Editor's Note: This article comes fromOurea Boundless Community (ID: ourea_community)Editor's Note: This article comes from

Ourea Boundless Community (ID: ourea_community)

, Author: blockpunk, published with permission.

In "The Lord of the Rings", Sauron forged the Supreme Lord of the Rings, which has powerful power and also makes the wearer invisible. But at the same time, Sauron has incorporated evil power into it, and the person who wears the ring will be slowly bewitched and eventually fall into the dark side.

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Plato also told a story of "The Ring of Guges" in "Utopia". This ring that can be invisible made an honest shepherd embark on the path of doing evil, which shows the respect for anonymity. of fear. In today's online society, it seems that everyone has the opportunity to obtain a "Googs Ring". In a generally anonymous online society, the lack of responsibility caused by invisibility seems to indicate the collapse of society. How can we rebuild it? Morality and norms, let the society restore justice and fairness? This article tries to find technical solutions from the perspective of blockchain.

Blockpunk (Boundless Community)

A few days ago, the "Nth Room" incident in South Korea was exposed. Criminal groups established multiple secret groups through the anonymous chat software Telegram to persecute and exploit threatened women (including minors) in heinous ways, and spread illegally captured sexual videos and photos within the groups. Criminal groups are coercing victims step by step by obtaining the privacy of victims on social platforms such as Twitter.

Criminal groups use Bitcoin to collect "membership fees" and share videos through Telegram. At the peak, the number of members exceeded 260,000. What's more frightening is that because criminals have been using anonymous technology to protect themselves, it is difficult for the authorities to supervise. Without the two college students who reported to the police, this disgusting room does not know how long it will exist.

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On March 19, a Weibo user named "Safe_Yunshu" broke the news that Weibo may have leaked the privacy of hundreds of millions of accounts, including data such as mobile phone numbers and historical passwords. The Weibo was deleted shortly afterwards. At the same time, these citizens' privacy is being sold through Telegram and paid for in the form of cryptocurrency.

Out of justice and concern for privacy, my good friend went undercover in an undercover community that sells citizens’ privacy. After writing an article that was exposed, he was met with a frenzied human flesh search in retaliation. The original ID card, mobile phone number, and real name were disseminated. In the chat group of more than 30,000 people, they were also bombarded with text messages and phone calls. Ironically, after being fully exposed, my friend had to keep a low profile for the time being, while the operator of this gray-produced robot was even more aggressive in selling the privacy of citizens.

As a blockchain practitioner, I have always paid great attention to privacy and encryption technology, and Telegram and cryptocurrency have always been the objects of research and study. It should be noted that anonymity and privacy are not equal, and protecting privacy does not necessarily mean protecting anonymity.

First of all, the blockchain is never anonymous. Strictly speaking, it is only a "pseudonym" system, and anonymous technology is only a scheme to protect privacy. Because of its lower implementation cost and simpler architecture, anonymity has attracted widespread attention from developers since the birth of the blockchain, which makes most of the open blockchains now based on anonymity.

The original intention of technology developers is to protect the weak as much as possible and safeguard everyone's rights and dignity under capital exploitation and 1984-style centralized monitoring. The rapid development of privacy technology is precisely because it meets the basic needs of individuals. However, with the screening of technology tendencies by certain groups, the requirements for anonymity are continuously strengthened, and anonymity is used incorrectly. It is slowly reaching its own opposite.

These two recent incidents are the best proof. First of all, the victims used social software that was not anonymous and did not protect their privacy, such as Weibo and Twitter. After their privacy was leaked and their identities were exposed, they were threatened with nude photos and ID cards by people with ulterior motives and tortured the victims. further infringement. On the other hand, people are also opposing network surveillance. Anonymous social software intended to protect privacy, resist surveillance, and strive for greater freedom for users provides protection for criminals and makes it impossible to pursue justice: not only can we The perpetrator cannot be caught (unreachable), and may not even be identified at all (invisible).

