Episode 52: W3ID #4: Philip, Aaron, David, Enrico | Govrn, Bright ID, Polygon ID, Snapshot, Orange Protocol - Creating More Efficient Governance Frameworks
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Check out Otter Space at Otter Space underscore xyz on Twitter or@oterspace.xyz. Hello, and welcome back to Crypto Sapiens. Today's episode is a bit different than others you may have grown familiar with. It is one of a four part miniseries that explores web3. W three i d is a series co-hosted by crypto sapiens and many of the top web3 builders and seeks to demystify digital identity and present to you our dear listeners, with many of the novel applications that are being developed today.
I truly hope you enjoy this content and find it useful in your crypto journey. So without further ado, let's get started. I'm really excited to have so many amazing people up here on the stage. I think we kind of briefly went through some introductions there. Philip, Aaron David, Nathan. so I think if you wanted to maybe just a, a very brief intro, like 30 seconds or a minute if you wanted to talk about some of the stuff you're doing.
So the audience who's listening kind of gets a bit, bit of. reference point to how the work that you're doing may influence some of the discussion that we're having, which today is around DAO governance and really looking to see how identity and reputation could potentially play into that. so I have Philip right next to me.
So Philip, would you mind giving a brief intro to yourself? yeah. So I'm Phillip. I work a lot on the Bright ID project. saw this need to figure. Decentralized digital identity a long time ago. also deeply involved in a whole lot of DAOs and just really eager to, to get this figured in.
Wonderful. Thank you Philip. And definitely I think anybody who's been in the space for any amount of time would definitely recognize you and bright Id because I think it's just one of those projects that's been incredibly valuable. In the research and implementation of identity solutions and check out the, the, the social graph.
I think the bright ID graph is actually probably one of the coolest ones out there. So if you haven't had a chance to look at that, please do. Aaron, same. Would you mind giving a brief introduction to yourself and what you do in this space? Yeah, for sure. my name is Aaron Soskin. I'm founder of projects called Govern and we're essentially building tools to empower DAO contributors and constituents.
our firm right now makes it really easy for DAO contributors to track and record their DAO contributions so that they can own them and more easily be rewarded and compensated by the DAOs. you can think about it like a contribution graph that we're creating, like a contribution. For you to see where you're contributing to all these things.
so what we're working on and would echo what what you said. Also, while we're, while we're pumping up Philip Philip has been the bright ID team that has been killing it and talking about identity before it was cool. there's a time Philip and I were talking every week and, and I miss those times.
So it's good to see you, Philip. Nice. You too buddy. Ah, that's beautiful. I love that. Well, bringing everybody back together again. That's, that's amazing. and thank you for sharing that. I personally, I have to be honest, I need to explore the govern ecosystem a little bit more. Obviously I about it, I've been following it on Twitter for some time.
but certainly what you just mentioned there, I think really Kind of lit a bold bit, like the whole contribution graph. I'd really need to explore that because I think that that is especially as we talk about DAOs, is certainly a a big point of reference for our digital identities. So thank you for that.
David, do you wanna introduce Orange briefly and, you know kind of the, some of the work that's being done there as well as, Yeah. So I'm David, I'm in charge of basically marketing for Orange. So, you know, if you see Orange Twitter, that's, that's probably me crafting those. But yeah, so, you know, Orange, essentially it's we're, we aim to be like essentially a reputation infrastructure for web.
so, you know, we help essentially DAOs NFT communities any type of project integrate reputation systems into their events. for example, moving beyond token weighted voting to reputation weighted voting reputation based airdrops. just any number of things that you know, can help, you know, push the notion of reputation forward in web3 and make it more meaningful and and have more utility.
So that's essentially what Orange does. And, you know, we're glad to work with people like Snapshot and you know, and a lot of other good, great projects. So, yeah, I guess that's the. Summary there. I don't know Humpy, if you had anything to add to that. but yeah, gr great to be here and really look forward to this discussion.
Uh anything around ID is definitely AP applicable and have interest to, to what we do with reputation as it is kind of the foundation of reputation. No, I think that's fine. we can definitely build from that throughout the conversation. and you did mention Snapshot. Great to see Nathan up here.
I really am excited to hear some of the things that they're thinking about being, you know, I would say one of the predominant governance platforms for web3. How you doing, Nathan? yeah. All good. So yeah, for people who don't know snapshot, it's kind of like a hybrid on chain, off chain voting for where you signed a message, but you don't have, actually have to make a transaction.
