I disagree with KYC.
Also transaction volume just rewards deep wallets and people that can create scripts to fake volume. We need to find ways to really decentralized the network and get people more interested and that CARE about this network.
The idea that people will care after being rewarded with money is just false. We need to create forms where we can identify those that really care about the ethos and not those that just care about money.
And what if I told you that you can use this KPI faking as a good work?
If your goal is to stress test the network and the KPI is to have max number of transactions on day x. Then you simply do not care how people achieve it as long as they make many transactions. For that they are rewarded.
It’s the same thing with bitcoin miners. They have their KPI and they can try to fake the metrics as much as they want but if they do not put the work, they won’t receive the reward.
Is it clearer now?
There’s still a lot of novel considerations that haven’t been done, of course this all takes programming and work. One way would be go by wallet age. The older the wallet having more weight than newer wallets that are still active. You don’t have to go back all the way back for this. The moderate amount of activity again could be rewarded the most versus the higher or low end across chains. If sybil are using more and more wallets to avoid sybil detection, that should also weed out some there as they either have very high activity, and/ or inconsistent activity as they use new wallets?
You could go by gas usage as activity measured and award heavier toward the wallets with the middle amount. Rewards decreasing from there with higher or lower gas usage. You reward early adopters and real use before airdrop farming was a thing that are still active linking a still active Ethereum wallet. Who had many many wallets back in the day? You’re more likely to reward the average user.
Unfortunately even there, I’ve heard of someone who has 50 Gitcoin passports. What’s from keeping someone from paying 50 people to kyc and give them a small percentage of their farming?
Well, this is probably better suited for filtering sybils and I would say a very good idea!
This is however discussion about how to employ sybils to do desirable work for the Starknet ecosystem like the mentioned max TPS test. This is arguably happening now but it’s unguided. My point is, it wouldn’t have to be. We wouldn’t go from 0 to 100 as having everything unguided to only rewarding tasks we set users to do. We could do mix. Let organic users do organic things and reward them for it. At the same time create sybil sinks and let sybils do something useful instead of clogging the network with random transactions hoping to get airdrop in the future.
The example that you proposed might be one of a kind. Also that same example can be achieved by the foundation itself with scripts.
Do you have 3 more examples like this one where identity doesn’t matter and that the foundations needs humans to make it a reality?
Foundation could do it with the scripts but why to do it themselves? I would guess their time is more valuable than time of airdrop farmers.
Already made those in the original post.
Can you give me the reason why the foundation won’t need the additional help from people who are clearly willing to do some work (sybils)? Especially in the situation we are in right now when they are unguided and clogging the network constantly?
Writing a script for testing the resiliency of the network is something that I’m sure they have already done and I believe that it is way cheaper than giving away millions of dollars to airdrop farmers.
As I mentioned before in my previous posts, I do believe that you might have some examples where sybil attacks might not matter, but by having clear ways for people to get a guaranteed airdrop without having sybil resistance mechanisms will reward those that have technical capabilities to fake being a human and dilute those who are genuinely doing the work.
In fact with airdrops where there were no sybil resistance methods suffer from actually giving a lot of tokens to not so ethical individuals that do dilute the reward of those that do things genuinely. Which means if you are not sybil attacking the network you are basically letting someone else take your launch. This is similar to the tragedy of the commons with tuna fish stock (The Tragedy of the Commons - YouTube)
I think you might have missed the part in my post where I explicitly say that this could be used as a complementary thing. It’s absolutely obvious to anyone with basic econ 101 knowledge that this could not be used as the main design choice for an airdrop.
To your point about scripts. It’s broader discussion about laboratory testing and real life scenarios. Latency, different machines, weird transactions. Those are things you can’t simply write a script a fake “max TPS”. You would prove on paper that you tested something but in reality not that much. Ideally you want to test the system with real users but since sybils are attacking the network, you might as well use them for something productive.
Also if you “lure” some sybils to donate to “some thing you like”, you don’t really care if they are not human. You lure some of them into similar sinks and then state hard commitment to very strong sybil protection.
To obvious point - just state hard commitment to very strong sybil protection without giving them anything. Well, then you don’t have donated money to X, you don’t have network fees, you haven’t tested max TPS and you don’t have public attention. To bootstrap the network, you need attention. Just look at twitter and how many threads about Starknet there are. Yes, it’s mostly about airdrop farming. But how do you think the bitcoin gained most of its users? They joined just because the price was growing. Only later some of them stayed and new wave of believers was born. And again and again. I am in crypto for quite a while and I assume you too so I guess you know what I am talking about.
Agreed, I’ve seen there are so many “parasites” actually.