And if everyone uses anonymous and peer-to-peer encrypted chat, is the problem solved? This can indeed solve the privacy problem to a large extent, so some cypherpunk groups have been trying to teach the public how to use "encrypted" weapons to protect themselves. But an anonymous and free system without an actual controller can be used to do anything without excluding the possibility of crime. This is precisely the problem that most technical solvers ignore. They naively estimate It highlights the importance of the user's moral level and supervision and accountability.

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Even with the original intention of protecting from the actions of others or promoting activities of positive value, anonymity provides space for actions without consequences, which in turn jeopardizes the freedom of groups.

We provide technology for anonymity but not technology that doesn't even care about accountability at all. Under this imbalance, everyone entered a "dark forest", where the strong wore "encrypted" armor and unscrupulously shot at the weak who had exposed their coordinates and did not know how to protect themselves.

Why do we seek more anonymity out of our desire for privacy?"Here we must first explain the meaning of privacy. In order to facilitate understanding, I quote a sentence from the "Cypherpunk Manifesto" published by the advocates of this type of technology in 1993: "Privacy is something you don't want the whole world to know. Privacy The right is a kind of power of an individual, allowing him to selectively disclose his information to the outside world", which is similar to the legal definition of privacy, and privacy is recognized as a basic personality of natural persons in any society that power.

"If there is no technology that can solve privacy protection, then whether to be anonymous is an ethical issue; if there is technology that can do it, then this is a technical implementation issue.

Cypherpunks are staunch practitioners of technology.

After clearly realizing that privacy will inevitably be put into reproduction by capital as a means of production, or used by authority to control and seize more power, the cypherpunks believe that only relying on the power of the people can protect privacy, and there is no centralized philosopher king. It can be trusted, but at that time it was impossible for identity authentication to run away from a center. Under the limitation of this technology, anonymity was the only choice.

At the same time, they also understand that too much emphasis on concealment will lead to a situation of non-cooperation and non-communication, so they only require to disclose as little necessary information as possible in life and transactions. "When I ask an email service provider to send and receive messages for me, the service provider doesn't need to know who I'm sending messages to, what I'm sending messages about, or who else is talking to me. My service The vendor just needs to know what to do with the information and how much I owe them."

If these systems require identity by default, then individuals lose the right to choose to disclose information, so they conceived only under the framework of default anonymity, and then use cryptography to prove identity and protect data, and individuals only disclose voluntarily information, so as to truly protect privacy.

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In the early days of the blockchain, developers deeply influenced by neoliberalism constantly emphasized the importance of anonymity, selectively ignoring the part about disclosing information and establishing fairness, and taking absolute anonymity as the ultimate goal of technology."。

However, under the mathematical iron law of one-way encryption, reverse supervision is technically unfeasible, which is tantamount to directly challenging the laws of thermodynamics, and it is precisely because of this that encryption is reliable enough. This physical irreversibility has led to a serious lag in regulatory technology, where external authority has failed, and the imbalance between the two forces has finally led to the embarrassing situation of "protecting criminals anonymously".

Not only from a technical point of view, but also from familiarity to unfamiliarity, from strangeness to anonymity, this is indeed a basic trend in the historical evolution of human society. In modern times, we no longer drive out the strange, but use it as an experience, making "inner homelessness our home"

And anonymity is an inevitable stage in the development of strangeness. It makes people's relationships invisible and unreachable, and it also makes the existence of authority and norms invalid. But while gaining power and freedom by breaking old rules, people are emphasizing rights more and downplaying responsibilities. While polarized emotions create group unconsciousness, an "anonymous jungle" without authority and rules no longer has laws and morals, and the evil of human nature is magnified to the greatest extent.

