💬 DISCUSSION: game theory incentives behind evaluating reports

[marsrobertson]

How does the evaluation work?

Docs: https://testnet.hypercerts.org/docs/whitepaper/evaluation

My previous research

I was working on a highly aligned project called BaseX and applied to Kleros incubator:

The reason why I mention https://kleros.io is the community of the jurors - they are impartial experts when comes to fact-checking data. Already established community with expertise - a highly valuable asset.

Jurors can join the court where they have qualifications, for example, they know the language and can evaluate if the translation was done properly. For Hypercerts, a new category should be created: "Impact Evaluation"

Proposed workflow of evaluation

Noone knows the project better than the founders, participants, people on the ground. They have a much better understanding of the impact they are creating. It should be the Hypercert creator who can use standardized values - https://impactgenome.org/impact-index/ - to calculate the overall impact.

Then the jurors will have a simple job:
✅ Yes, correct, the overall impact assessment is reasonable*
⛔️ No, wrong, there are some issues

Additional rules:

• *reasonable because evaluating impact is not the exact science, as long as the assessment is reasonable, it should be accepted
  • What is the definition of “reasonable”? Fair, just, accurate, sensible… There are loads of uncertainties in the climate and finding a perfect estimate is a fallacy. “Reasonable” is good enough. When in doubt ask AI.
• If the evaluation is rejected, we can differentiate honest mistake VS outright fraud
• Both projects and jurors can earn a reputation through soulbound tokens
• When new information becomes available - a new supplementary evaluation can be added TBD TBC
• Evolving, anti-fragile system, responding to any curve balls, bad actors will not outsmart us

Negative impact

Someone needs to keep an eye on the polluters. Who is watching the watchers, who is regulating the regulators? Entrepreneurs are much faster to respond to challenges than government.

Hypercerts can be applicable to both POSITIVE and NEGATIVE impact.

• For positive activities: minting Positive Value Token (PVT)
• For negative activities: minting Negative Value Token (NVT)
• PVT and NVT = names TBD TBC for something more eco-friendly and meme-able
• Accounting for PVT and NVT is done separately, rather than a single value, this is to preserve the fact that someone did damage in the past (and then it is even more flex watching how much they improved)
• [minor technical detail] storing total accumulated historical PVT and NVT on-chain, increment only, ease of access without running Dune queries

Quadratic easing

• Big corporation did some work and generated $1m in impact value
• Small farmer did some work and generated $100 in impact value

A single large entity would dominate and flood the market. To handle this we suggest quadratic easing, similar to quadratic voting on Gitcoin so that smaller participants also play an important role in the system.

Onwards and upwards

Slide from my old pitch deck:

The timing is incredible, the convergence of exponential technologies is making it possible

I would love to initiate discussion about some of the ideas mentioned above, specifically:

• workflow of evaluation
• potential Kleros integration (community of jurors with fact-checking experience)
• negative impact
• soulbound reputation

[marsrobertson]

From the announcement blogpost: https://protocol.ai/blog/hypercert-new-primitive/

My experience with evaluating various Carbon Credits methodologies suggest that relying on evaluators is not scalable. That's why dMRV (decentralized Measurement Reporting Verification) seems like a trend. See for example Verra: https://verra.org/validation-verification/

These processes are conducted by validation/verification bodies (VVBs) – qualified, independent third-party auditors who are approved by Verra. VVBs are experts in the program and sectoral scope or technical area they audit.

29 accredited entities for the entire world. OUCH.

What if you want to become one? Not that many options either:

These dudes (NABCB) made me laugh, flashback to Geocities and the 90s:

Noone knows the project better than the founders, participants, people on the ground. They have a much better understanding of the impact they are creating.

Those submitting self-assessment will have an incentive to be accurate, sensible, reasonable. It will be their job to accurately present their impact. They will include a variety of supporting evidence: photos, satellite photos, samples, testimonials, press, anything and everything really.

There it will become a much simpler YES / NO question:

✅ Yes, correct, the overall impact assessment is reasonable*
⛔️ No, wrong, there are some issues

I was also thinking that in case of any doubts, those doing this YES / NO verification should DYOR, don't trust verify:

• check google maps / google earth
• order a fresh bunch of satellite photos
• check web archive wayback machine
• hire someone on the ground to go there and fact-check (I will be not flying to Kenya but can totally pay someone $5 to take photos and talk to local people)
• and then someone else hires someone else to go there once again to double check

These features allow the whole evaluation system to be dynamically improved by each actor.