5 Reasons Telegram Needs BotBasher.
Do you all remember back when Telegram was one of, if not the greatest communication app, especially for those in crypto? You had private real-time messaging, you didn’t need to worry about jumping into communities or chatrooms to talk about various projects or themes you were interested in because you knew your identity was safe, and yes, only the cool people knew how to use it. Then came the bots, the scammers, and the noobs.
Yes, you could tolerate the noobs, after all, you were once one too… But the bots and the scammers, pretending to be friends, colleagues, co-workers, famous people, and or project leaders started to become a real problem, and oh my god, the number of spam messages from “Nigerian widows” that need your help with “a large stash of cash left behind by her late husband”, the lawyers of European Nobles who are trying to track you down to pass on your inheritance, and the lonely Asian girls that fell in love with you and want to visit you… It is hard to even know if anyone in the “community” you joined is a real human being or not anymore.
Simply put, they are all ruining the Telegram experience, making you wonder if you should just go ahead and drop it or not. Plenty of people have been scammed, and it is not once or twice that people have tried to scam you.
The same goes for the projects that want to connect with their community. Look at the Humanode Hub on Telegram, it has 14k members, but who knows if they are real “community members” or not. There is nothing more disheartening than inviting the community to a live chat with the founders to talk about anything the community is interested in and having less than 30 people show up, or having less than 10 people participate in a contest, or having a 98% rejection rate due to the submissions being from bots that didn’t bother to read what the contest required. Not to mention those messages from accounts nearly identical to a fellow team member’s account sending you a DM saying “Hey Bro, How is the weather there. Hey, I have emergency. Plz send me 1ETH?”.
In short, the team members of Humanode, and the core developers of Humanode got fed up with how Telegram is. Who wants to deal with all of the Sybil attacks anyway? There is too much to do, and there is too much cost associated with dealing with Sybil attacks in a chatroom, a cost that could be spent elsewhere, such as in even more cool development or promotions.
So, Humanode did what Humanode does best. We started to develop BotBasher for Telegram. It is hard to deny that Telegram is a great tool if used properly. It is easy, it is private, and it is somewhat secure.
The team knew that in working with Telegram, privacy is King. So, why not use BotBasher to tie a single account together with your private and secure biometric ID? All we need to do is provide a private and secure way to prove that there is a real, unique, and live human being behind an account, and Humanode already has a track record of making that possible, such as in BotBasher for Discord, BioAuthentication for launching nodes, and Biomapping for rewards in the LP staking pool!
In all honesty, the Humanode team thinks it is a great idea, and here are what we think are the top 5 reasons why Telegram NEEDS BotBasher.
#5 One User One Account Verification. BotBasher for Telegram, like other Humanode BioAuthentication products, such as BotBasher for Discord, will allow one user to tie one BioAuthentication to one Telegram account. The user may have 15 different “Sybil” accounts for various reasons, but only one can be BioAuthenticated, period. This authentication will prove that there is a real unique user behind that account. Community Managers for Telegram will be able to set up chatrooms, content, event spaces, and so on for users in general, and those tailored to BioAuthenticated users only. Meaning, the creation of a Bot Free Zone for the community, allowing the team members and community members to be able to interact with each other with the knowledge that there are actual, real users behind the accounts.
#4 Secure BioAuthentication. The Humanode Team knows that Security is the key, especially for Telegram users. Although nothing in the world is 100% secure, Telegram is based on 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, 2048-bit RSA encryption, and Diffie–Hellman secure key exchange, and assuming you are the only one that has access to your phone or root access to your computer (and that of the person you are messaging), all data (including media and files) that the user sends and receives via Telegram cannot be deciphered when intercepted by the user’s internet service provider, owners of Wi-Fi routers the user connects to, or other third parties. In addition, those who want more security also have access to P2P secure messaging. So yes, Telegram was built with Security in mind.
The Humanode BioAuthentication was also built with extra Security in mind. When a user Authenticates for the first time, and scans his or her face, the original image of your face scan and liveness detection never leaves your device. Instead, an encrypted 3D map of the face based on the calculations gets sent to our confidential virtual machines (CVMs) as a string of data, and the original image gets deleted from the user’s device.
And just so you know, the CVMs allow us to run a system that has no external access besides the operational API (i.e. no SSH, no maintenance shell, no software updated, etc) and that does not have any operational code that can leak the biometric data - which allows us to implement a system that is safe for our users to send the biometric data into. In short, even we can’t get our hands on the encrypted biometric data, not that we would ever want, or need to. And even if some evil genius comes by and hacks the system using a quantum supercomputer, and somehow gets through, well, it is virtually impossible to recreate the exact image of the user.
In any case, this encrypted image/string-of-data is then used for 2 things. The first is to check if the face is already in the system or not, and the second is that if it is not, allow the user to tie it to a Telegram Account.
In short, the BioAuthentication process is just as, if not more secure than the Data you sent through Telegram. After all, there is no risk of your Mother or younger sibling going through your BioAuthentication, unlike the time they found those dirty pics you sent your friend from High School in those few minutes you left your phone on the table, unlocked.
#3 High-level Sybil Resistance for Telegram Channels and chats. For the first time, channels and communities will be able to have a better understanding of how large their communities actually are.
