The Verifiable Enforcer: On Creating Just and Transparent Rules for Digital Spaces

While natural laws are perfectly enforced and human laws attempt fairness through judicial systems, our digital world lacks consistent enforcement mechanisms. Maël Gassmann introduces the concept of a “Verifiable Enforcer,” a digital solution aiming to bring fairness and accountability to virtual environments. By implementing public algorithms and smart contracts, this approach offers resilience against corruption and manipulation while ensuring accountability in digital environments, all without requiring central authority or blind trust.

Natural Laws: Their Perfect Enforcement

The world we live in is governed by fundamental rules – what we call natural laws. For example the laws of physics are not enforced because they are morally right or good, but simply because they are inherently and automatically enforced by nature itself. For instance, we are all constantly subjected to the earth’s gravity.

However equally applied to everyone, a rule will always have consequences on its subjects. In our case, gravity makes us all lighter or heavier depending on our mass. This creates distinctions in-between every human and object subjected to the rule, and might advantage some of us and disadvantage others in certain environments.

Human Laws: Essential Even If Fatally Imperfect

Humanity, from both good and bad intentions, has created its own sets of rules and given birth to our societies. The principle is simple: when a rule is created, it has to be communicated to its future subjects, and finally, requires an enforcing mechanism. Human laws are usually enforced by both the judicial system and police forces. Although the enforcing intention might be to act as blindly and equally as natural laws do, a human enforcing system will always have its biases and imperfections. Therefore, it will never succeed at applying the same perfect enforcement that natural laws do.

Even if fatally imperfect, human laws still have the power to balance out some effects of natural laws and provide a flawed, but preserved, harmony and equality between us all.

Virtual Laws: A Break in Consistency

The creation of digital communication systems that span over the entire world has allowed us to evolve as a species. It has created some virtual environments with their own set of virtual `natural’ laws. The Internet is such a system. Although human laws and governments try to enforce themselves online, the virtual natural laws provide a different foundation than the real world does and make human laws incompatible as they rely on missing natural laws. For instance, in the real world, if a crime is committed and detected, it is certain that the criminal was physically present on the scene in order to have committed the crime, and thus, is also in the enforcing power’s jurisdiction. This is rarely the case in virtual environments.

A Virtual Verifiable Enforcer

The issue is rather simple: virtual interactions require a virtual enforcing power. My thesis “Verifiable Labels – A Website Reputation System”, even if focusing on the specific environment of the Internet, describes a Verifiable Enforcer that should allow humans to create virtual “natural” rules for a system and enforce them on virtual entities. This virtual Verifiable Enforcer’s purpose is not to distinguish between a good or bad subject, but to make sure they all play by the rules.

This is what the `Enforcer’ stands for in its name, but what about “Verifiable”? It is Verifiable because the applied algorithm, which processes information to accept or fail when rules are disrespected, is public. This means that even if the Verifiable Enforcer was to be hosted as a central server, anyone should still be able to verify the output by running the algorithm themselves.

My thesis explores the possibility to provide a Verifiable Enforcer as a smart contract, where a higher level of verification and trust can be reached. A smart contract cannot be directly edited, and no company has to host a central server. Therefore, corruption risks are lower, the infrastructure is more resilient as it is decentralized, and all the computing and storage costs are directly paid by the individuals that interact with it.

Moreover, while manually verifying the output of the algorithm is still possible by running it locally, the blockchain argumentatively provides a runtime which does not even require trust.

One should however note that this concept is not mature enough to respect the privacy of its subjects, thus humans should never be directly subjected to such a Verifiable Enforcer.

Righteousness & Justice

The rules a Verifiable Enforcer implements are not necessarily “right” or “just” in their effects, and this could lead to issues. I from a democratic country where citizens directly vote on the laws that will govern them. This experience has shaped my belief: rules are most just and right when the majority of people who will be subject to them willingly accept them as fair. A consensus is always the best path to a fairer society, even if not the shortest.

Such a mechanism is an interesting research question that will be explored in the future, so that a Verifiable Enforcer’s set of rules would be allowed to evolve and fit its subjects’ view of righteousness.

For further details and a description of a practical realisation of such a Verifiable Enforcer on an actual use case, more information can be found here to fulfill any further interests https://bfh.easydocmaker.ch/search/abstract/4225/.