we want to reduce the friction for actual legitimate users to get into the system so it was kind of created by the constraints of Bitcoin being a quadratic funding tool and and wanting to prevent civil attacks on the quadratic funding

mechanism um that's the way I play that back I'm curious if either of you have anything to add no that's great I mean that's exactly right I think it's it's really important to think too about like like the the rational economic actor you know at play here right so airdrop farming people do it because it makes sense because they make money doing it right they're not doing it to distort like signals of user numbers or something like this right like there's always a sort of like you kind of empathize a little bit with what where people are coming from and the same is true for all of these like systems that are trying to reward user Behavior right you look at these nft platforms they're trying to like you know reward people for doing certain things they end up with a bunch of wash trading and a bunch of bots and

this kind of stuff right so anytime there's an economic incentive which is like huge right it's a big part of what we can do in this space is actually incentivize users for participating in networks and protocols be able to kind of gate people for like legitimate uses is super important it's been something that's really been hard to do and kind of missing right so you can see a lot of these different identity providers popping up that are trying to solve this and kind of like one lucky shot and I think what's really cool about our approach is that we've decided to kind of take the sum of all of those right we're not trying to go all in on one solution get coin passports really intended to be this like aggregator of all of these really high quality signals and giving people a lot of choices about

how they want to like uh you know reason about those right there's a cool design space at the end once you have all these attestations and stamps you can decide you know what matters to you and your community how do you want to train you know an ml model uh determining what's a likely airdrop farmer from a likely bought from you know somebody else right those are those are a very cool thing that's enabled by this primitive that you know we have one use case the quadratic funding use case but we're finding that there's lots of communities that really really diverse sets of needs that are all benefiting from this now actually Jeremy I don't know if you want to chat a little bit about that that'd be super cool to hear about kind of like where people are seeing use cases outside of this git coin yeah for sure and I just

add on that I think there's an important thing here which is that in the infinite game right or uh you know the red team blue team as we we've talked about before and I know you've talked about on this podcast uh Milwaukee um this is a space where we actually can see the attack vectors as they happen both in real time and retrospective which which makes it really powerful for us to be able to adjust those stamps and those different credentials and the things that we need to do to continue to improve passport to make it better because we actually get to see that closed loop within the other side of Bitcoin of of how that attack happens but we're seeing lots of really interesting use cases um you know cyber connect just launched with us a few weeks ago to use us to

protect their raffle and saw a pretty substantial decrease in Bots from their system which was really really exciting to see somebody adopt it they were able to integrate quickly and then actually see the impact of it quickly which was which was really exciting um there's some upcoming airdrops that are looking to use passport to potentially protect and and against those airdrops and we're working on Integrations right now with both discourse and Snapshot from a community protection uh standpoint so how do you prevent spam Bots false actors from you know creating proposals and snapshot or doing votes that don't matter or you know adding to you know the community forums in a way that's destructive and some of these you know it it's really

difficult because you know on the on the face you know one or two of those actors may be harmless but what we're seeing is that it's actually damaged in the community it's just the people that are doing things are you know trying to provide legitimacy for phishing attacks or other fraud that's happening in the web so it was born out of get coins need originally um but what we found is that there's a huge problem in the space that if we could solve the Civil problem and let me asterisk that but if we could solve the Civil problem it's just a it's just a massive problem that lots and lots of players in the space need help to try to solve and I say solve because I think at the end game we don't actually ever eliminate sybils or Bots entirely but we get to a place where it's you know too

expensive to attack or that we get to a standstill where there's some small percentage that I let through but it's really you know reduce the problem significantly than what we're seeing today let me just play back what I heard there so there's a red team and a blue team the red team are the attackers uh the people who are trying to exploit the mechanism for economic gain and then the blue team are the Defenders the people who are kind of setting up the trip wires and studying the attacker's behavior and they're you'll never really ever solve completely civil resistance because there's no perfect way of knowing whether or not an identity is is is is is made up we won't have perfect information because of the Privacy

