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I would like to mention the concept of "Soulbound Tokens" as a way of attacking this problem. This is the subject of a paper this year by Vitalik Buterin (found

I would like to mention the concept of "Soulbound Tokens" as a way of attacking this problem. This is the subject of a paper this year by Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum), E. Glen Weyl (economist/researcher at Microsoft Research) and Puja Ohlhaver. Here's the abstract: """ Web3 today centers around expressing transferable, financialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships of trust. Yet many core economic activities—such as uncollateralized lending and building personal brands—are built on persistent, non-transferable relationships. In this paper, we illustrate how non-transferable “soulbound” tokens (SBTs) representing the commitments, credentials, and affiliations of “Souls” can encode the trust networks of the real economy to establish provenance and reputation. More importantly, SBTs enable other applications of increasing ambition, such as community wallet recovery, sybil-resistant governance, mechanisms for decentralization, and novel markets with decomposable, shared rights. We call this richer, pluralistic ecosystem “Decentralized Society” (DeSoc)—a co-determined sociality, where Souls and communities come together bottom-up, as emergent properties of each other to co-create plural network goods and intelligences, at a range of scales. Key to this sociality is decomposable property rights and enhanced governance mechanisms—such as quadratic funding discounted by correlation scores—that reward trust and cooperation while protecting networks from capture, extraction, and domination. With such augmented sociality, web3 can eschew today’s hyper-financialization in favor of a more transformative, pluralist future of increasing returns across social distance. """ Here's the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763

aaronharnly 4y ago
I honestly can’t tell if this abstract is also GPT-3 generated.
- nullc 4y ago
  https://archive.org/details/EtherealVerses https://archive.org/details/EtherealVerses
  - ilyt 4y ago
- garyrob 4y ago
  No, it's the real thing. Go to the paper. But somehow, copy-paste added typos which I am going to try and fix.
- pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
  I honestly can’t tell the same about the comment itself either…
- status200 4y ago
  Which part would you like to be elaborated?
tacon 4y ago
aliations -> affiliations hyper-nancialization -> hyper-financialization Maybe more. Did cut and paste do this?
- munificent 4y ago
  Copy-paste probably inadvertently stripped out the non-ASCII "fi" ligature characters.
- garyrob 4y ago
  Hmm. Yeah. Let me look through and try to fix that. Very weird. But thanks for point it out!! [Update: I fixed the ones I could find.]
root_axis 4y ago
I read the paper and I don't see how this solves anything that couldn't already be solved with basic public key cryptography. IMO this is just more self-aggrandizing cryptocurrency snake oil, dressed up in invented technobabble to make it sound sophisticated.
- garyrob 4y ago
  Couldn't disagree more. I'm not going to argue about it here though. I do suggest that anyone interested in the subject read the paper and judge for themselves. (I have zero connection to the Ethereum project other than running a node and having bought some Ether.)
garyrob 4y ago
I see a lot of reflexive negativity here. It reminds me of the kind of negativity I received on my blog when I said that eventually, music streaming would overtake music sales—including in a comment from Steve Jobs himself while Apple was still selling music. It also reminds me of the negativity I received from most people when, in (probably) year 2000, I was talking about the possibility that ads would be distributed to web sites through what I called "hubs" and by targeted by means of activity tracking through cookies, including from a VC who had recently been on the cover of Business 2.0 Magazine and called there the "top-performing U.S. venture capitalist for 1995-1999", who told me, "I don't see much money in that." Trust me, you should take a serious look at this. A lot of what may sound like gobbledegook to you, such as "zero-knowledge proofs", is definitely not gobbledegook and is likely to be very important as time moves on. If you don't have the background to understand what the authors are talking about, it will sound like GPT-3 nonsense. Get the knowledge if you are in the internet industry. [Update: I see that even this is being voted down. Well, I guess the downvoters just have more of a track record and more experience in the industry than me, and more knowledge about blockchain, zero-knowledge proofs, etc., so I should forget all about this stuff. Not. I'm trying to help out here. Don't downvote what you don't understand. If it isn't what you expect to hear, that's when you have a chance to learn something. If you understand it more than Buterin and Weyl do, well, tell us all about it, I'm all ears.]
- root_axis 4y ago
  > it reminds me of the kind of negativity I received on my blog when I said... Cherry picking examples of your past predictions that may have turned out to be correct as a way of defending something in question today is obviously fallacious - hopefully I don't have to explain why that proves absolutely nothing. > Trust me, you should take a serious look at this... get the knowledge if you are in the internet industry. Trust isn't necessary when something is actually useful. Explain how the technology is actually useful rather than demeaning the supposed lack of knowledge in others. > Well, I guess the downvoters just have more of a track record and more experience in the industry than me Sarcastically appealing to your own authority while claiming your critics just don't understand is another bad faith rhetorical tactic that is often used by cryptocurrency enthusiasts. > if you understand it more than Buterin and Weyl do, well, tell us all about it, I'm all ears I read the paper, understood it, and responded with a clear critique to you in a different comment, your response was "Couldn't disagree more. I'm not going to argue about it here though". So what I'm getting from you is "I'm a tech expert, if you disagree you don't understand, I also don't have to prove anything or defend my position, just trust me". Sounds like the typical cryptocurrency grift...

