One of the more interesting conversations I had at Hivefest in Mexico was with Dan from @blocktrades about PeerVerity, the trust and knowledge system that they are gradually building behind the scenes. More and more people have been asking me or talking about the kind of system that Dan is creating here, so I thought to take a moment to share some of what I know about it so far...
I found the PeerVerity website by chance shortly before travelling to Mexico and Dan was surprised that I had seen it, since they haven't advertised it or shared it yet - the content on it is very basic at this point, so that's understandable. Dan did leaves some breadcrumbs for us to follow, in the form of a few posts on the topic on Hive a couple of years ago - This first one is an introduction to the concepts and motivations and this second post talks more about data modelling. He did say then that there would be later posts on the topic, but I'm not seeing any in their post history yet.
What is PeerVerity?
In brief summary, PeerVerity is an open source protocol (and probably an app) for sharing/creating data that is used when rating knowledge and people, enabling us to build a network of people and to note who we ourselves trust on which topics - also allowing evidence to be stored to demonstrate people's expertise. All of this information can then be voluntarily shared with others, while maintaining appropriate data privacy.
Dan himself said that some people have said this sounds like a 'social credit scoring system' of the kind that the Chinese Communist state has introduced, but while a few of the features cover similar areas of life as would be found in a social credit system, PeerVerity absolutely doesn't operate in the same way. PeerVerity is a system that anyone can run on their own computing device in a decentralised way, that enables them to create their own trust system that can remain totally private if they like. Perhaps we can think of it as our own personal trust scoring system, but how we use it is up to us alone.
With that out of the way, the details of this system seem to offer us a way to improve on and even solve some of the main problems we face today online and in life generally. The mass of information that is created daily on every topic imaginable is difficult to navigate, simply due to it's scale. On top of this, we have many 'vested interests' trying to direct our experience of it, whether that be through 'editing' the content before it gets to us (up to and including outright censorship), or trying to bias/influence us through advertising, buying out 'influencers' to 'whisper in our ears' or other such nefarious methods. The 'influence' market is only growing and yet we have little in the way of new tools to be able to deploy in our attempt to remain confident that the information we receive/use is accurate/neutral.
In a world where the number of possible topics, their scope and also their content is vast and ever expanding, we simply do not have the time or energy to study them all. As a result, society 'suggests' (oh so subtly) that we rely on 'trusted experts' who we are assured have put in the long hours to study a topic in depth and who are somehow magically unbiased and have our best interests at heart.
Obviously, by now, most of us have had experiences where we know that this is not always the case. The 'experts' are often either misleading, speaking half truths, are corrupt, are in denial of key points or not even remotely experts at all! One answer to all of this is for us to use tools which score and track people's expertise, allowing us to share the benefits of our own experiences - easily recommending to others when we have found someone who we ourselves class as a true expert.
For example, I might have a plumber in my house to fix a difficult problem and he might fail badly. I might mark that in my trust app. I might then find another plumber that my friend on the trust network recommends and find that he solves the problem easily, so I give him a good score too. Over time, we will have a complex network and lots of data regarding how each of us relates to others in the community - plus be able to track expertise too. I'm sure you can see how this could turn out to be very useful.
Google My Business, Trustpilot and other such apps attempt something similar to this in order to generate 'social proof', which is a marketing phrase that means 'the community likes this service, so you should too'. However, these solutions are centralised and open to exploitation. There are many people in the world whose job it is to leave false negative reviews on these sites in order to falsely boost a competitor who is paying them! Decentralisation can solve this.
Although a 'trustless trust' system sounds like the kind of paradoxic zen riddle that definitely should be turned into an app, I think Peer Verity is not exactly going to be trustless, in the sense that connections between app instances will need to be authorised by each user based on their existing trust for the other user they share information with. None the less, I'm sure there will be ample need for inventing new terminology to deal with some of the idiosyncrasies involved!
Ultimately, how this system turns out will depend on who develops with it and what they make from the code, plus how end users integrate it into their lives. There are many possibilities here. I can easily imagine a world where all news stories are automatically run through a system that informs me of the insights about them that others that I trust have written online.. but then that also highlights other people that I don't know who disagree, why they disagree, their credentials and relevant sources of information. While this might sound like 'fact checking' on steroids, it is really quite different.
Fact checking 'services' are centralised groups who are paid to 'discern truth' and then to proclaim what truth is. In contrast, the PeerVerity system is a tool that anyone can make use of to build their own fact checking mechanisms, similar to the ones we are already creating internally in our own minds - but faster and using more information, automatically!
My regular readers might know that I am opposed to most forms of AI because I know they will detract away from our own internal development, we will rely on them and while we may get stronger in some areas, we will get weaker in others - which may then become too damaging to recover from. This principle does apply to all areas of life where we can use computers to replicate our own internal faculties and processes - however, there is still a sweet spot where technology can be helpful, without being inevitably harmful. I imagine PeerVerity to have the potential to be just such a system.
Improving on X Community Notes
In my last post on Hive I pointed out that the 'community notes' feature on X/Twitter is now being used to demonetise users (who already find it very hard to earn a penny anyway!). It's a no brainer that Hive is infinitely better than X when it comes to monetisation and even to discernment of truth, but this new peer to peer system could really take things to a new level.
Now, instead of just blindly trusting that 'the community' has created a 'fact check' of a post for you - you could perhaps instead do a deep dive into the background and knowledge base of every commenter, find out who trusts them and why - then reach your own conclusions about why any given comment is right or wrong. You could then be rewarded for adding your comment and explaining why you hold your position, referencing the data stored in Peer Verity along the way.
Summation
I can only offer a pencil outline of what this system is and will become, we'll need to look out for future posts from @blocktrades on the topic, but since their website states the end of 2023 as a possible launch date - we might be seeing just that materialise on Hive very soon.
I don't yet know just how well this system will work out, but I can easily see how it can be yet another example of why decentralisation is so necessary and how it often destroys centralised versions of solutions for the same problem. While PeerVerity is not designed to be part of Hive and is it's own standalone project, it can absolutely be integrated in to existing Hive projects in whichever way dApp creators choose. So expect to see some interesting and cutting edge implementations in the Hive ecosystem in the nearish future.. the most stunning in the whole of the 'sooniverse'! lol
Final point: The only way that centralised corporate interests can prevent the world from making use of truly decentralised solutions is through censorship, preventing the ideas from spreading - so it's no surprise that censorship is at an all time high and even now, few people have even heard of Hive on web 2 sites! It's time to change that now!
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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