Editor's Note: This article comes fromAmbi Labs (ID: secbitlabs), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
"Collaboration" -- the ability of a large group of actors to work together for their common good -- is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. It manifests itself in: a king adopts an oppressive dictatorship to rule a country comfortably, while on the other hand the people can rise up and overthrow him. It is reflected in: on the one hand, let the global temperature rise by 3-5°C, on the other hand, when the temperature rises a little, we can work together to prevent the temperature from continuing to rise. Collaboration is the key to the functioning of companies, nations, and any social organization of any size.
Collaboration can be improved in many ways: faster dissemination of information, better norms to determine what behavior is classified as cheating and impose more effective penalties, stronger or more powerful organizations, tools such as smart contracts, allowing low Interactions in trust scenarios, governance techniques (voting, staking, decision markets...), and more. And the fact is that with each passing decade, we get better at collaboration problems.
We can present this problem on a map, but in fact this map has many, many "dimensions" instead of the two drawn.
In the lower left corner, "everyone for himself", is where we don't want it to be. In the upper right corner, "full collaboration" is ideal, but it may not be possible. But the vast area in the middle is far from a gentle ascent. There are many reasonably safe and productive places here, which may be our ideal place to live, and can avoid many deep and dark pits.
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Note: Hobbesian Hobbesianism believes that human behavior is all out of selfishness, and society is a situation of unlimited, selfish and brutal competition. From the book "Leviathan" by Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth-century English political philosopher.
What are the dangerous forms of "partial collaboration" now, where someone collaborates with certain groups but not others, leading to an abyss? This is best illustrated with an example:
A country whose citizens die heroically in war for the good of the country...and that country is Germany or Japan during World War II
A lobbyist bribes a politician in exchange for the politician adopting the lobbyist's preferred policies.
someone sells their vote in an election
All product sellers in the market collude to raise prices at the same time
Large-scale miners of a blockchain colluded to launch a 51% attack
In all of the above cases, what we have seen is a group of people coming together and cooperating with each other, but greatly damaging the group outside the collaboration circle, thereby causing substantial damage to the entire world. In the first case, all are victims of the above-mentioned state aggression, they are outside the circle of cooperation and suffer huge losses as a result; in the second and third cases, it is the corrupted electorate and politicians; in the fourth case, customers; and in the fifth case, non-participating miners and users of the blockchain. It is not the mutiny of the individual against the group, but the mutiny of one group against the wider group, which is often the whole world."This kind of partial coordination is often referred to as "collusion," or "collusion," but it's important to note that we're talking about quite a wide range of acts. In normal contexts, the word "collusion" is often used to describe relatively symmetrical relationships, but in the above cases, many have strong asymmetrical features. Even extortionate relationships ("Vote for the policy I like or I'll expose your affair publicly"unwelcome collaboration"。
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Evaluate intent, not action(!)
An important feature of particularly lesser collusion cases is that one cannot determine whether an action was an unintended conspiracy simply by observing the action itself. The reason is that the actions taken by a person are the result of the combination of the person's internal knowledge, goals and preferences and the externally imposed incentives on the person. Actions (or collaborations in benign ways) often overlap.
The same holds true in bribery and vote-buying cases: it is likely that some people voted for the Orange party legally, but others voted for the Orange party because they were bought off. From the point of view of those who decide the rules of the voting mechanism, they do not know in advance whether the Orange Party is good or bad. But what they do know is that a vote based on a voter's true inner feelings works well, but a vote in which voters are free to buy and sell votes works very badly. That's because vote trafficking is a "tragedy of the commons": each voter gets only a fraction of the benefit from voting correctly, but gets the full bribe if they vote as the briber wishes. The bribe needed to attract each voter would then be far less than what would actually compensate the populace for whatever policy the briber wanted. So voting that allows vote-buying can quickly collapse into Plutocracy.
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understand game theory
We can go a step further and look at this problem from a game-theoretic perspective. In a version of "game theory" that focuses on individual choice—that is, one that assumes that each player makes a decision independently (allowing for the possibility of a "group of agents" working for their common good) there is a mathematical proof that: any game There must exist at least one stable Nash equilibrium. In fact, mechanics designers have a lot of freedom to design games to achieve specific outcomes. But in the version of game theory that allows for the possibility of coalition cooperation (such as "collusion"), called "cooperative game theory", we can show that there is a large class of games that do not have any stable outcome (called "core" (game On terminology: Core)). In this type of game, no matter what the current situation is, there are always alliances that can profitably stray from it.
