It's becoming increasingly clear to me that issues of identity are the main ground of disagreement between many in the crypto community and @RadxChange.
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First of all, by identity, I mean attempts to identify properties of the physical human being that controls a particular cryptographic key. A particular use case is the "unique human" problem, constructing a set of cryptographic keys that are each owned by a different person.
The usual cypherpunk view is: identity can be coopted by govts to oppress, coopted by corps to discriminate by nationality, violates privacy and is generally bad juju. When an ability to punish is required, we should instead use security deposits that get burned if you misbehave.
The usual RadX view is: in a money-only system, 1 person with $1000 has much more power than 1000 people with $1 each because 1000 people have difficulty coordinating with each other. A fair system must compensate for this by somehow distinguishing the two cases, hence identity.
The main difference in worldviews is arguably survive vs thrive slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-t…: cypherpunks assume a much more adversarial worldview, fearing harm from both cops and robbers, RadX assumes more collaborativeness...
... but a truly synthetic perspective should be able to work well in both worlds.
Cypherpunks need to realize that in order to thrive they ultimately will need to solve public governance challenges in decentralized communities, and coin voting is just plain terrible. vitalik.ca/general/2017/1… vitalik.ca/general/2018/0…
RadX needs to deeply understand that (i) attempts to measure "identity" or "sociality" will inevitably be attacked by powerful actors, and (ii) privacy is crucial to prevent all human life from becoming a battleground for public favor and official approval, and privacy is *hard*.
There *are* now teams working on solving identity issues with privacy and robustness challenges in mind, and I highly welcome this development. I hope to see the space as well explored in the next 5 years as proof of stake and sharding have been in the last 5.
Special thanks to @VladZamfir for helping me realize the centrality of the issue
