It’s incredible to think that we released Humanity DAO as a humble experiment just one week ago.
First, some participants have expressed concerns that they felt like they were unfairly kicked out from the registry. We understand your frustration for feeling that insiders kicked you out of a system that was meant to be for everyone in favor of more influential people.
We did not make it clear at the beginning of the game what the bar would be to prove unique identity and for that we apologize.
To compensate the early adopters who were genuinely trying to prove that they were unique humans, we will be distributing 500 Humanity , 12 Dai (1 year of UBI in the current system), and refunded gas fees to each rejected applicant to date. We hope you will accept this as a fair compromise. Feel free to use the Humanity however you choose. We hope you’ll use them to participate in what we believe is an important experiment in the crypto ecosystem.
We will always act in good faith with the community. If you don’t know us personally, please ask others in the community for their experiences with our team.
Now, I’d like to take this opportunity to provide some transparency into the project as I’m sure many of you have a lot of questions.
STORY
Humanity was built as a side project in six weeks as part of a larger lending protocol at Marble. The lending protocol required a , DAO, peer-to-peer lending protocol, and insurance pool. This is the DAO component.
In order to test the system, we thought why not take a moonshot attempt to solve Sybil-resistant identity? We had this idea in the summer of 2018 and built a proof-of-concept at that didn’t receive too much attention or win any prizes. But it always stayed in the back of our minds as something that might make sense.
Our strategy as a team has always been to ship fast and iterate with the community. This project is no different.
As the week progressed, we hit some early growing pains.
It is clear that the current governance mechanism is susceptible to trolling.
Despite the frustration that this weakness has generated in the community, we now also have a unique opportunity. In the bootstrapping phase of this identity network, the distribution mechanism has the potential to incentivize 10,000 mission-oriented people to rally around a common cause: to create a self-sovereign identity system that exists outside the control of any nation-state in order to promote democratic access to wealth and personal freedoms.
PARTICIPATION
We decided to bootstrap Humanity DAO using Twitter for a few reasons:
- Twitter is the de facto forum for discourse in the crypto ecosystem. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that if you aren’t active on crypto Twitter, you aren’t publicly active in crypto, since Twitter is where the open community interacts. Projects use it to update the ecosystem about their progress, developers use it to communicate with each other, thinkers use it to share their ideas about the ecosystem. It isn’t a perfect representation, but Twitter captures an important majority of the crypto ecosystem.
- Twitter represents a strong social graph and web of trust. Participants in crypto Twitter have spent a long time building reputations: their profiles, follow graphs, and content. It is easy to identify reputable users on Twitter: they have invested a lot of time in posting useful content, engaging with other users, as well as linking their accounts to their real-world identities.
- Twitter enables a loop to spread the word about Humanity DAO. Humanity DAO needs critical mass of unique humans to be governed fairly and succeed, so we need to get the word out to the best people in the crypto community. The application process requires you to post your Ethereum address on Twitter and tag @HumanityDAO, to link your Twitter account with your Ethereum address, and also letting your followers know about Humanity DAO.
We realize that this decision excludes many potential participants who want to join the network today. The community will find ways to eventually onboard anyone in the world who wants to participate in the identity network. We want the Humanity DAO community to be as large and inclusive as possible. This technology is for everyone.
TRANSPARENCY
We will always be transparent with the community.
This is the team multi-signature . It will not be used for voting:
These are individual team members’ wallets. We will always use public wallets for voting. We’ve heard your feedback and will no longer vote No, but will continue to signal our approval on applicants by voting Yes:
We are working to build tools where you can better visualize voting activity.
There will always be blowback when a new system is introduced and we’ve seen some of this materialize. There is no . We are trying to pitch in on a community-owned effort to build an honest, global, self-sovereign identity network. The project is now in the public domain.
IMPROVEMENTS
We have seen confusion around the verification process. We are building tools to help voters discuss applications, taking inspiration from applications like in the Augur ecosystem.
We have been improving the site over the last week and continue to welcome your feedback and feature requests.
FUTURE
We are excited to see the initial responses to the Humanity game.
Some are excited about the big vision for the project:
Others are at least curious enough to participate:
The community has already started building great tools. There’s a lot to build.
We know we need to fix privacy. We’re hoping the community can come together to solve this important issue first. For now, if you want to participate, you’ll have a public display of your application to the Humanity registry. For me, it’s a public message that this is the kind of future I want to live in.
If you’re excited about this vision of the future, please join the Humanity DAO community.
Think big. Let’s build this together.
Published at Thu, 16 May 2019 19:23:01 +0000