And Canada stuff we're thinking about is bringing governance, like bringing snapshot on chain. and to do so, we're gonna use L twos and more precisely Stock net. that project is called Snapshot. And yet the idea is to have really like self sovereign governance where only governance itself can kinda modify the parameters of whatever your community's rules are.
so yeah, I think that's one of the big focus. And the other focus is just accessibility, accessibility, accessibility. Always making sure that as many people as possible can participate in their governance. To make it kind of as fun as possible to access that government just to kinda encourage people to companies like identity and reputation matter a lot to us because if you feel like you personally belong and have a, an importance in a community, you're more likely to convert, to share ideas and to really kind of push the do.
So definitely with partners like Orange, but lots of other partners as well. We're thinking about like how best to integrate all these cool ideas into a voting system. Amazing. Amazing. And we do have two new, I guess panelists today who just recently joined the Crypto Sapiens web3 Identity Channel where we coordinate with these type of discussions and Ricoh.
I recently actually chatted with you to kind learn a little bit about what's going on over at IEM three and Polygon id. How are you doing, man? give an introduction to yourself and you know, some of the work that you're doing at those project. Yeah. H I'm Tia. Hi everyone. yes. So basically I'm mostly a browser, but I'm also a developer as Polygon idea, which is the underlying protocol on which Polygon idea is.
And we are basically building the centralized identity, the centralized private identity, actually. Cause we work a lot with serial knowledge proof. But, and yet Polygon idea is mostly a suite of tools to make the interaction with em free easier because actually right now it's a pretty, for our core CK developers to interact with, with item.
But we are trying to make it easy, everyone to create identities and manage the verification, the issues, everything like that. And yeah, I think like we are kind of. Close to the DAO system because currently we're working with the Polygon DAO with our first let's say the, the first release of Polygon, like.
Permiss for everyone to join to at to. So yeah, I think this is like something really powerful that can be used to many manys basically. So, and yeah, I'm really. Excited to discuss with you guys. Yeah. Thank you so much for, for jumping up here and joining us. And then lastly, Chris b just recently joined us as well.
I'd love to learn kind of some of the stuff you had done in the past and definitely, hopefully that can allow us to frame some of these questions for you as well. Cool. Hello everyone. I'm Chris. I found so thanks for inviting me up. I was actually planning on lurking today, but happy. You know, share what I can share if, if it's valuable.
But I founded a company actually as a back in 17 called Life id. We were attempting to take web3 Tech and solve web two identity problems. that particular project, I worked on it for about three years. yeah, so that, like, that's my background. I still care a lot about privacy and identity and I've learned so much about this space.
I'm not currently working on an ID identity product per se, but I care a lot about, you know, how we develop the tooling around preserving our privacy and making sure we don't reenable the same surveillance capital pro capital problems we had with web two. So, yeah, I just just wanna. Contribute to pushing forward on, on great ideas.
so that's my background. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for giving that background. So I guess let's just get started on the conversation. Today's, today's conversation really revolves around DAOn governance and, and really exploring that from the lens of identity, you know, self sovereign identity, reputation, and how those you know, different elements of web3.
Could potentially unlock a new way of governing DAOs and maybe just opening up new opportunities generally for contributors. so since we have Nathan up here on the stage, I would, I was, I would be curious if you wouldn't mind kicking us off with just maybe a very. Brief runDAOn to governance today and kind of how, you know, the, that governance works.
And then maybe we can kind of expand from there afterwards to kind of maybe the potential challenges or opportunities that come from those the way that we govern DAOs today. And maybe you can frame that around how snapshot looks at governance just generally. yeah, I think like a metaphor, I like to.
Not even a metaphor, really just kind of a key of understanding I like to use is those are good in the middle and humans around it and what that DAOs are all about code. I think those are even more about humans than any other type of organization. But the code in is what can it dictates the rules of the game and if the game is quite clear.
Everyone in the game knows what the rules are, how you gain points, and and, and there's no, you know, hole in the rule that makes it so that if you act in a devious way, you gain more points. Well, you've got a really good system for human coordination. So, on a very like basic level, DAO governance is about finding a really good.
Of doing human coordination that enables humans to kinda work together for a goal and not have to kinda have like alter a motives or think about what others might. , you know, used to cheat or you know, get, get an unfair advantage. So a really well-built DAO wins when the community wins. And a really, and, you know, and vice versa.
A a really, a community wins when the DAO wins. And then you get like bigger DAOs, you get maybe bigger rewards for people participating, that kind of thing. So if you think about like the most basic example of do go. It's kinda how Bitcoin works. So this is like extreme governance minimization. There's almost no discussion, but the rules of the DAO are quite clear.
So all the actors know what to do, how to react to each other, and if they all play the game correctly while they all get, if they all gain something from it and there's no real way of kind of, you know, destroying someone else, just, you know, to get more points so that. Human organizations clear set of rules, and these words, you can enforce them in many different ways.
