Idena AMA

Bingbinglee
Here we go -
Welcome back Andrew / Idena team, thanks for hopping in the telegram chat for hosting the first ever Idena AMA. We have a lot of questions in the queue and Idena community has been waiting for this for a long time. It will be fun getting through as much as we can in the next 30 mins.

Andrew Idena
Hey there! On behalf of the Idena team I am happy to welcome you at our first AMA.
Thanks a lot - there are tons of great and diverse questions out there!
Let's get started!

Bingbinglee
amazing!
Can you give us a little history on what inspired the project, how it came to be, any past experience and hints at the size of the team?

Andrew Idena
Sure, off we go!
Despite the fact that the team is anonymous, there is a lot we could share.

Bingbinglee
As i mentioned, one of the questions asked - I imagine that a project such as Idena can't come up overnight. Could you explain us how the idea germinated ? How the team was created ? Why the name "Idena" ?

Andrew Idena
Our team is in crypto since the end of 2015. We were actively involved in tackling the Bitcoin blockchain scalability issue with 2nd layer solutions like micropayment channels / lightning network. However, as we faced the limitations of these approaches because of the Layer 1 constraints we decided to go deeper.
We believe that decentralization is the most critical part in the blockchain scalability challenge. Only an exaggerated decentralization on layer 1 can enable sharding with the true horizontal scalability.
We realized that personhood is the only alternative to money that is used as the basis for both PoS and PoW consensus mechanisms, so we started considering formalization of cryptoidentity.
The person who created the Idena's logo saw Idena as the goddess of fairness and identity. Her name is an allusion to the words ‘Identity’, 'Idea', 'DNA'.

Bingbinglee
Interesting.. that brings me to the next question which the community at large always asks
Why Anonymous?

Andrew Idena
From the very beginning we wanted to decentralize Idena protocol as much as possible and didn't want to personally expose ourselves not to become a point of failure. We envision that in the long run Idena protocol should be able to sustain it's own development without reliance on the current core team.




Bingbinglee
That explains it :) . We do see commits from multiple members of the team often on the central git repo. Can you kindly give us a rough idea of the size of the development team?

Andrew Idena
There are 5 developers in the core team. However in fact there are many more of them today from the community side who develop Idena-based apps and services and contribute to the Idena client development, to mention a few: @endogen, @realRioda, @menxit, @bingbinglee1, @Angainor, @ProjXDev and many others. Thank you for your great contribution!

Bingbinglee
Thank you to you as well!
Now jumping into the themes of usecases
In some ways Idena feels similar to Bitcoin/Ethereum in its early days, solving problems yet to exist. What first "killer usecase" do you see coming from Idena's protocol?

Andrew Idena
Bitcoin gave us censorship-resistant cryptocurrency, its killer use case is p2p payments. Ethereum's crucial innovation was smart contracts and its killer feature is dapps, like DeFi, DAO, etc.The key building block provided by Idena is unique human cryptoidentity. We think that the killer use cases related to this cryptoidentity can be related to governance in digital democracies, public good and community projects funding and other useful tools for people worldwide. We would want to rely on our community to help us build such applications on top of Idena.

Bingbinglee
to that answer, Does the team view CryptoUBI as the ultimate goal of IDENA? Was this the primary motivation behind the project?

Andrew Idena
The primary driver for creating cryptoidentity for us was the attempt to resolve the blockchain scalability trilema to have a safe and decentralized consensus with a throughput sufficient for worldwide applications. Basic income from the protocol reward is rather a nice side effect associated with formalization of cryptoidentity.

Bingbinglee
in the landscape of identities, How do you see yourself competing with identity solutions such as uPort and Sovrin?

Andrew Idena
We do not consider these and other SSI projects to be Idena's competitors as they do not set the task of ensuring uniqueness/semi-uniqueness of human identity.

Bingbinglee
There's a lot of test models to validate humanity. In terms of being easy for humans and hard for AI, are you 100% convinced the flip system is the most optimal?




Andrew Idena
So far the Flip Challenge was our best guess for a Turing test that could be language agnostic and wouldn't require personally identifying information. We are open to other approaches.

Bingbinglee
That makes sense, will be coming back to that again in some time.
As idena is decentralised and doesn't collect personal info - The marketing use case is confusing, advertisers want to see PII such as age, sex, location, interests etc which Idena shows nothing, how will you combat this?

Andrew Idena
Advertisers should reveal the information about who may be interested in a particular advertisement. And users, seeing all advertisements, select those which are relevant to them, without revealing their identity properties such as gender, age or location. We call it self-targeting.

Bingbinglee
I'm tired of having to create a new identity everywhere a new reputation on Amazon, eBay, Facebook etc. Will Idena allow me to bring my one identity everywhere?

Andrew Idena
The use of the Idena cryptoidentity largely depends on the decision of these services. From our side, we will provide a convenient tools, so that the cryptoidentity could be integrated into any websites and Internet services.