In the society of acquaintances, everyone lives together, and people are visible (identification of responsibility) and accessible (acquisition of responsibility), which makes responsibility normative and binding, so this small society does not need authority and responsibility. The system can often operate in a self-consistent manner, but due to the closeness of interpersonal relationships, such a society is bound to be unfair. And as the scope of collaboration grows larger and the distance between people begins to widen, we gradually form a society of strangers who are visible but inaccessible. At this time, we can only rely on an external authority and norms to ensure accountability. The anonymous society further weakens the accessibility of people and destroys visibility, and the binding and normative force of responsibility disappears. How to maintain social fairness and justice at this time?

This heralds two possibilities: one is the disintegration of society, and when we can neither hold others accountable nor need to be accountable to others, society comes to an end; As blockchain practitioners standing at the forefront of "network society technology", we must accept technical ethics considerations and come up with solutions.

05

I still insist on solving the problem from the technical side, but because the encryption algorithm is irreversible, the efforts of external authorities will all be invalid, so the solution needs to be embedded in the blockchain network itself.

The blockchain makes decentralized identity authentication possible. Can we build an identity system as much as possible on the basis of an anonymous network, and then re-establish ethics and rules around identity? Or, by binding interests, we realize the identification of responsibilities with democracy, and the pursuit of responsibilities with codes. Can such blockchain governance help establish social order?

In 1984, March and Olsen published "New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life" and pointed out that the driving force of institutional change comes from the subject of institutional change, that is, the calculation of "cost/benefit" by "economic man". The formation of the blockchain encryption society is a bottom-up institutional change driven by interests, with a strong inducing effect.

The blockchain is first based on a basic protocol framework similar to a "social contract", taking Bitcoin as an example: "There is no center that owns and controls the network, and anyone has the right to record transfers, but in order to maintain unity, a period of time is specified Among them, only the computer that first solves the specified value is recognized as having the power of bookkeeping, and this computer is rewarded with bitcoins." Since it is impossible to selectively discriminate against participants based on identity, the structurally neutral technology enables the blockchain to Turning the trust problem between strangers into a mathematical problem of comparing calculation results, Bitcoin, a nearly anonymous network, can produce fair and close cooperation."If more computers are added to the calculation, the network will be more secure, the resources in the network will be more expensive, and the only bitcoin that can be used to call resources will be more valuable. Based on the calculation of "cost/benefit", this basic system allows network maintenance individuals to bind interests with the network collective. Therefore, even as an inaccessible and invisible anonymous person, even if there are no norms and authority to restrain him, he will perform responsible behaviors for the network society as a whole.

Different from the negative neutral requirement of liberalism "you have no right to interfere with me", the blockchain allows anonymous people to make a positive requirement of "I should be responsible for the collective (actually responsible for myself)" to myself. In this near-anonymous network, "I" only has access to "myself"

It is accessible, so the system must put forward high requirements on the moral level of the participants, or the degree of rationality (for profit). Most blockchains are established by default on the premise that the number of honest nodes is greater than 51%.

06

However, this mechanism still needs a foundation other than technology. It relies on a free market that can trade tokens, so that an anonymous user can spontaneously maintain the system and group interests through "cost/benefit" calculations. Such a design can indeed prevent "crime" within the system, but due to the external foundation of the free market, if capital outside the system has the ability to obtain low-cost computing power, it will still lead to the collapse of the encrypted network society. In fact, undervalued encrypted networks have been attacked by 51% many times in history.

There are still more serious flaws in this way of establishing order: first, it only requires the "miners" of the encrypted society to take collective responsibility, while developers and users can still do evil irresponsibly; second, for those that have occurred Fraud and crime, there is no recovery of damages or accountability.

In terms of the governance of the anonymous society, we have seen more technical attempts on Polkadot, EOS, DFINITY and other networks. Through "electronic taxation" and UBI (Basic Welfare for All), users and developers are bound to the collective rights and interests of the network society, the recognition of responsibility is realized through democratic voting, and the accountability of responsibility is realized through code enforcement, thereby establishing order , a process known as “on-chain governance.”