preserving decentralized nature of this and so the best that we can do is host an infinite evolutionary game where the attackers attack the mechanism The Defenders see how they exploited the mechanism and then evolve the system for the next Epoch for the next coin grants round and what you can do over time is that you can kind of make it costlier for an attacker to so that it's not resource efficient for them to attack the mechanism and over time the system will go from being resistant to to no one to resist descript kitties to Petty criminals to organize crime to nation-state actors if you can get um

if you can set up the right trip factors in there and so um it sounds like this is kind of like an infinite evolutionary game and we'll never fully solve civil resistance because these are complex systems with humans but what you can do is you can set up this like kind of Quake Team Fortress or or like I'm thinking like Counter-Strike here where where your Bitcoin or some other where you maintain that the blue the blue team infrastructure and then what you can do from there is you can just produce an API so that other people who need simple resistance can just derive from get coins data instead of having to set up the whole attack Arena and solve game theoretic problems yourself so I guess two points there this is a hard problem

is a big unsolved problem for the space and it'll never be fully solved but uh bitcoin's kind of taking the brunt of of figuring out a pluralistic values lines way of solving it and then producing a data exhaust trail with passport that other d-apps can integrate with if they want civil resistance how does that resonate and is there anything I got wrong yeah I think it mostly resonates I think the the place today is that we are evolving based on the quarterly get coin grants round like that's the sort of today versus and historical look uh where we're trying to go is to start to evolve in much more real time right so you know the thing that's great is that we do own the Quake Team Fortress or

whatever analogy you wanted to use on the on the get coin side for the grass round which gives us an lots of additional data that we don't have from just the purely passport side so passports privacy preserving and opt-in only but when you start to use another system like you're going to donate to a grants round you're now providing additional data that isn't necessarily opt-in because that's data that's captured for trying to determine if that is a legitimate Grant or not and so we can use that additional data to help improve our signals within passport itself but go find grants is just one integrator it's just one partner that we have in this system and the more partners that we have in the system the better and the faster we can start to respond so we can see one attack Vector for one blue team whether that's our

blue team or a partner blue team and then use that to improve it for all the other blue teams right and so that's that's the goal of us doing that from the integration side and there's still lots of work to be done on how do we have that data round trip and those feedback loops and do that in still a privacy preserving way but that helps to improve the entire ecosystem and then on the other other side was the identity providers that are part of the passport system and solution we're looking at them to we're looking to continue to add additional providers so in our our language or our world those are stamp providers or people that are helping provide credentials so those are identity systems like our friends at bright ID and we're looking to both uh add additional systems and also help to

sort of improve those systems as they have new signals so simplistically we might find Twitter works today two weeks from now Twitter doesn't work as a strong signal we either remove it or we replace it or we change the credentials on that and so we're constantly seeing those vectors and and figuring out how we can start to improve those and so that's where it gets really exciting is you know this this pluralistic system we start to make it more and more anti-fragile and we also make the feedback loops faster so you attack in one place and it's like it's like now the immune defenses across all the other places that you haven't even had a chance to attack yet and so if we can start to do that rap iteration with with a broad Community then then we get both more powerful immune response and we get

it faster which is which is ultimately also now you think Dad now that's brilliant man I like it I like the idea too just sort of like this sort of like summing up of efforts right so yeah you're like having Bitcoin or oh we had our own needs right we had to solve them finding the use cases outside of git coin but then being able to work with these Partners to like improve that scoring and you know we we have the scorer which is kind of like that integration point right where everyone can kind of come back and get the quick access to any one of the passport shows up you can quickly get a score our default score is going to continue to evolve right but we're also starting to realize through these partners that there's other kind of flavors of scoring and we're starting to build kind of

custom scoring uh for those communities right like a protecting an airdrop is different than predicting a quadratic funding route and we're going to start having sort of different uh Opera options for People based on their needs right so there's also like a place for people to bring a lot of like you know design intelligence into this too kind of push us to help them you know uh you know partner with us to bring new and novel use cases and we can keep improving either like the core default score or new flavors of scoring um that also feeds back into like new signals like maybe there's new types of credentials or we have some really exciting conversations with different credentialing ecosystems there's all kinds of cool stuff that can come through there uh and I think that's what I'm actually most excited about is