Bingbinglee
Seems to be that Idena could be a great use case for Crypto projects specifically via distribution, etc, Will Idena partner up with other projects in the future? Any plans?

Andrew Idena
Fair value distribution and cryptogovernance are very relevant use cases. Idena intends to build bridges with other crypto projects. For example, we will support a Hackathon soon to be launched by Radical Exchange and Gitcoin. Idena will grant DNAs for the Hackathon challenges related to governance in electronic democracies. Everyone is welcome to join and contribute. Some more information:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JhOX7C1dL0jD2rxA7HHA-QLSquK44yGYMWlfKkp35DY/edit#slide=id.g75d1fd9870_0_0

Bingbinglee
Very interesing! Changing gears a bit now.
Approaching the topic of "Bad flips" :)
Idena says you can have human status whether you make a good flip or not. If the same bad flip is used to decide someone's status, how are these not correlated?

Andrew Idena
The Idena identity status reflects how good the peson is in solving flips. The person who creates bad flips should be penalized. We plan to improve the protocol in order to address the flip quality issue.




Bingbinglee
great. this has been long awaited and we definitely would be keen to hear more on it.
A suggestion - Can you please low report barrier for a bad flip from current 66% to 33%? Otherwise the whole committee based flips curation doesn't work? What do you think of that

Andrew Idena
Yes, we think it is a good idea to lower report barrier to 33%. This would increase a fraction of disqualified flips roughly by 10%.

Bingbinglee
Will we primarily still rely on reporting for consensus to weed out bad flips - How will you prevent malicious entities who create simple flips (i.e. 1-2-3-4 sequences) from gaining a majority of the network, given nobody bothers reporting?

Andrew Idena
It can be regulated with the help of criteria by which a flip should be reported.
We also believe having AI embedded in the Idena app is a mid-term task in order to prevent users from creating flips that are too easy for AI.

Bingbinglee
interesting.
lastly on this - Is there a reason that flips are distributed in such a way that you get multiple flips from the same identity (sometimes all of their flips)?

Andrew Idena
At a short session, participants receive flips from different authors. It is the long session where flips from the same authors are usually qualified. This is done intentionally in order to optimize the network load during the Flip lottery.

Bingbinglee
That makes sense and coupled with improvements to counter flip quality - this should definitely help longer term.
As you have seen the network grows between 15-20% epoch over epoch, So for time between validations in a general sense: Usage of Idena Identity as a login on third party services won't be comfortable with 91 days between validations, will it?

Andrew Idena
The Idena's identity should be validated every epoch. Third party services may choose to login users with any Idena address but give / not give them certain privileges, depending on their current identity status.
Services can also give privileges to identities with the Candidate status and not wait for validation if for example other validated members of the network have vouched for these identities.
In addition, there was a proposal suggested to reduce the maximum length of an epoch to 1 month - this is a subject for a community voting, but we are ready to support this proposal.





Bingbinglee
you have touched upon voting a couple mins before as well - What are your thoughts on on-chain governance mechanisms?

Andrew Idena
We suggested principles for it in the Community report: https://medium.com/idena/idena-community-report-current-state-and-next-steps-dce97a0e3034
Idena community report: Current state and next steps
Idena is an open source project started in October 2018 by an anonymous group of like-minded engineers and computer scientists.
You are welcome to read and comment.

Bingbinglee
In that sense, Are there any plans for a voting system for verified identities so they could vote on suggestions and propose their own? Timeline?

Andrew Idena
In the short term, we plan to give a protocol for signing transactions using the Idena app to 3rd party services. This will allow to organize voting sites outside the application. We'll be happy to provide co-funding such projects.

Bingbinglee
I am sure this is music to some of our dev friends tuning in :)

Andrew Idena
😄

Bingbinglee
you talked about AI as mid-term solution few mins ago - Have you considered the use of AI to prevent people from uploading numbered flips/ progressive object count flips? Also NSFW flips?
Also sidenote @all, we will be extending the AMA by another 15 mins to cover a few more questions before opening up. Back to you @AndrewIdena

Andrew Idena
It makes no sense to use AI for the numbered flips. It can be regulated with the help of criteria by which a flip should be reported.
However, NSFW flips are to be flitered with built-in image recognition algorithms both at flip submission and validation sessions.

Bingbinglee
Great to hear that. Is it possible to easily hard fork to a different kind of human validation IF somehow bots learn to solve picture flips successfully?

Andrew Idena
Technically any binary test (with two answers) can be a replacement for flips without a blockchain hard fork. It is enough that this new test is supported by the Idena app that participants use during validation session.


Bingbinglee
As people from many cultures join Idena, How do we approach issues with different cultures creating flips only they understand?

Andrew Idena
We believe that diversity of the network should provide sufficient economic incentives to create flips that are understandable for everyone regardless of cultural background. Culturally specific flips are penalized if the committee is sufficiently diverse.
Bad flips very often are just bad flips regardless of cultural or regional biases.

Bingbinglee
Makes sense.
Community is often wondering about scalability. When will sharding be implemented? Will it be region based?

