# One-Pager Proposal: Solving Privacy & Accountability Dilemma via ZK-based “Identity Mixer”

Motivating Use Case: Wikipedia aims to allow everyone to freely edit its content, especially enabling anonymous editing to promote free speech and avoid retaliation for sharing true information and counter censorship. However, this anonymity poses problems, such as the potential for bad actions too: uploading child pornography, privacy infringement, or copyright violations. When such bad actions occur and sometimes repeatedly by bad actors, there needs to be a way to hold these bad actors accountable.

#### Solution Overview

One solution is to organize Wikipedia editors into trusted groups, such as a doctor of medicines' working group or a computer science working group. These groups would accumulate reputation within Wikipedia.

1. **Joining Groups**: New Wikipedia members can secretly join these working groups with the permission of existing members. Such permissions shall
2. **Anonymous Editing via Endorsement**: Under normal circumstances, members can edit Wikipedia anonymously. Wikipedia can only see that the edit came from a member of a certain working group or endorsed by this workinggroup but cannot identify the specific editor or their edit history.
3. **Accountability**: If a problem arises and accountability is needed, it can be traced back to the working group, for example, the medical doctors' working group. And conditionally the group shall be able to identify bad actors within this group and remove them from the group. Ideally, even such removal doesn't have to reveal the true identity of the original "bad" actor, again for the purpose of avoiding retaliation or procecution of miniority views from majority views within the group.
4. **Maintaining Reputation**: If someone commits a bad act on Wikipedia, they will be kicked out of their working group to maintain the group's reputation; The group's reputation should also take a slight hit, such as a slash. This approach maintains an incentive for the group to keeps their members in good faith. By removing bad actors from the group it ensure that the individual is excluded from future participation. The group can use zero-knowledge proofs to exclude the previous anonymous member and ensure that they are not readmitted in the future.

This approach allows Wikipedia to preserve the freedom and anonymity of editors while ensuring that bad actors can be held accountable when necessary.

This approach essentially is similar to the journalism's protection of whistleblowers, except for it was relying on the centralized reputation and accountability of individual media outlet or individual journalist

#### Solution Details
TODO add options for components, circuts and algorithms for validating memberships onchain and discuss the pros and cons of each options.

#### Discussion Plan

I heard that Starkware will soon release a new milestone to make it easier to check membership onchain via ZK cuicuit. Look forward to a conversation for potentially using it to develop a solution