BotBasher usecase: Humanode
With Biomapper becoming available on more than 20 chains, and with more and more chains to come, people sometimes need a reminder that BotBasher is also as powerful as ever, and that it is available for any Discord or Telegram channels that want to experience Sybil-resistance.
Unfortunately, sometimes people just assume that it is a tool to keep bots or scammers out, or that it is just an extra step that will “keep potential users out.” After all, being able to claim that your channel has 100,000 users (with a majority being bots or multi-accounts), seems cooler than saying your channel has a couple of thousand verified human beings as users.
However, it all comes down to your perception, what you truly value, how you envision your path to growth, and ultimately, how you utilize BotBasher.
Even Humanode, which gave birth to BotBasher, recently (as in just last week) came up with a new way to utilize it further.
Since the birth of BotBasher, the Humanode Discord server has utilized BotBasher to create Sybil-resistant channels so that all of our unique users who are alive can have a space to talk to other real users without having to worry about being interrupted by bots or the run-of-the-mill scammer. There are also Sybil-resistant voting channels, and then there are Sybil-resistant contest channels.
Naturally, some people attempt to use Sybil attacks. Yes, there still are a few sock-puppeteers. Thanks to them, we can learn even more about their tricks, thought processes, and the issues we need to address. Naturally, all of this assists us greatly as we work on Vortex (the one-person = one-vote Humanode DAO), and improve BotBasher and Biomapper.
So, long story short, we came up with something new. As Humanode currently utilizes Polkadot, we combined some features of polkadot{.js} and BotBasher.
As the first step towards one of the largest decentralized and democratic governing entities in the world, Vortex (which is in development), we had the human nodes (Humanode validators) make sure that they had their Discount user identity verified through BotBasher (making sure that they are unique human beings). The next step was to have them go to polkadot{.js}, have them select their address for their validator node, had them fill out a message saying “I associate my Discord account activity [username] with my Humanode Mainnet validator address“, and then click a button to sign the message.
This produces a unique signature, tying their validator address to their “human verified” user name.
Yes, these are a few extra steps, but with this, we were able to verify if the voters in the special “validator-polls” are active, unique validators or not.
As a result, our first poll had 861 validators (out of the 1800 active validators) join the vote. Considering that there are only 535 members of the US Congress, we can say that we had a rather good sample size for the very first “vote”. And, as participation in the voting in the polls is currently tied to receiving full rewards from validation, the number of voters should only rise.
The key is that everyone who voted was a unique and living human being. Even if some people manage to sock-puppet, the process is not, and will not be easy (aside from the fact that there is a limit to how many unique living human beings there are on our planet).
Of course, once the development of Vortex is completed, this process will become obsolete for us, but it is a great and free method as a stopgap measure.
We are 100% sure that there are other ways to accomplish similar results. In our case, we wanted to make sure that we were able to see how many active validators are participating in the voting. We still will not, and do not, know who the validators are, nor do we have any of their private information. But that is ok. We never wanted it, nor did we need it. All we needed to know was that the validators are unique, active, and alive. And for that, BotBasher was all we needed.
If you have any interesting use-cases of utilizing BotBasher, or have any great ideas on how they can be utilized, feel free to join our Discord Server, Telegram Channel, or X, and tell us all about it. We would love to hear from you and perhaps feature your solution in an upcoming article.