Original title: "
Original title: "Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul》
Foreword:Unitimes
Foreword:
Glen Weyl is a research fellow at Microsoft's Office of the CTO and co-author of Radical Markets. This article is adapted from "The Decentralized Society: Finding the Soul of Web3," a paper co-authored by Glen Weyl with Puja Ahluwalia Ohlhaver, strategist at Flashbots, and Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum.
Web3 shocked the world by building a parallel financial system of unprecedented flexibility and creativity in less than a decade. Cryptography and economic primitives, that is, building blocks, such as public key cryptography, smart contracts, proof of work (PoW) and proof of stake (PoS), have formed a complex and open financial transaction ecosystem.
However, the economic value on which financial transactions depend is generated by people and their relationships. Since Web3 lacks primitives to represent such social identities, Web3 already relies fundamentally on the very centralized Web2 structure it seeks to outperform, thus replicating the limitations of Web2.
For example, the lack of Web3-native identity and reputation forces NFT artists to often rely on centralized platforms such as OpenSea and Twitter to promise scarcity and initial provenance, and prevents partially collateralized forms of lending. DAOs (Distributed Autonomous Organizations) that try to go beyond simple Token voting usually rely on Web2 infrastructure (such as social media accounts) to resist Sybil attacks (ie one or a few entities pretending to be many entities). Many Web3 players rely on custodial wallets managed by centralized institutions such as Coinbase. Decentralized key management systems are not user friendly for all but the most sophisticated.
In our paper, we will show that even small and incremental steps towards using Web3 primitives to represent social identities can resolve these issues and bring the ecosystem closer to regenerative markets and their role in native Web3 environments. The basis of human relations.
More promisingly, our emphasis on Web3-native social identities with rich social composability can make huge strides in Web3 around broader long-term issues around wealth concentration and governance vulnerability to financial attacks, while spurring innovation A Cambrian explosion of political, economic and social applications. We refer to these use cases and the richer, diverse ecosystem they support as the Decentralized Society (DeSoc).
Soulbound Token (Soulbound Token)
Our key primitive is the account (wallet), which holds publicly visible, non-transferable (but potentially revokable by the issuer) tokens. We chose this set of properties not because they are obviously the most desirable set of features, but because they are easy to implement in the current environment and allow important functionality to be achieved.
We call this kind of account "Soul" and the Token held by the account as "Soulbound Token" (SBT for short). Although we are very interested in privacy, we initially assumed that these tokens would be publicly viewable, as it was technically easier to do a proof of concept as a proof of concept, even if constrained by the subset of tokens users are willing to share publicly. Programmable privacy STBs are the next step we discuss below.
Imagine a world where most participants have "souls" (i.e. accounts) that store SBT (soul-bound tokens) corresponding to a series of affiliations, memberships, and credentials. For example, a "soul" (account) owned by a person may store SBT (soul-bound tokens) representing educational credentials, companies he has worked for, hashes of works of art or books he has written. The simplest form of these SBTs is the ability to "self-certify", just like we share information about ourselves on resumes. But the true power of this mechanism is revealed when SBTs held by one "soul" (account) can be issued by other "souls" who are counterparties to these relationships. These adversary "souls" may be individuals, companies or institutions.
For example, a university could be a "soul" that issues SBTs to graduates. A stadium can also be a "soul," handing out SBTs to diehard Dodgers baseball fans.
Note that "soul" does not need to be associated with a legal name, nor does it require any protocol-level attempts to ensure "one soul per person". A "soul" can be a persistent pseudonym holding some SBT that cannot be easily linked. Nor do we assume that "souls" are not transferable between humans. Instead, we try to illustrate how, where needed, these properties can emerge naturally from the design itself.
"Soul" Borrowing
Perhaps the greatest financial value built directly on reputation is credit and unsecured loans.
Currently, the Web3 ecosystem cannot even replicate the most primitive form of unsecured lending, since all assets are transferable and sellable - and thus only serve as a form of collateral. The traditional financial ecosystem supports many forms of unsecured lending, but these loans are often moderated by centralized credit scoring mechanisms—the rationale for this is that less creditworthy borrowers have little incentive to share information about their creditworthiness. information.
But such a credit score has many flaws. At their best, they opaquely add and subtract factors related to reputation and create a bias against those (mainly minorities and the poor) who have not accumulated enough data. At worst, they could spawn a Black Mirror-style opaque "social credit" system that drives social outcomes and exacerbates discrimination.
The SBT (Soul Binding Token) ecosystem can open a censorship-resistant, bottom-up alternative to the top-down business and "social" credit system. SBTs representing educational credentials, previous employment history, and lease contracts can serve as long-term credit-related records, enabling "souls" (accounts) to obtain loans with meaningful reputations, thereby avoiding collateral requirements. Loans and lines of credit can be represented as non-transferable but revocable SBT, such that the loan line can be embedded in the SBT of a certain "soul" (account) - as a kind of (non-forfeitable) reputation collateral - until They are repaid, and subsequently destroyed (or, better yet, replaced with "proofs of repayment" to add to the "soul's" credit history). Like a note on your credit history.
SBTs provide useful security properties: the property of non-transferability prevents the transfer or hiding of outstanding loans, while the rich ecosystem of SBTs ensures that borrowers who try to avoid loans (perhaps by creating a new "soul") will have no SBTs to meaningfully stake their reputation.