Andrew Idena
We are working on this currently. First we plan to implement sharding for the validation session. The second step is the blockchain sharding. Every identity will be randomly allocated into a specific shard based on their public address.

Bingbinglee
:+1:
What is the exact implementation used for the BFT protocol underpinning Idena's consensus (pBT, Paxos, etc)?

Andrew Idena
Idena's Byzantine agreement was inspired by the VRF-based approach first proposed by Silvio Micali. It's a leader-based consensus with fast finality for the every single block. Randomly selected participants generate block proposals and broadcast them into the network. Random committees are selected to reach a consensus about whether to include a candidate block into the blockchain.

Bingbinglee
What is the theoretical limit of nodes Idena can support during validation session at current network state?

Andrew Idena
The total number of the validated prticipants is limited by several factors:
- the number of blocks in which users' flip answers should be mined during the long validation session
- the size of EvidenceTx transactions with which nodes vote for the timely submission of responses by other participants
- the network throughput at peak load during validation
We estimate the limit at about 8-10k nodes. Further network growth will require sharding.

Bingbinglee
Do you think Idena can suffer from block propagation time when the network becomes large?




Andrew Idena
Of course, the load on the network and on the node will increase. We are working to ensure that the node stably cope with large blocks.

Bingbinglee
Why the result on scan.idena.io start from Epoch #007? What happens with Epoch #006 and so on? Premine?

Andrew Idena
Unfortunately, the data from the blockchain explorer was lost due to the hack of the indexer database at the early stages. To ensure it won't happen again the indexers database backups are to be shared. The latest backup is available at http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTRkjTjUERfaxASvZg6o3myEUnSpfJ64XMRdoeDU8uMG1

Bingbinglee
that makes sense.
Idena use ipfs to transfer flips, but ipfs mainnet is not launched, do you see any risks to use ipfs?

Andrew Idena
We consider IPFS to be a promising technology, by using it we not only test IPFS but also contribute to IPFS bug fixes. Also we do not use the latest rc-marked (release candidate) IPFS versions.

Bingbinglee
When do you think the smart contracts go live presumably?

Andrew Idena
We are still focused on the core part of the protocol. Unfortunately, no ETA for this yet.

Bingbinglee
Are you not worried that 99% of images used in flips are copyrighted material that is used by the network for mining profit? What protects the foundation from a lawsuit?

Andrew Idena
Strictly speaking, there is no way to control the copyright of the images used by the network. However, most of the images are small-res and encrypted. Last but not least Idena has no entity to be a subject of a lawsuit.

Bingbinglee
Switching gears again as we hurl towards the end: here they come!!
In popular lingo "When Mobile app sirs"
:grin:

Andrew Idena
At the moment, we are not developing a mobile version and will be ready to return to it as soon as the desktop client is ready.




Bingbinglee
Makes sense!
Community often asks - Why such a large premine AND Why has idena chosen to have an unlimited supply of tokens with inflation instead of a fixed total supply?
@all last one minute ... @AndrewIdena some rapid-fire questions coming.

Andrew Idena
You can read more about the premine structure in our Community report: https://medium.com/idena/idena-community-report-current-state-and-next-steps-dce97a0e3034
We benchmarked with the premine size of other blockchains, e.g. Ethereum: The Idena premine is not that large in comparison to others. You should also bear in mind that we did not have any ICO and vast amount of the coins will be used both for further funding of the project and community-based funding (quadratic funding).
Idena community report: Current state and next steps
Idena is an open source project started in October 2018 by an anonymous group of like-minded engineers and computer scientists.

Bingbinglee
Are we going to see proper experimental mainnet to mainnet transition in Q3-2020?
Also, here are almost no marketing efforts, why?
When are you going to start with listing Idena on bigger exchanges with more volume?


Andrew Idena
Mainnet: We are working on it heavily.
However, we must admit that we will not manage to do everything that we plan by then. Now the development team is trying to implement the maximum number of protocol changes requiring hard forks. Further growth of the network will make it more difficult.
Marketing: We believe that the product itself and the benefits that people get are the most effective marketing tools. Given that the product is still under active development, increasing attention may negatively affect healthy growth of the network.
Exchanges: We are in contact with some bigger exchanges that could be interested and are ready to support our project. Any inputs from the community would be helpful here.
dikanevn joined the group

Bingbinglee
amazing. i am sure community members will have a lot to say / ask now.
This has been great!! Thanks for soldiering through so many questions so far. We are coming right up at our 45 min mark and will be opening the floor for the community to chime in.

Bingbinglee
One closing question to @AndrewIdena - What are your dreams for Idena? In a world where everything works out for you, what does it look like?






Andrew Idena
We believe in the 3.5% rule: the 3.5% of active citizens that can change the status quo. If the Idena network grows to a certain critical mass then we could see a qualitative transition of the network to a new level and the birth of something new which we have not seen before on our planet. We believe it could be the birth of new social structures governed by direct democracies towards a fairer world.