And one of the main problems is their multi wallets which leads significantly unfair token distribution that is not favourable for loyal ones, unfortunately.
Airdrops farmers is an unavoidable topic, but it is too early for us to discuss airdrops, more attention to the starknet community
Yeah I got it since the beginning that this was more a complementary thing. My main concern has been to create some metrics to be hit and that people with the experience of creating scripts will be the ones benefiting and not the large community that does care about Starknet.
Now, I also believe that these programs that you are suggesting could definitely have value and should also be compensated but they should be isolated from the general genuine activities. Maybe the way that you can actually participate is by applying and declaring your wallets and so on before hand.
I believe is very important for the community to understand what are real KPIs and what are inflated KPIs that are not being performed by real humans.
Regarding donations, I’m super aware about this as I’ve been working in the public goods domain for a while. IMHO this could also be an issue because a single individual with a good amount of money could potentially divide the money into multiple wallets and donate with all of those wallets in the hope of potential airdrops. This has happened already on gitcoin so it’s definitely something to keep an eye on.
Thank you so much for sharing your points of view🙏🏽
agree that KYC discriminate those that come from authoritarian governments, and I believe that those projects who care about KYC have a smaller picutre in the world of web3.
Perfect! I get your point and I agree that we can’t rely mainly on sybils to achieve our goals. My point was that ceteris paribus, the big problem now is sybil farming so let’s have some discussion on how to make sybils do something useful. How to design the whole airdrop is another question.
So lure sybils into sybil sinks that are useful and at the same time announce strong anti sybil metrics. So it takes a LOT of effort and time to cheat the system. This way low effort sybils will rather do the easy thing and follow KPIs to get at least something. We get the benefits mentioned above and then try to identify real users. It will never be perfect but it could be better than previous attempts.
On donations. If we use it only to lure sybils (and we don’t care about pushing away regular users), we can just reward more tokens for bigger donations. Then it would be kind of ICO in disguise but farming airdrop via hundreds of accounts is arguably too. 
Do we perceive Bitcoin miners as malicious? No. There is a game designed for them where they can focus on maximizing their profit and still do something productive for others.
Why not do the same thing with airdrop farmers?
This is one of my primary points towards inclusion of Ethereum network validators, by joining the beacon chain despite profit incentives have contributed meaningful work towards the network security, of which StarkNet inherits its security from.
This metric cannot be gamed especially pre-merge/withdrawals, and as this type of distribution has never been done before, there’s no incentive to game it.
I’ve talked about some ideas here. "Arbitrum Airdrop Sybil Loophole": Proposed Measures to Address the Issue for the StarkNet Project - #13 by GLCstaked
The main thing I believe is to incentivise ‘strong on-chain’ profile over one or small number of addresses, vs ‘weak on-chain’ profile over many.
This is implicit incentivisation and can only be achieved by projects going this route, unfortunately I think ARB has emboldened sybiloors.
There is a reason for a thing to exist. It is precisely because of these users that the popularity and activity of the project will be increased. Without them, it will be difficult to get started in the early stage of the project.
I completely agree with your stance on airdrop farming and its negative impact on the long-term development of the ecosystem. Categorizing and incentivizing different communities with distinct rules and methods is a wise decision to ensure sustainable growth for the network.
It is unfortunate that airdrop farmers in Arb or OP are able to gather 10-20 times more than regular community members by opening hundreds of accounts with little to no consequences for identifying as a Sybil account. A fair game where early contributors, developers, ecosystem users, and testers are incentivized accordingly is a better approach to building a sustainable network.
Overall, it’s crucial to establish clear and transparent rules for the community that discourage airdrop farming while fostering the growth of the network in the long run. Thank you for sharing this insightful post.
I think that to prevent or reduce the number of airdrop farmer on this kind of project, it is necessary to take into account, in addition to the financial investment, the investment in term of time nottament by indexing the people having an account on the forum starknet and having sent messages, the people active on the groups telegram/discord This would eliminate a lot of bot farmer to start with.
There is no best algorithms to filter out sybils because its a double edge swords. You can’t filter all sybils without sacrificing real users. I think SUI network has good approach of filtering sybils but although it filtered most of the sybils, it also sacrificing lots of real users. And They were also able to backdoor KYC and verify tons of accounts to sybils the system. Another way is to reward users based on level of their contribution. Rewards users based on their community activities, layer by layer. But the best is to focus on the products, since quality speaks for itself, prioritize the quality first over the quantity, not airdrops. Save the resources for product development first, then marketing.
Making it difficult for airdrop farmers is actually good for testing the chains, because it will force them to interact more and in different ways with the blockchain.