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Imagine someone is building bot armies and then sells them to whoever is interested. What is the sell price?
In order to agree on the bot price the buyer and the seller probably rely on some parameter to measure the bot quality with. Probably it is the total number of social connections, or how well the bots are connected with a "target" account, or it is the lack of bot clusters. Probably the quality depends solely on some specific purpose of the buyer, on how they are going to use the bots. The fact is we don't know the parameters. And we cannot predict the price.
How much do users value their accounts? How easy it is to create a fake account? Can this platform's accounts be used as a verification method? The price of an account is a very reliable metric to asses the quality of the platform's audience. It would be really helpful to know it. But there is no simple way to get it. There is a market but it is in a shadow.
Upala uses the same shadow market forces to get an account price precisely, easily and immediately. Upala provides digital identity uniqueness score which is measured with this price. In other words Upala's account score corresponds to the efforts needed to forge the account (price of forgery). Let's see how Upala makes it possible.
First lets have a briefest dive into two major concepts behind Upala.
1. Groups. Users join a group. They put their deposits in the group's pool in dollars (DAI). The group assigns scores to all of its users.
2. Explosive bots protocol. The score is also valued in dollars. And the score is higher than the deposit. It represents the explosion price - an amount of money that an identity holder can get at any time for deleting their ID.
When exploding, an attacker betrays other members of the group (steals their money). This group will not let the attacker in again. So if that person wants to create a new Upala ID and get some score they'd have to build trust within some other group of people.
This is what incentivizes groups members to let only trusted people in.
Deposits are not necessarily money. It could be any other value or efforts "put on stake" - like solving captchas, sms-verification or real-world reputation. The group can decide on any verification method. And the pool is not necessarily consists of user deposits - it may have outside sources (works a lot like insurance). Groups may earn by charging DApps for providing scores to them or earn interest on their pools (or other - Upala allows arbitrary incentive and governance models). Have a look at this video or check out the Upala docs to have a deeper dive.
Back to our bot sellers. Explosive bots protocol gives a bot owner a choice to sell the army or to explode every bot in it. It makes no sense then to set the sell price lower than the explosion price. It would be easier just to explode and get an amount of money corresponding to the combined scores of the bots, effortlessly and deterministically.