International Social Credit System

The International Social Credit System (ISCS) is an international reputation system that keeps track of individuals’ reputation using a social credit score. The ISCS was created in 2 July 2051, with national governments and influential corporations in the International Regulations and Standards Body as founding members. Each individual’s social credit score is stored in a private blockchain; the public is allowed to read social credit scores, but only ISCS members are allowed to modify social credit scores. Members may modify an individual’s social credit score for any number of reasons, including for crimes committed by that person or failure to repay debts. Entities can use this social credit score to determine things like what services to provide an individual, whether they can board planes, or immigration status.

History

Trials for the first social credit system started in K’ahjaan in 2039. The social credit system was national in scope and was universally adopted nationwide in 2049. The success of the K’ahjaan social credit system pushed other governments to develop their own. Overtime, many forms of social credit were formed, but for purposes of immigration and the global market, the variety of competing standards made it difficult to transfer social credit from one system to another. This led to the creation of the ISCS in 2 July 2051, establishing a worldwide, decentralized, and standardized database.

Blockchain

The ISCS uses a blockchain, or decentralized ledger, to store social credit scores. The benefit of the blockchain is that there is no central authority that needs to be trusted. Each transaction, which can be a change to an individual’s social credit score or the creation of an individual’s score, is collected into blocks. Nodes broadcast their transactions to every other node, and each node collects these transactions into blocks. A randomly chosen node submits a block to be added to the blockchain, and the other nodes vote on whether to add the block to the blockchain.

The voting-based consensus differs from proof-based consensus algorithms used by cryptocurrencies, where nodes are given the ability to add blocks based on whether they solve a cryptographic problem first. Voting-based consensus is used in ISCS because the identities of all nodes that are allowed to add blocks are known. Votes cannot be falsified because each other member has the public key of every other member, which is used to verify that a vote comes from a certain member. Voting-based consensus has the advantage of adding blocks faster, and nodes cannot hijack the blockchain by accumulating the majority of the computing power of the blockchain (known as the 51% attack).

ISCS Members