Yes, it is great to see that your Channel has 95k users. But what if, that was just because you had a few AMAs that gave out $5 to every user that asked a good question, and the “Bot Army” was geared up, with one user commanding ten, twenty, or even hundreds of bots to get a better chance at winning that $5? Imagine having to deal with 10k questions originated by bots, trying to find a question from a genuine user is harder than finding a needle in a haystack. What if you were planning your ICO based on those 95k users, only to find that 94k of them were Bots geared up to gain rewards and get whitelisted? What if you were a project looking for a great community to do AMAs with as promotion and marketing, only to find out that their promise of access to 100,000 users only produced 2000 users online, and behind those 2000 users, were 15 guys on computers, and 4 of those 15 actually worked for the platform, and you recognize the remaining 11 from the last AMA you did with a different group?
How about those guys who start dishing out FUD just to stir things up, and then turn around and send out messages stirring FOMO using a different account, or accounts?
What about those assholes that just stir things up just for fun, or just troll people to death for “fun”.
Yes, they may get banned, but they just pop right back in with a fresh account.
But what if the scammer, spammer, or troller got kicked out and banned from the “Sybil Resistant, BioAuthentecated user only zone”?
It is guaranteed that they will need to find a new “face”, or borrow someone else's face to get BioAuthenticated again to be allowed back in that community.
Yes, it is possible if you live in a remote village and you are the only one with internet access, all you will have to do is go door to door to scan everyone in the village, and pray that those 72 villagers never demand money for allowing you to profit off of their identity.
Yes, there is a potential market for buying and selling biometric identities somewhere, but fortunately, there are only 8.1 Billion people on the planet, versus infinite Sybil identities.
#2 The dawn of new content channels and opportunities. The only reason why projects create channels for their community is because they want to connect with their users. They all care about their users and want to connect, share ideas, gain inspiration, and at times, have fun together. They also want to make sure that the necessary information gets to their users, and that the users know where to go to find accurate information.
The golden rule for any business is to know your customers (different from KYC operations). If you want your user base to grow, you need to be able to reach out to people. If you want to do marketing or PR, you need to be able to deliver your message to actual living customers. If they are actually interested in the industry that you are from, even better.
Truth be told, most serious players in the market have already given up on most social media platforms. The guys selling “access” to their “popular platform with multitudes of users”, are hellbent on making sure their numbers are exaggerated, even if 50% of them are known fake accounts. The more users, the higher the price they can charge their customers.
There is a whole industry behind the creation of Sybil accounts, selling them for money, or using them for misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and misleading the market of public opinion. Not only is there an industry made of it, but at times these are state-sponsored operations trying to manipulate people's opinions for whatever reason, such as overthrowing governments, or sinking rival companies.
But then again, it is also fact that hundreds of thousands of companies and projects would pay top dollar if they had access to communities that could guarantee their users were real, unique human beings.
Now, what if new platforms could be created instantly by installing BotBasher, and creating channels only allowing actual living and unique human beings?
You may not know who they really are, but it is guaranteed that there are actual living human beings behind the accounts you give access to. If you ban or kick a user from the group or community, that user will not be able to come back in using the same BioAuthentication.
Creation of “Unique Live Human Being Only” AMA platforms or interview stages, Sybil-Resistant event spaces, Sybil-Resistant product review and/or product introduction spaces, Sybil-Resistant contest communities, or simply “No Bots Allowed” safe zones for the exchange of ideas or getting to know people are some of the quickest things that come to mind.
The question is not if it is possible or not, but rather, who will build a name in the creation of such spaces first.
#1 Additional User Security. It has been mentioned earlier in this article that Telegram was built with Security in mind. Having said that there is one area where security is looser than the cookie jar in my grandmother’s kitchen.
That comes from the fact that it is possible to create anonymous accounts on Telegram, going around the need to tie the account to your SIM card. A simple solution would be to use a burner phone or buy phone numbers online. Most scammers have accumulated countless numbers over the years. People can just change their username and profile, or delete their account and start over.
This opens the door to scammers, spammers, and Bots and makes it nearly impossible to control them. The user, at his or her discretion, needs to make sure that the user behind the account is actually a human being, and that the user is actually the person they think they are talking to.
But what if, just what if you could tie a private and secure BioAuthentication to the account?
What if the user who tied their BioAuthentication is not able to change which account they tied that account to (at least until the next server reset), like “watermarking” that account to be an account that has a real human behind it?
No, this will not solve all of the problems out there, and the users will still need to make sure that they are talking to someone they know and trust, and keep an eye out for security, but it would make it a lot harder for bots, scammers, and spammers to commence as is.
What if, let's say, when you check the user info, you can confirm if the account has been BioAuthenticated or not?
What we are saying is that adding BioAuthentication to Telegram, will add a whole new layer of security to using Telegram. Especially for those of us who just want to use Telegram to connect with friends and family, and those projects we are interested in, and don’t enjoy dancing with scammers, spammers, and Bots.
Yes, risks will still remain, but compared to the jungle out there now? It will be a whole new layer of security, with just as much, if not more privacy.
BotBasher for Telegram is in the final stages of development, so expect to see the Beta Test out, sometime soon this Summer!
If you have better ideas or thoughts about BotBasher for Telegram, feel free to join the discussion in the Humanode Hub on Telegram, or the Humanode Server on Discord! If you would like to develop projects alongside us or want to build tools to make BotBasher even better, we have grants! Send us your proposals!