Transcription
Thanks for joining us everyone. Um, look, between deep fakes, AI agents, and a wave of social engineering attacks, proving your identity is becoming one of the most important and hardest problems to solve in crypto. We want assurance that we know who or what we're interacting with, but at the same time, we don't want to have to give up our privacy. So, how do we prove humanness without creating a surveillance state?
I thought we could actually just explain what we mean when we talk about proving that we're human or you're human online today and what does proof of humanity actually mean to you. Um hi Nicolas Kokad is one of the two founders of Pi network which is a layer one blockchain protocol and uh it has the special property that every single account on the blockchain is already KYC.
Uh so I think uh to answer your question I also want to step back a little bit and say that uh um it depends on the purpose. So in some cases you need to know who exactly the per the person is like if someone goes to the bank and wants to withdraw money we you really need to know who exactly the person is. In other cases you need to know whether >> um what's the act of uh that is being conducted whether it's happening by a human or a bot. >> Yeah. >> And in other cases you want to know whether uh there are unique people behind a situation. So uh like for example if you had uh uh ratings on an online system uh you you don't want to allocate a thousand ratings thousand different uh product reviews to one uh uh act who created a thousand bots. Um you want to give more fairness everyone's voice.
>> The second part of this title is uh not doxing yourself. When we talk about that, are we saying, you know, I doubt it's that people necessarily need to be completely a non on the internet or is it more kind of about wanting personal control over your data, having the option of selective disclosure? You know, how do you draw that line in terms of what is not doxing yourself?
I want to say that uh when people are thinking of not doxing your identity especially in a crypto conference their mind immediately goes into zk proofs uh such as uh advanced uh techniques like zk snarks starks and bulletproofs and things like that. But even though these techniques are a little more advanced you need to mathematically uh convert your problem into a formula and then do polomial computations and other things. But uh in in practice, you can have zero knowledge with uh existing primitives we all know and understand.
Uh let me give you a very quick example. So uh imagine in the traditional world you want to buy alcohol. So you go to the store. What you do is you give your driving license and people can you're essentially showing all of your data for no reason because all they need to know is whether you're above 21 or not. And instead they're getting your home address, your date of birth, everything. Now let's if you were to do this in a zero knowledge way you could actually have a KYC authority let's say the PI KYC authority and uh that authority can provide you a statement you are more than 21 uh above 21 years old and uh give you the a cryptographic signature of that statement together with uh your for example your face ID data and then all you need to do is you need to provide that statement and uh the recipient can check whether the signature is coming from the trusted uh uh third party in this uh case and you've already proven that you are uh above 21 without delivering more information that's necessary.
>> Something that came up in in our prep call, if I may say, was a hint of frustration that whenever a a new emerging tech comes out, whether it's crypto, whether it's AI, it feels like we're reinventing the wheel and starting from scratch on identity. So why is that? And how are you putting these people back in their place?
>> There's actually another aspect as well which is kind of like forcing the industry to reinvent the wheel in a justified way.
>> Uh which is the whole agentic AI. So before that it was uh very easy to make assumptions between who is a bot and who is a human because humans had very different behavior uh compared to bots. Uh so that therefore you had systems like capta and other things that uh you could safely more or less assume that only a human could answer and uh proceed certain sex. But now uh with agents becoming more and more humanlike uh and the fact that an agent can be replicated to a million agents concurrently running uh it creates new challenges for identity that we need to see as as a community. So especially you know that was also one of our uh core principles why we started having a fundamental identity KYC verification on the on the PI blockchain because uh uh each individual for example can have their own primary identity and can run multiple agents if they want but if the agents are carrying their identity and uh they are essentially attributing uh to to to the original user the the behavior then that's some uh um realistic good case scenario. Uh the bad case is when the agents are pretending to be humans themselves.
>> But uh uh if that's why that's why the society needs to add some kinds of uh checks and balances for this problem in the future.
At the core of this, we're just trying to figure out how do you reliably link a real human to a digital identity or a cryptographic key without exposing massive security or privacy issues.
So, >> so um in the end of the day um all these cryptographic techniques and all these protections are absolutely necessary on the back end and what we need to do on the front end on the system designers perspective is we need to create the user experience and the user interface such that people can actually use those systems because uh in the end of the day if uh you have a very sophisticated uh foolproof uh system but people can't use it or they lose their keys and they completely get locked out. There's no way to recover. Then uh it becomes um not not use not as useful as we wanted it to be. H people end up not using it and people end up uh uh falling back into very primitive uh password what is your the last four of your social security number >> types of verifications. So yeah that's we are big on user experience. bit of a disconnect between uh theory and real world applications. Yeah.
Let's do a quick rapid fire round. If we are lucky enough to find ourselves back here on this stage altogether in 2 years, what progress do you hope the industry has made in terms of proving we're human without doxing ourselves?
>> Yeah. Yeah. Distinguish between civil attacks and a people being actually able to use agents to uh empower themselves. So you want your agent to be able to access all these resources online uh and and report back that report to those resources who they represent >> uh so that they can do your work while at the same time those different services are not bombarded by fake uh pretending to be human beings.