Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

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HN tends to be pretty micropayment / cryptobro averse (for good reason, mostly) but I think this is a problem that crypto could legitimately solve - Tie an anonymous 'identity' to a well-seasoned (unmoved for >x time, where x = days for some things or maybe years for some things) wallet with some reasonable amount of funding in it ($100 or something) and you become 'Guy who owns that hundred bucks'. Moving the hundred bucks unseasons it. The provider only respects your claim to be an individual if you can prove you've got a pile of 100 seasoned bucks. If you do something I don't like, I can ban that pile from further interaction. Malicious users would immediately move the money around, but at least the malicious actors would need a lot of piles of money constantly moving around and 'seasoning' to create a bunch of fake individual identities, which gets prohibitively expensive at scale for all but nation-state type actors which you're not going to be able to defend against anyway.

Bam - I am anonymous, but have (mostly) proven I am a real person with (mostly) reasonably good intentions.

This is exactly how crypto solves the problem that another thread said Google was solving with your phone number. Phone numbers are expensive them say!

Its a put up or shutup kinda system. Fund your wallet with $100, hold it, and we will let you post that reaction to a news article after its been held continiusly for 30 days, and automatically delete is as soon as its unfunded.

I always thought the blacklistable credentials was a cool approach - we're you prove you control an ip but dont reveal it. https://www.cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/blacronym-wpes.pdf

Your talking about earned capital as a forfeitable deposit. Sure that scheme has its place.

I joined HN for one or two reasons. To research a book. But also to promote my last book. Anyone can post here with a throwaway, yet I didn't want to be an interloping dick who felt entitled to hit and run posting links to my own vanities... so I decided; join, contribute, participate, earn. After a few months I don't feel bad about plying my own wares a little. Reputation (social capital) is natural and ancient and doesn't really need crypto.

Most of the Web isn't that though. As an information system, as Sir Tim first coined it, it's a publishing machine: You advertise a service, I send "requests", you send "responses", we part ways without complications. Quick anonymous sex on the beach. So-called Web2.0 f-cked that massively. Web2.0 wants to exchange phone numbers. And once the surveillance capitalist creeps latched on to stalking everyone around the neighbourhood... well here we are.

I think what some Web3.0 people think is that crypto can repair some kind of "middle ground", where Web2.0 type behaviours can take place but anonymously and under conditions controlled by "stakes". I think this won't work for psychological and game theoretical reasons we can't get into here. Instead I think we need to repair the Web1.0 layer at least, and since transport level security and anonymity have become necessary in a post-Snowden era, for me that means getting rid of the selective prejudice inflicted by systems like Cloudflare.

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