getting the more and more signals in there because you know our particular approach of you know dids and VCS and you know uh the way we've built things so far that's one ecosystem right but there's a whole kind of like ZK ecosystem that's spun up uh we're really looking forward to like figuring out how to start incorporating some of that stuff into this uh and just kind of enriching That Base data set uh and then really like again creating that that sort of like library of signals that people can start innovating on top of I'd love to get real tangible and and and talk about what is the user experience so if I go to passport.getcoin.com which by the way is linked in the show notes if I go to password.gitcoin.com what do I see what

can I do as as a user in the ecosystem how does it look and feel uh hopefully good and easy and if not we want that feedback so always always reach out if you're encountering issues uh but basically it starts with you signing in uh signing with Assyrian to a wallet to prove that you have this particular wallet address and that you're giving us the ability to store the credential data which we can come back to on ceramic and then it says uh We've added a new feature called web3 one-click verification which which uh goes just goes through really quickly all the things in web 3 that we can pull on chain and puts all those stamps and credentials together to say hey this is

what you qualify for based on what we're able to find just to make it really easy to capture the first set of stamps these were some new changes that we just pushed the last two months which is making it less less friction and easier for users to do and so then you can choose whether you want to capture those credentials or not and publish them to ceramic and then there's a plethora of additional web 2 stamps that you can now auth into say you want to connect Facebook and prove that you have a Facebook account again like uh Kevin was saying earlier in the show we don't store your Facebook ID or your profile picture or your friends list or any of those Privacy Information we're just checking to see that you have a unique and valid Facebook account for passport

and that we're saving that credential if you choose to save it that says that yes you have that and you have a profile picture attached and and so it's really easy to sort of go and capture those stamps we're looking to improve the UI over time to make it more fun for that sort of stamp capture experience but once you've done it that's it and you get a score which updates with every additional provincial that you add so you can kind of see over time how you're growing and how you're doing and then we tell you whether you're passing what is our basic what we call our default unique Community score whether whether you're a pass or fail because a lot of Integrations and systems including they get coin grants uses that uh pass fail for default unique Humanity to do

whatever it is that they're going to do so in our case it unlocks the uh matching on quadratic funding on the get coin Grant side but this is a a score that as Olson was saying others can create their own scores they can change the weights they can change the thresholds that they want to use for their particular application um so it's kind of an 80 20 rule where most integrators we're seeing right now are using the default score and either the default threshold or slightly modified threshold so maybe they don't want 15 is their threshold they want 20 is the passing threshold and then there's a small power user base that's like I want to entirely change the weights I want to take some credentials out and that's totally fine you can do

that as well and we're going to make that easier and easier over time eventually to where maybe there's a there's a whole I don't know what the right term is I keep saying Marketplace but it's not really a buy sell it's just like this open community of uh hey I like that model for this use case or you know I want to use this other model for a different reason and and we'll continue to update our models but it probably won't be the model or maybe even the most adopted model you know some at some period of time which is exciting yeah so so again hopefully easy uh hopefully it feels like the front door is going to passport.getcoin.com clicking into any stamps that you want to connect and not having to worry about privacy because it's size zero knowledge proof it's literally zero knowledge the

the data identifying information is not stored in your verifiable credential and then that's a springboard to contribute reading on bitcoin grants right now but it sounds like as more and more d-apps integrate with passport the idea is that they can either use git coin scoring algorithm or they can Fork it and create their own scoring algorithm that that fits their values and and the idea is that once once there's enough data in credentials in passport then you're kind of creating a prism where where people can formulate their own view of civil resistance and so going through the front door for the user is just like a springboard to a civil resistant economy but um there's like a side door where if you're a d-app developer you can also

kind of start to take advantage of of this data and either just use Bitcoin scoring algorithm or create your own scoring algorithm in in order to leverage it for your dap I'm wondering could you tell us about that side door um what is it like to integrate with with passport and to start siphoning off some civil resistance and some trust for your community yeah so I'll let Olsen talk about that in particular but I would say there's a third way too which is that you could just use the credentials so we've seen in some instances I don't want all the credentials I don't want the score I just want to know do they have a Discord or you know have they donated to get coin grants and and they should just look at a a water or two credential kind of system to just pass fail based on do