Note: This conclusion is known as the Bondareva–Shapley theorem.
An important part of this set of inherently unstable games is the "Majority Games". Majority games are formally described as games of agents in which any subset of more than half of the agents can take a fixed payoff and divide it among themselves—a setup similar to that of Corporate governance, politics, and many other situations in human life are eerily similar. That is, if there is some fixed resource pool and some currently established resource allocation mechanism, 51% of the participants will inevitably conspire to seize control of the resource, regardless of the current configuration. Some lucrative intrigues arise for the participants. However, this conspiracy would be susceptible to a potential new conspiracy, possibly including a combination of previous conspirators and victims...and so on."This fact, that is, the instability of the majority game under cooperative game theory, as a simplified general mathematical model, can be said to be seriously underestimated. Why is there probably no"end of history
, nor a system that has proven to be entirely satisfactory; I personally think that it is much more useful than the more famous "Arrow's theorem".
Note: Arrow's Theorem, Arrow's Theorem, also known as Arrow's Paradox, means that there is no ideal election mechanism that satisfies the three principles of fairness at the same time, Pareto efficiency, non-dictatorship and independence."Note again that the core dichotomy here is not"Individuals and Groups"; for a mechanism designer,"Individuals and Groups"Surprisingly easy to handle. and"That's the challenge.
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Decentralization as anti-collusion
But from this line of thought, there is another brighter and more actionable conclusion: If we want to create stable mechanisms, then we know that an important factor is to find The method by which it occurs or is maintained. In the voting scenario, we have "secret ballots" - ensuring that voters have no way of proving their vote to a third party, even if they wanted to (MACI is an attempt to use cryptography to extend secret ballot principles to online environments item[1]). This undermines trust between voters and bribers, severely limiting the potential for unwanted collusion. In that case of antitrust and other corporate malfeasance, we tend to rely on whistleblowers and even reward them with explicit incentives for participants in harmful collusion to defect. And in terms of broader public infrastructure, we have that very important concept: decentralization."A naive view of why decentralization is valuable is that it reduces the risk of a single point of technical failure. in the traditional"Enterprise
In distributed systems, that's actually often the case, but in many other cases, we know that's not enough to explain what's going on. It is instructive to look at the blockchain. A large mining pool publicly demonstrating how they distribute their nodes and network dependencies internally does little to quell fears of mining centralization among community members. And a picture like the one below, which shows that 90% of the Bitcoin hash power at that time appeared on the same conference discussion group, is really scary:"But why is this picture scary? from"From the point of view, large miners are able to talk to each other without causing any harm. But if we put"decentralized"decentralized"Viewed as barriers to harmful collusion, the picture becomes quite frightening because it shows that those barriers are not as strong as we think. In fact, these barriers are far from zero. Those miners can easily cooperate technically, and they are likely to be in the same WeChat group, but in fact, this does not mean that Bitcoin"。
Actually not much better than a centralized company
So what are the remaining obstacles to collusion? Some major obstacles include:"Moral Obstacles: In Liars and Outsiders, Bruce Schneier reminds us that many"security system
(Door locks, warning signs reminding people of punishment...) also have a moral function, reminding potential wrongdoers that they are about to commit a serious transgression, which they should not do if they want to be a good person. Decentralization can be said to have performed this function."Failure of internal negotiations: individual firms may start demanding concessions in exchange for engaging in collusion, which may lead to an immediate deadlock in negotiations (see"）。
hostage problem
Anti-collaboration: A system is decentralized, which makes it easy for participants not involved in the collusion to fork out the colluding attacker and continue running the system from there. The threshold for users to join the fork is very low, and the intention of decentralization will create moral pressure in favor of participating in the fork.
Risk of defection: It is much harder for five companies to unite for evil than for uncontroversial or benign purposes. The five companies don't know each other well, so it's possible that one of them declined to participate and blew the whistle quickly, making it difficult for participants to judge the risk. Individual employees within the company may also blow the whistle.
Blockchain experience has shown that designing protocols to be institutionally decentralized can often be a very valuable thing to do, even when it is known in advance that most of the activity will be dominated by a small number of companies. This idea is not limited to blockchains, it can also be applied in other contexts (see, for example, antitrust applications [2]).