aaronharnly 4y ago

I honestly can’t tell if this abstract is also GPT-3 generated.

nullc 4y ago
https://archive.org/details/EtherealVerses https://archive.org/details/EtherealVerses
- ilyt 4y ago
garyrob 4y ago
No, it's the real thing. Go to the paper. But somehow, copy-paste added typos which I am going to try and fix.
pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
I honestly can’t tell the same about the comment itself either…
status200 4y ago
Which part would you like to be elaborated?

tacon 4y ago

aliations -> affiliations hyper-nancialization -> hyper-financialization Maybe more. Did cut and paste do this?

munificent 4y ago
Copy-paste probably inadvertently stripped out the non-ASCII "fi" ligature characters.
garyrob 4y ago
Hmm. Yeah. Let me look through and try to fix that. Very weird. But thanks for point it out!! [Update: I fixed the ones I could find.]

root_axis 4y ago

I read the paper and I don't see how this solves anything that couldn't already be solved with basic public key cryptography. IMO this is just more self-aggrandizing cryptocurrency snake oil, dressed up in invented technobabble to make it sound sophisticated.

garyrob 4y ago
Couldn't disagree more. I'm not going to argue about it here though. I do suggest that anyone interested in the subject read the paper and judge for themselves. (I have zero connection to the Ethereum project other than running a node and having bought some Ether.)

garyrob 4y ago

I see a lot of reflexive negativity here. It reminds me of the kind of negativity I received on my blog when I said that eventually, music streaming would overtake music sales—including in a comment from Steve Jobs himself while Apple was still selling music. It also reminds me of the negativity I received from most people when, in (probably) year 2000, I was talking about the possibility that ads would be distributed to web sites through what I called "hubs" and by targeted by means of activity tracking through cookies, including from a VC who had recently been on the cover of Business 2.0 Magazine and called there the "top-performing U.S. venture capitalist for 1995-1999", who told me, "I don't see much money in that." Trust me, you should take a serious look at this. A lot of what may sound like gobbledegook to you, such as "zero-knowledge proofs", is definitely not gobbledegook and is likely to be very important as time moves on. If you don't have the background to understand what the authors are talking about, it will sound like GPT-3 nonsense. Get the knowledge if you are in the internet industry. [Update: I see that even this is being voted down. Well, I guess the downvoters just have more of a track record and more experience in the industry than me, and more knowledge about blockchain, zero-knowledge proofs, etc., so I should forget all about this stuff. Not. I'm trying to help out here. Don't downvote what you don't understand. If it isn't what you expect to hear, that's when you have a chance to learn something. If you understand it more than Buterin and Weyl do, well, tell us all about it, I'm all ears.]

root_axis 4y ago
> it reminds me of the kind of negativity I received on my blog when I said... Cherry picking examples of your past predictions that may have turned out to be correct as a way of defending something in question today is obviously fallacious - hopefully I don't have to explain why that proves absolutely nothing. > Trust me, you should take a serious look at this... get the knowledge if you are in the internet industry. Trust isn't necessary when something is actually useful. Explain how the technology is actually useful rather than demeaning the supposed lack of knowledge in others. > Well, I guess the downvoters just have more of a track record and more experience in the industry than me Sarcastically appealing to your own authority while claiming your critics just don't understand is another bad faith rhetorical tactic that is often used by cryptocurrency enthusiasts. > if you understand it more than Buterin and Weyl do, well, tell us all about it, I'm all ears I read the paper, understood it, and responded with a clear critique to you in a different comment, your response was "Couldn't disagree more. I'm not going to argue about it here though". So what I'm getting from you is "I'm a tech expert, if you disagree you don't understand, I also don't have to prove anything or defend my position, just trust me". Sounds like the typical cryptocurrency grift...