The ease of using SBT to calculate public debt will lead to an open-source lending market. New correlations between SBT and repayment risk will emerge, resulting in better lending algorithms to predict credit reliability, thereby reducing the role of centralized, opaque credit scoring infrastructure. Even better, lending may take place in social relationships, giving rise to new forms of community lending.
In particular, SBT could provide the basis for practices similar to "group lending" pioneered by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank, where members of a social network agree to underpin each other's debts. Because the SBT of a "soul" represents membership in a social group, participants can easily discover other "souls" who may be valuable co-participants in group lending programs. Commercial loans are a "borrow and forget" repayment model, while community loans may adopt a "borrow and help" approach, combining working capital and human capital to obtain a higher rate of return.
Don't lose your "soul"
The non-transferable nature of SBTs — such as educational certificates, which are issued one-time — raises an important question: how do you not lose your “soul”? Today's recovery methods, such as multi-signature recovery or seed phrases, have different trade-offs in terms of mental load, ease of processing, and security. Social recovery is an emerging option that relies on a person's relationship of trust. SBT allows for a similar, but broader paradigm: community recovery, where the "soul" is the cross-voting of its social network.
Social recovery is a good starting point for security, but has some drawbacks in terms of security and usability. Users manage a group of "guardians" and give them (based on a supermajority basis) the power to change wallet keys. These guardians can be individuals, institutions, or a mix of other wallets. The problem is that users must strike a balance between wanting to have a sizable number of Guardians and preventing Guardians from scattered social circles to avoid collusion. Additionally, guardians may die, relationships deteriorate or people simply lose touch, requiring frequent and laborious updating of guardians. While social recovery avoids a single point of failure, successful social recovery depends on curating and maintaining trusting relationships with a majority of guardians.
A more powerful solution would be to tie the restoration of the "soul" (account) to its membership in the community it resides in, not to curate guardians, but to leverage the maximum breadth of real-time relationships for security. Recall that SBTs represent membership in different communities, some of which — such as employers, clubs, universities, or churches — may be more off-chain in nature, while others — such as participating in protocol governance or DAOs — — may belong more to the on-chain community. In the community recovery model, recovery of a "soul"'s private key requires the consent of a qualified majority (random subset) of members of the "soul"'s community. As with social recovery, we assume that individuals have access to secure, off-chain communication channels wider than the blockchain itself, where "authentication" (through dialogue and shared secrets) can take place. We can generally think of this SBT Tokenized relationship as a way of obtaining these communication channels.
Source: Decentralized Society: Finding the Soul of Web 3 by Glen Weyl, Puja Ahluwalia Ohlhaver, and Vitalik Buterin.
Maintaining and restoring cryptographic ownership of a "soul" (account) requires the consent of the community network in which that soul resides. By embedding security in social, community recovery can prevent "souls" from being stolen (or sold). A "soul" can always regenerate its keys through community recovery. Therefore, any attempt to sell a "soul" would lack credibility, as the seller would also need to prove that it has sold a relationship that can be used for restoration.
Programmable Privacy
Most valuable data is not necessarily individual, but interpersonal (e.g., social graphs), or only valuable when aggregated in larger groups (e.g., health data). Advocates of “self-sovereign identity,” however, tend to view data as private property: the data about this interaction is mine, so I should be able to choose when to disclose it to whom. But in terms of simple private property, the data economy is poorly understood. Even in simple two-way relationships, such as extramarital affairs, the right to disclose information is usually symmetrical and often requires permission and consent from both parties. The Cambridge Analytica scandal was largely about the company leaking people's social graph attributes and information about their friends without their consent.
Rather than viewing privacy as a transferable property right, a more promising approach is to view privacy as a programmable, loosely coupled set of rights that allow access to, change, or profit from information. Each SBT—whether the SBT represents an affiliation, a membership, a certificate, or access to a device—also has an implicit programmable property that specifies access to the underlying information that makes up the SBT Rights: including holders, agreements between them, shared property or assets and obligations to third parties, etc. Some SBT issuers and communities will choose to make SBTs fully public, like SBTs that display information in public bios. Some SBTs will be private in the atomic sense of verifiable credentials. Most SBTs will fall somewhere in between, making some information public, keeping some private, while sharing some information to a designated subset.
SBT makes privacy a programmable, composable property right that can be mapped to the complex set of expectations and agreements we have today. Even better, SBT also helps us imagine new configurations, since there are countless ways that privacy (as a property right over access to information) can be combined into a nuanced cluster of access rights.
For example, SBT allows holders to run computations on data storage that may be owned and managed by a group of "souls" using specific privacy-preserving techniques. Some SBTs may even grant access to data in a way that can be computed across data stores, but the content can only be verified with the authority of a third party. This may be useful for instantiating and representing SBTs of "serial voting" mechanisms, where the voting mechanism needs to count votes from each "soul", but the votes should not be traceable to anyone, to prevent vote-buying .
SBT can manage a healthier form of "attention economy", enabling "souls" to filter spam from outside their social graph, while promoting communication from real communities. This would be a huge improvement over today's communication platforms, which lack user control or governance and auction off user attention to the highest ad bidder, or even a bot. Audiences can be more aware of whom they are listening to and better able to give credit to works that inspire insight.
Such an economic model optimizes positive-sum collaboration and valuable contributions.
Einstein told the Disarmament Conference in 1932 that "man's organizational capacity" had failed to keep pace with "technological progress" which "put the razor in the hands of a 3-year-old". In a world where his observations seem more prescient than ever, learning how to plan for a future built on (rather than displacing) trust seems a must for human survival on this Odaily.