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Forking as anti-collaboration
But we cannot always effectively prevent harmful collusion. And to deal with those cases where harmful collusion does occur, it would be nice to make the system more robust against those collusions — more expensive for the colluders and easier for the system to recover from.
We can do this through two core operating principles. (1) Support anti-collaboration, and (2) take benefit risk "Skin in the game". The idea behind anti-collaboration is this: we know that we cannot design systems to be passively robust against collusion, largely because there are so many ways for organizations to collude that there is no passive mechanism to detect them , but what we can do is proactively address collusion and fight back."skin"Note: The term Skin in the game comes from horse racing, the owner of the horse has
, they have the most say in the outcome of the game.
In digital systems, such as blockchains (this can also be applied to more mainstream systems, such as DNS), a major and critical form of anti-collaboration is "forking"."If a system is taken over by a harmful coalition, dissidents can come together and create an alternate version of the system that has (mostly) the same rules except it removes the power to attack the coalition's control system. In the context of open-source software, forking is very easy; the main challenge in creating a successful fork is usually gathering the required "legitimacy" (a game-theoretic"common sense
This is not just theoretical; it has been successfully implemented, most notably the Steem community's resistance to hostile takeover attempts, resulting in a new blockchain called Hive in which the original hostile have no power.
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Market and Skin in the game"Skin in the game"Another class of collusion-resistant strategies is"Skin in the game"the concept of. in this case,"Basically any mechanism that makes individual contributors to a decision solely accountable for their contribution. If a group makes a bad decision, those who approve it must suffer more than those who try to dissent. This avoids the inherent"。
tragedy of the commons
Forking is a powerful form of anti-coordination precisely because it introduces "Skin in the game". In Hive, the community fork of Steem that put aside the hostile takeover attempt, the coins used to vote for the hostile takeover were largely removed in the new fork. Key individuals involved in the attack were also affected as a result.
Note: Futarchy is a new form of government proposed by economist Robin Hanson. Elected officials make policies, and the public bets on different policies through speculative markets to produce the most effective choices. See V. Buterin's article "On Collusion" [4].
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This all gives us an interesting look at what people who build social systems do. One of the goals of building an effective social system is largely to determine the structure of collaboration: which groups, and in what configuration, can come together to advance their group goals, and which groups cannot?
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Different Collaboration Structures, Different Results
Sometimes, more collaboration is beneficial: it's better when people can work together to collectively solve their problems. At other times, more collaboration is dangerous: a small group of actors may collaborate to disenfranchise others. And at other times, more collaboration is necessary for another reason: to enable wider society to “fight back” against collusion to attack systems.
In all three cases, these objectives can be achieved through different mechanisms. Of course, it is very difficult to directly block communication, and it is also very difficult to make collaboration work perfectly. However, there are plenty of options in between that can produce powerful effects.
Below are several possible collaborative structuring techniques.
Privacy-preserving technologies and norms
Techniques that make it difficult to prove how you behaved (secret voting, MACI, and similar techniques).
Decentralization is intentional, distributing control of a mechanism to a broad group that is notoriously not well coordinated.
core developer"core developer"、"miner"、"miner"、"application developer"、"user"）。
user
Schelling points that allow large groups of people to quickly collaborate around a path forward. It is even possible to implement complex Schelling Points in code (for example, how to recover from a 51% attack).
Use a common language (or, split control among multiple supporters speaking different languages).
Use per-person voting instead of per-(coin/share) voting to greatly increase the number of people needed to influence a decision through collusion.
Encourage and rely on defectors to alert the public to impending collusion.
Note: Schelling points are proposed by the American economist Thomas Schellin in the book "Conflict Strategies". In the absence of communication, if people know that others are trying to do the same thing, their actions will tend to converge in a conspicuous on the focus. For example, if two people meet in New York without prior communication, they will choose Grand Central Station with a high probability, which forms a natural Schelling Point." Skin in the game"None of these strategies are perfect, but they can be used in a variety of situations with varying degrees of success. Moreover, these techniques can and should be combined with mechanism designs that attempt to make pernicious collusion as unprofitable and risky as possible; in this regard,
[1] https://github.com/appliedzkp/maci
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3597399
[3] https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/21/introduction-futarchy
