The current challenge fee in Proof of Humanity registries is too low, making it cheap for bad actors to engage in griefing or spamming tactics. By raising the standard baseline challenge deposit to a minimum equivalent of $20 USD, we create a stronger economic disincentive for frivolous behavior while continuing to protect decentralized lists, integrations, and oracle queries.
AIM
- Spam Prevention
- Higher Juror Compensation
- Sybil Resistance (Sybil Challengers)
Update the challengeAmount or relevant arbitrationFee parameters within the smart contracts of the specific target.
Thank You.
Looking at the contract, it seems that the only way to increase the amount that challengers must deposit to challenge a profile, is to increase the juror fees in the relevant court. (In some other curated lists developed by Kleros, there is an additional parameter challengerBaseDeposit, so that the total amount to challenge is challengerBaseDeposit+Juror Fees, and the submitter receives the challengerBaseDeposit if the challenger loses her case. However, there is no parameter like that in this contract, probably with the goal of keeping the contract simple.)
To recall, the submitter needs to make a deposit when they submit of baseDeposit+Juror Fees. The baseDeposit amount is paid to the challenger if the challenger wins her challenge, and the juror fees are the amount that is paid to the Kleros jury that judges the case. So any amount that you increase the Juror Fees to make challenging more expensive will also increase this part of the submitter’s deposit. However, if you think that the incentives of the challengers are excessive to what is necessary to keep a robust ecosystem of challengers engaged to review profiles, one can reduce the baseDeposit.
If there are a lot of frivolous challenges, I would suggest starting by reducing the baseDeposit, and leave the Juror Fees alone for now. So it would cost the same to challenge, but the challengers’ rewards for successful challenges would decrease, so they would be less incentivized to challenge borderline cases. If the challenges we are seeing are coming from economically rational, but non-malicious challengers, that should be enough to have fewer frivolous challenges. Also, that approach has the benefit of making submissions more accessible.
If it turns out that there are challengers that are actually spammers/griefers, maybe you need to raise the Juror Fees to deal with that, either by increase the fee paid per juror, or by increasing the number of jurors in the case.