alt Hacker NewsI hope I'm wrong but I don't think a privacy friendly alternative is going to exist. It's going to go the way of show me your drivers license to use my site.
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Invite trees approximately solve this problem. I don't need to know who you are to know that someone in good standing in the community invited you.
I feel like we need a distributed system/protocol that allows people to have pseudonyms not linked to their real identity, but with a shared reputation/trust score, so if you’re a bad actor using a pseudonym your real identity and all your other sock puppets are penalized too.
I know very little about this but sense that some combination of buzzwords like homomorphic encryption, zk-snarks, and yes, blockchains could be useful.
Of course this would present problems if any of your identities were ever compromised and your reputation destroyed.
No credential will be sufficient, this is basically an unsolvable enforcement problem. That doesn't obviate the utility of rules and norms, but there's no airtight system which will hold back AI generated content.
Problem is, if a token is anonymous, then it follows that it can be bought and sold. Which breaks the original use case of the token, right?
That is exactly what will happen. The sad thing is, it needs to happen. I've found myself advocating for this lately, when 10 years ago, I wouldn't have even considered taking that position.
If Web3-like session-signing had taken off enough to become OS or even browser-native, we would have had a fighting chance of remaining mostly anonymous. But that just didn't happen, and isn't going to happen. Mostly because fraud ruined Web3.
Why wouldn't criminals like they do now just use stolen identities? If someone verifies they are a person that doesn't mean they're not leaving their PC on with some AI that uses their credentials either.