Blockchain was built by anons. More than a decade after the infamous “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” genesis block was added to the Bitcoin chain, we still don’t know who Satoshi was, where Satoshi was from, or if Satoshi was even an individual or a group of multiple people. In addition to this are the theories that suggest Satoshi was an alien, a time traveller or a prophet. Basically, the status of Satoshi is that of an entity, not a person. Today the crypto community, both web3 and Bitcoiners, have seemingly come to the conclusion that in order for mass adoption to take place, we must create a system that transposes the identity assigned to people by governments and hospitals at the time of birth to the blockchain, to be used as a foundational identity within the internet/metaverse, in the same manner that driver’s licenses and passports are used in meatspace. In my view, there are structural, social and practical considerations that make doing this not the best idea. The internet (not blockchain in particular) rapidly scaled the shift in thinking from being exclusively in terms of people to being in terms of entities. Blockchain projects, rather than attempting to re-introduce person-based thinking, should embrace entities as the lowest primitive of a thinking thing. Eventually humans will not prove their humanity on-chain; entities will prove their humanity in reality.
Person based thinking
When we interact with each other in the real world, we intuitively understand that each person we talk to is in fact a single consciousness inhabiting a single brain. A small number of humans have multiple personality disorder, and so may appear to be multiple people, but even in this extremely rare case we understand from a medical perspective that these personalities are still the manifestations of a single conscious mind. Because this state of mind is natural we have become quite comfortable with it. So comfortable that organizations in the real world, prior to internet based communications, made heavy use of spokespeople to orate on their behalf. In politics, advertising, business negotiation, etc, having recognizable faces, who are perceived as being free thinking people (although they may or may not be), adds a humanizing touch to the nature of the interaction. People would rather have Shaq tell them to buy Old Spice deodorant than the faceless Proctor and Gamble inc. This system worked fine until the majority of communications moved to the internet, after which everything was upended.
Entity based thinking
Twitter is not the first social media but it is the most important. There is obvious evidence in the Twitter user flow that suggests the intention was to move personhood into the online space. Namely, the requirement of birthdays and phone numbers in order to create new accounts. However, while many, including myself, link one of my twitter accounts to my real world identity, many choose not to. Everyday a Twitter user will interact with not only accounts that claim to be real people, but accounts run by groups, companies and brands, gimmick accounts, troll/shitpost accounts, accounts using deepfake imagery, etc. Many personthinkers would like to see this reality dismantled, because they are fearful of a world where they must reimagine the ways in which they conduct interactions. Take Australia for example, where in 2021 legislation was proposed to ban online anonymity. Entity based thinking, despite the previous generations wanting it dismantled to maintain their own control, will not go away. Social media, although it has allowed entities to assert dominance over humans, does not contain enough censorship resistance to be viable long term.
Web3
Many sing the praises of web3. NFTs in particular are seen as a way to truly an enable an online world that people will actually want to inhabit, where value accrues to those who truly deserve it. But tied to this vision is once again the apparent need to attach human identity to interactions onchain. Transferring humanness to an on-chain environment has proven to be one of the most difficult tasks undertaken by blockchain engineers so far. Additionally, the one brain, one consciousness model that is used in meatspace hinders much of the creative potential that web3 is handing us. The lowest primitive in any blockchain environment is the private key. Private keys are generated from entropy inside of a computer, and used to then derive addresses and public keys (see my project AddressPy to see how to do this in python). Humanity is to be assigned to one of these addresses in most onchain identity schemes. If by either government oppression or community consensus, we decided to enforce some form of proof of humanity for every wallet, then all people are immediately prevented from getting the operational, security, and logistical benefits of having multiple private keys for different use cases. The drawbacks to creating “person” gated systems in web3, a network of networks designed specifically not do to this, feels like the wrong approach.
A view of the metaverse
Every day on twitter I interact with an ocean of different entities. I also operate five twitter accounts of my own, unrelated to one another with different aims. In an online interaction, I am not interested in the person or people behind the screen but the entity itself. We are forced to take what is presented at face value, rather than investigate the “true” identity of the poster. True identity is irrelevant on the internet. When interacting with a wassie, I am interacting with the wassie, not the person adopting that character as their persona. This attitude is necessary because switching between accounts is akin to switching personalities; that particular wassie may control multiple accounts, each themed differently, the goals of each impacting the ‘real’ person’s thinking and identity at that moment. Bring blockchain into this equation and now there is a true primitive underlying the ‘account’. Living onchain means daily interactions with DAOs, MEV bots, NFT floor undercutting bots, real people, groups of people who aren’t DAOs, businesses etc. But ultimately all these actors are represented in the same fundamental namespace. One view of a potential ‘Metaverse’ is a digital world in which AI models, groups, individuals and DAOs are seen as completely equal.
Conclusion
As I have argued in the past, I think the desire to replicate the real world inside the digital is both naive and lazy. There are infinite possibilities unlocked by the ever rising computational power computers posses as well as the novel coordination mechanisms that blockchain gives us. We must harness these technologies in order to transcend the shackles of corporeal life and move into a world where the concept of human dissolves into a wider, more abstract whole. Deniers are afraid of trolls, spam, phishing and hacks. These are real dangers, which in some ways can be mitigated, but likely never fully eliminated. A sense of alarm and outrage is easiest to cultivate when a system or environment is poorly understood. Therefore we assign, in my opinion, undue weight to the severity of these threats. Physical humans, due to their existence as beings, are also subject to a range of dangers every day. Muggings, random violence, accidents, etc. But despite this humans have found a way to get comfortable with these dangers. The same will one day apply to digital dangers. What does this mean for meatspace? In a world where the digital outweighs the physical, proof-of-humanity reverses. People will not prove their humanity on-chain, but prove their entityness off-chain.