With respect to proof of location, you can’t naively use GPS because it can be spoofed. You might go with trusted towers of known location, but that’s centralized.
Another approach may be to assume K of N nodes are honest reporters of GPS, and use speed of light as a constraint.
Specifically, suppose you have N nodes, each of which is reporting a time-varying position [x(t), y(t)] over a time interval with M time steps.
Any node which purports to be near another node can be challenged by an equation that it must solve & return as quickly as possible.
For a pair of nodes with reported locations, the speed of light gives a lower bound on how quickly info can go back & forth.
Obviously network topology can dramatically change ping times. But a node should be able to solve more challenges more quickly from nodes it’s nearer to.
A node that claims to be at a given (x,y) location at time t will get many challenges from other nodes that report being near to it at time t.
It’s incentivized to solve and return these challenges as quickly as possible, such that compute time is small relative to ping time.
Some nodes in the network would be stationary while others would be phones or tablets.
The protocol wouldn’t be hardcoded to trust any particular node, but stationary servers run by organizations like Pingdom or PagerDuty could accumulate many location confirmations over time.
So, you might not get a *guaranteed* location out of it. But you might get something like “this node was close enough to stationary servers operated by different entities to pass many challenges over this time interval, meaning it was likely within this coordinate ball.”
Importantly, if you ran an organization, you could put your *own* servers on the network with fully trusted and known locations. And you could prioritize the response to their challenges when looking for nodes with spoofed locations.
This is a form of independent verification. If you introduce probes with known-to-you locations that issue challenges to other nodes — and yet the reported location of other nodes doesn’t change — that’s good evidence the protocol is working.
Incentives TBD, but roughly speaking you’d want to incentivize nodes that had high uptime, reliable locations, and the compute to issue and pass many challenges. And you’d want to slash or penalize nodes that spoofed their location.
Finally, it goes without saying that ping times are a highly imperfect measure of physical distance.
They can rise for reasons like network congestion that have nothing to do with a node moving further away.
Nevertheless, they are lower bounded by the speed of light.
What about VPNs? These are tricky for distance-based methods because you’re remote controlling a computer (with some latency) that actually is physically in the claimed region.
You might make the challenge depend on a private key which you wouldn’t want to copy to the VPN node.
These are the options. I get the logic, but banning signals technological and cultural weakness. Yet so does capitulation of the Newsom variety. The best way is to build something *better* than China, as Elon and others in tech have done.
Congress blew him kisses.
Journalists gave him applause.
Regulators promised to take no action.
So it was only Crypto Twitter that uncovered his deception.
Read the actual history of what happened with Sam Bankman-Fried, before it gets memory holed. balajis.com/p/crypto-twitt…
Meanwhile, Coindesk's Ian Allison was revealing[1] that SBF had no money, while Axios' Dan Primack was asking[2] whether SBF could cure world hunger.
"For context, the US sustained about 50k casualties in two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In large-scale combat operations, the US could experience that same number of casualties in two weeks." press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewconten…
Others are making similar proposals, due to military recruiting shortfalls.
"...in 2023, every service except the Marine Corps is poised to miss its recruiting goals. In 2022, the Army alone fell short by 15,000 recruits." military.com/daily-news/opi…