do capture these credentials so it's not is it again it's pretty flexible and pretty open but yeah sorry uh no piggyback on that before I get my answer um I think that's a really important one to talk about too we talk about scoring a lot because we found that's probably the most uh effective way to get a broad group of people through and evaluate them and get a sense of kind of who's who's a bot or not right but you have a lot of people who are looking for something slightly different like do you participate authentically in my community right do you have certain stamps that I value as people who are likely to be good participants and that's where you see people doing this like like single one-off thing I really want to make sure you have a Discord I really want to make sure you have you

know a lens profile what are the things that are reports of maybe a safe you know maybe you haven't interacted with the safe um those are just individual attestations and you can build up your own logic and your own app right so we're not going to prevent you from just interacting with those stamps AKA attestations directly and building up your own kind of logic so that's kind of just part of it but we do make it easier for you to get that kind of like bot or not score and that's the default score so that's pretty easy as well right so you can go to score.gitcoin.com uh you sign with ethereum and you can create your own score you have some configuration options there and you get an API key and from that basically you can start making calls directly to our API and getting scores back for people

who present their passports on your site so that gets you pretty close to the one line of code in your in your D app to be able to like hit an endpoint and get a score back and start being able to like understand if people are passing this threshold that you set your score and allow them to continue on in your app or not so yeah score.getcoin.com that's where you go to set it up if you have any questions if you're if you have any any concerns about this there's a couple places you can go the first one is docs.passport.getcoin.com kind of a mouthful which is docs dot password that'll get you like all of the information you need on how to actually do all this and it covers a lot more detail than we'll go into here and then also in our Discord we have a builder's

Channel you can get in because they're interacting directly with us on the core team so that's the passport Builders channel uh I think it doesn't have the Builder Builders role but it's an easy thing to grab so you can come in and start asking questions directly to the core team there um I'm wondering how you think passport differs from other civil resistance tools out there on the market it's June 2023 World coins been in the news a lot recently bitcoin's also integrated with bright ID proof of humanity and a handful of other civil resistance tools what's passport doing that's that's different and how does it differ from other anti simple tools yeah so I don't think it's an Us Versus Them sort of conversation so uh in the frame I'd like to think of it as much more inclusive so

uh what one of the major ways that we differ is that instead of us just being a single point solution or an irrigator and we're across many of these different solutions with the ability to continue to add new novel attempts to to stop sybils as part of our overall sort of aggregation of Defense um and what that unable is for those identity providers is both more adoption because they are now having this big public passport integration that that helps Drive users to to their Solutions as well as a delay data and we can talk about this more if we talk about the future of how do we help improve the ecosystem but more data to help them understand where they are and aren't being effective potentially those blind

spots they may not be able to see so that's one sort of aggregation across many different provides Fighters the second is that we really focused a lot of our time and energy as Olson was saying on this how do we get down to the one line of code integration where we've made it really really easy to integrate um and made it easy for folks to spin up and start using one or many of these additional identity Solutions through us and so we handle that making that simple documentation all these things that are uh you know potentially tough or expensive for a small solution to implement and we make it really easy for them to do that um which is which is great and we've seen adoption happen within days so people have been like hey we'd like to maybe integrate and then three days

later they're like hey we're fully integrated and it's working which is like fantastic for us to see um and then uh I'd say the third one is that it's really pretty customizable right so as we talked about earlier like it's not one size fit all we make it easy if you just want to use our score uh but if you don't then there's lots of different paths that you can go down as we talked about uh of ways that you could Implement uh beyond what we're doing one of the most uniques that I've seen so far is folks that are using our score R credentials and I would call it plus so I want to I want to use your score and I want to give the user some additional score for actions they're taking within our dap so you know the most simplistic way to do it is I'll