The legitimacy of "on-chain governance" is very similar to the social contract theory. The technical structure of the blockchain cannot discriminate against participants based on identity, allowing anyone to participate in governance without access. This can be regarded as a neutral "veil of ignorance". Blockchain governance relies on this "technology neutral Sex" gained legitimacy.

How to be visible and accessible? For example, there are evil products such as "Room N" in a certain network society, and if such products continue to exist, they will attract the attention of regulators and be suppressed, which will cause the collective interests of the entire network to be damaged. Therefore, it is best The best way is to kick the product out of the network society through democratic voting, permanently destroy all its assets, and require participants (although in a quasi-anonymous network, they can operate on addresses) to discount future transactions, as a fine.

But in fact, there are still problems with on-chain governance. Although the code replaces external authority and touches the criminal, the determination of criminal behavior needs to be produced through democracy. Firstly this is not a good idea and secondly what is the democratic voting process based on? Don't forget that we are still in a semi-anonymous network society. Because identity cannot be authenticated, a natural person can manipulate multiple addresses, so "one person, one vote" is not feasible. But in order for democracy to effectively maintain the interests of the network, it can only be forced to empower tokens and implement "one coin, one vote".

The problem is obvious. In order to maintain the "individual autonomy" generated by the binding of interests, tokens must have the support of a free market, which means that capital can grab power by acquiring the most tokens. In this society where the system comes from the market, capital can get rid of all shackles, has the ability to quantify and devour everything, and has become the only privileged class.

Even if we don't blame capital, the governance rights in the blockchain are inherently unfairly distributed, because the power is always determined in advance by early developers, such as only allowing "on-chain governance" to modify parameters, but not allowing it to modify the organizational structure , such as assigning yourself a large number of tokens in advance, etc. Considering the incomplete possibility of the contract, on-chain governance is limited to a fixed structure. This inequality is derived from the structural characteristics of technology, so the "equal original status" cannot be truly realized, and the privileged class may be directly written into in the underlying code.

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This sounds like a neoliberal dystopia, and it's not hard to find a society where digital laborers toil between DAOs and open protocols, rentiers keep getting rich, and most people live on UBI .

Under the influence of radical technology, developers generally regard the above problem as a design problem, and some people continue to try to optimize the process of governance and democracy, through designs such as secondary voting, gradient voting, mobile democracy, and policy prediction markets. Various ideologies are organically integrated to achieve more efficient and fair governance.

In addition to trying to generate order with the help of the market, there is also a technical attempt to re-establish identity in a decentralized anonymous network, and then establish new ethics and norms around identity.

Although due to the protection of encryption and hash operations, we still cannot link the address with the real person, it still appears as a pseudonym, but based on the consensus and non-tamperable characteristics of the blockchain, we can prove the validity of the relevant data behind the pseudonym Sex and authenticity, and accumulating data (or credit) on top of a pseudonym, ultimately resulting in a true identity model.

The more data an identity accumulates, the more authentic its identity model will be, and thus it can enjoy more power than those "anonymous identities" who have no data accumulation in the encrypted network society. These powers are expressed as the right to use more services. These services can require users to show different data certificates according to the situation. Users need to selectively disclose information in order to enjoy the rights. If the use of high-risk services requires sufficient proof, it will effectively block the income channels of criminals like "Room N", or make him easier to track.

Using technologies such as zero-knowledge proof and multi-party secure computing, it is possible to produce relevant proofs without leaking specific information, which also ensures privacy. Such a decentralized identification technology was a serious missing link in the pre-Internet era when cypherpunks were active. Therefore, at that time, it seemed that the only way to protect privacy was anonymous technology.

Decentralized identity can also be used to accumulate reputation, which allows the system not to be based on tokens, but to conduct fairer, closer to "one person, one vote" on-chain governance voting by weighting reputation. This system allows individuals in the encrypted society to be visible again in the effective field of vision, eliminates anonymity, and makes social reconstruction possible.