give you five points if you're also a paying user within our dap because I know who you are and I know that you're creating value within our ecosystem and you're more likely to be a human with our ecosystem because you're paying um could be a way to do it so you could take the passport score plus the additional points and you could set a threshold so that they can pass that or not pass that if they achieve and so that just like the customer customizability of it I think is is really important and the last thing is that we're not brand new and so I I call I frame this as sort of battle tested right we've we've been using the solution we've been using the solution uh to protect our own get coin grants rounds and seeing it be effective and not effective in certain situations and

started to adapt it um and so some of the other Solutions may not have actually seen that real word of the option yet or had that you know how does it work in specific situations that that we can add that lens to and we can help with square weightings to show how strong of a signal that particular provider is from our vantage point from the attack factors that we've seen word yeah I agree with all that I think the the framing like especially around this like you know uh this being really a plurality of scoring mechanisms right I think what we're trying to get at is that a lot of these other providers are are intended to be kind of one provider you buy into that ecosystem and you use that and that's 100 of your civil detection right you're coming from

that one ecosystem and so I mean some of them are quite you know like you know sophisticated they put a lot of energy into this whole teams and whole projects that are just working this one thing but I think that that creates a certain fragility right that like if that solution is compromised or if you find out that there is a big simple problem or someone has you know found an exploit there there's a big civil ring uh you know at the core of that that's a problem right we you know there's stories in the news already around you know oh not to pick on world coin but you know like uh people buying it's not like a black market of identities you know this is just going to happen anywhere right so no single system is perfect right you know as soon as there's an economic Advantage someone

will find a price for an identity and sell it right National IDs are not enough right you can you know like people can can forge identities uh even in physical uh form so the the big thing for me is to create a system that is anti-fragile right where if any one of these single providers is is uh you know maybe not a 100 effective you can get better effective you know higher effective results from combining them so this this you know this idea of us being an aggregator isn't just us kind of avoiding the problem I think it's actually a a unique kind of solution it's kind of hard to compare Us in some ways because we rely on the identity providers they have to be building these things they're generating these signals there's some stuff we can observe but a

lot of them are trying to do a lot of work and they're very high quality signals but on their own there's a certain kind of weakness to it and there's only this kind of combination I think you get to something that is like as effective as as we need for quadratic funding and I think we're what other uh you know communities need as well so I would go at it from that direction to kind of the plurality and anti-fragility I think are also things that are really unique in the passport ecosystem what does world look like in which passports maximally successful say there's a A Primitive that that creates civil resistance that diops can integrate with and it's it's intact fragile to attacks and capture what is the world in which you're perfectly in which you're massively successful look like so hopefully sooner than later uh but if I

if I cast if I cast my vision out what I'd really like to see coming back to some of these Concepts we've talked about earlier is this this graph of graphs right where each node is its own unique anti-sibil system and we're able to help facilitate the sharing of data across those systems such that we're improving them and they're getting better and better as we go and we've got this open decentralized privacy preserving user opt-in system that we've built whether that becomes a protocol or not is still TBD over time where anyone can add credentials to that system and uh in a protecting way and can add providers to that can add new models to

be able to score um that just continuously enhance the ability for us to detect and stop sybils and like the the end game there is that it's just really easy for end users to prove that they're a human hard for a Sybil to try to forge that and really expensive for a civil to forge that so only in those you know maximally efficient cases of like you know massive airdrops would anyone even try to attack because it's just not worth the time of the energy right as you talked about earlier on that spectrum of you know script kitties or multiple identities on a very primitive form to nation state it's we want to push it to really only that nation state sort of ability to

attack would be the ultimate end goal and there's a lot of steps in between there from my vantage point but if we can get to that place where it's it's open in the the communities are all getting better and better over time and we're helping to facilitate that that's a magical place for me totally I I think for me a big one for me is I think that it would feel a lot different to participate in web 3 communities once we have this right the the biggest thing for me right now is getting it I think it was after one of these big air drops you know someone was talking about how it was just like blotted to hell and a bunch of people who are legit users didn't really qualify and a bunch of people were basically kind of going like well learn how to code Bots next time

you know and I thought that was really like huh like really revealing like you know like the the system that we have currently where we keep handing Capital rewarding people for learning like for scripting and and botting our systems we're literally we have like a fitness function where we're actually pushing Capital at people who are like maliciously and exploiting these systems right for personal gain and that's not I don't think that's really in the ethos right of like what we're trying to do right I think there's a real kind of power to the people behind all this right we really want to reward users when like exit to community we want to see people own the protocols and you know like you know like benefit from its success right uh and that's like like completely antithetical to what you

actually see in the in the world where people are being like lol whatever man learn how to code a bot and like get better at airdrop farming like that's that's crazy to me you know like that's just not the like incentive and reward mechanism that's act I think in the design of any of these systems right people are trying I'm not thinking how do I build the best community of airdrop Farmers right uh but that's that's kind of what we've done right uh and we've we've pushed a lot of capital I think into the wrong people's hands and I think what we'd like to see is like really like a return to like fairness right this is the kind of Market fairness at some level you know like this is like you know you can debate insider trading laws and this kind of stuff but ultimately the idea is that

when I participate in the market where I participate in some project that I should have kind of equal footing right the game's not rigged against but the problem we have right now is that like all of these systems are ultimately kind of rigged against the users right that you're you're not competing against other users you're not necessarily buying nfts from each other you're buying against bots that are flash trading these things and wash trading them and ultimately like milking all of these reward systems in ways that are like really not gonna help you uh like like own that system or or have Fair rewards distributed to you so for me I think it really gets back more of that vision of like you know Community ownership I know the right you know actors who are like really good allocators actually

getting rewards back to them and I think seeing the mechanisms that are at the core of all of these projects actually flourish because there's there's this massive friction that all of these systems are seeing because they're being exploited by you know rational economic actors but but it's because it's so hard for us to defend against that so I for me I think it's getting people back into the center of this getting fairness back into the center of this I think that that's what's possible once you kind of get the Civil problem you know under control it's a it's a better Fair easier world to be in and I I I did work in anti-spam 15 years ago and it's hard it's hard for folks now that are new to email to imagine a world where you were constantly being spammed uh yeah you were still using those systems because

you had to and and that's that's the world that existed for a long time until we sort of got the spam problem under control and and I feel the same way about this it's it's very analogous like it's also a saying if we can do this which we believe we can it just makes it a lot better and removes a lot of ugly friction in web3 because this is a huge problem for lots of excited to follow the journey along and you know having been involved in bitcoin's evolution from the beginning it's it's interesting to see um to to see it starting off as as funding what matters and in funding public goods but sort of like a side quest has come out of that of oh wait in

order to fund what matters we need a way of creating more democratic systems and so it's just interesting when you try to really go at this design space how there's sort of a modular stack of of tools and and problems coming out of Bitcoin Dao that are each designed to do one thing and do them well and uh so it's neat to follow the evolution yeah we're quite excited like I said it's such a fundamental problem for so many people in this space I think it's it's going to be amazing to see what happens over the next year with passport I I could not be super excited it's gonna be great is there anything I didn't ask that you want to say maybe I'll go to you Jeremy first and then Olsen next I I don't think so I mean I I think the

place that I would ask the community to start to engage is is get in there if you haven't started already create a passport if you're a job provider and you've got protection that you want us to help you with uh start to get involved because we're we're at the beginning of the beginning of our journey here and we're looking for the community to continue to work with us so that we can improve this and and make this the best solution possible to help resolve this problem in the space yeah I think it's that really getting people who want to build right like using this tool um I think we've established that it's a pretty uh big problem everyone probably has some element to this especially if you're like Distributing Rewards or you know you're whatever paying for gas on on transactions you're going to get exploited by folks who can

eke out some economic Advantage I bet you probably really have some issue like this in your in your in your app or your ecosystem uh get involved reach out to us give it a shot we'd love your feedback we want to keep making the product better and better and we think we've got a good like start but we do definitely need feedback from folks we want to keep making it better so get in touch sounds great final question if people want to integrate passport into their d-apps where should they go docs.getcoin got docs.passport.getcoin.com there we go all right well Jeremy Olsen thanks so much for joining thank you man thanks for watching thanks love foreign [Music]