Often they're kind of enforced in a, you know, in a way that leverages some of the products that we've heard about already. You know, for example, you might want to know. All the people in your DAOs are, are humans. That might why I meant to play the game. So you're gonna use something like Bright Idea to get a better sense of who's an actual human and who's trying to build this game.
Or you're gonna use something like Orange Political to get a better idea of what the different players in the game have been up to in the past. And you are gonna take some of these, you know, some of these results, and you're gonna decide that this is how people in your DAO vote. And this could be about tokens, this could be about NFTs, could be about one person, one vote.
All of these are, are quite possible. So you're gonna use something like snapshots to transform these characteristics into voting power. And then finally, you're gonna have some level of execution. and either it's automatic execution or you're gonna use maybe an oracle like safes snap, or you're just gonna use a multisig where different trusted members, unity.
enact the, whatever the community decided to do. So I think DAO governance is that process, the process of making decisions that are in the interest of the DAO in a way that that favors certain verifiable things that DAO members are, And this kind of reads the level of high level decision making where your CEO is gonna make a decision and nobody else is gonna have a, a say.
so I think these ideas behind them of like kind of horizontality transparency and decentralization are really key in the process of do governance. Thank you. That's a wonderful breakDAOn and quite comprehensive. and I appreciate you also kind of alluding to some of the maybe opportunities here as we discussed earlier.
You know, by using other, you know, kind of data points, if you will, or parts of our web3 life such as our humanness, you know, proof of humanity, if you will. and also the ability to see how our web3 activities may potentially together unlock much more robust than just richer experience for people that are operating in DAOs.
so I guess. One of the questions that I would kind of throw out to, to, to the, to the group is, you know, what are some of the things that you've seen where maybe you've through, through the governance, whether it's, you know, just generally through soft governance or hard governance as potential challenges where you've seen clear opportunities for self sovereign identities to kind of This kind of richer experience.
David, I wonder if you would want to maybe speak a little bit to some of the things that Orange is seen as kind of spaces where self sovereign identity can certainly unlock you know, kind of a richer governance experience. Yeah. that's, that's interesting. I think the first thing that comes to mind, I suppose, is we had like a really interesting discussion on decentralized science a couple weeks ago, and I know that maybe doesn't relate a hundred percent to governance, but you know, a lot of these research you know, initiatives are now turning into DAOs within Desi.
and so that raises the question about anonymity. And you know, in terms of self sovereign identity, you know kind of flipping the funding model on its head, right? Because you know, now you can have citizen researchers who can create and curate their own self sovereign identities and reputations as researchers.
And really Get funding and, and perform research through DAOs in unique ways that are not possible in the current, you know, scientific research community. So that was the first thing that kind of came to mind. Yeah, that's really interesting actually. I think you, you, you mentioned something there that I think maybe we could unpin that pity, Right?
In fact, I was having this conversation with Gloria yesterday and even with one of my other buddies here out of Los Angeles where I'm based out of, and we're talking about. The space really having sad Adam as actors, right? A and I think that that's by nature. Some of the some of the things that are inherent to these privacy, preserving technologies that individuals want to interact with, you know, the blockchain and with projects in a way that is unrelated to their own, you know identity in the real world.
And some of the challenges that I, that, that I, that were brought up in that discussion are, There are these individuals that while they are sad, autonomous, they are not necessarily bad actors. Right. And certainly you can probably have an argument on the other end where it's like, Oh, well if you're sadist, how do we know that you aret going to, you know, do something that is you know, against the rules or that are hurt the community.
Right. and. You know, for the most part though, I think sometimes we confuse, you know, doxing, oneself with a, a level of accountability, a level of like you know, being recognized for who you are in the real world, and that you will not act in a way that will hurt people or the community that you're representing.
But that doesn't necessarily mean anything, right? Because, I mean, in the real world, you could meet someone face to face, and that doesn't necessarily mean that you. A sense of who they are and what they've done in the past. Just generally the reputation that someone has built out over time that you can assess is you know, how you know someone's gonna be reputable not just because you know who they are and you've seen their face.
So I think there's something there in terms of some of these kind of opportunities that we can. To pseudonymous people in, in web3 where instead of looking at who they are as, you know, individuals in, in terms of like who they are in the real world, we look at like their behavior over time.
And from that we can gain an understanding of, you know, what type of behavior they, they engage in. And, you know, maybe also as some sort of like metric. By which you can trust an individual, right? So say for example, there's a developer, or in your example, David, there's a writer in Desi where this researcher has been contributing, right?
these, these this research over time, this person doesn't. Necessarily have to reveal who they are, reveal their identity, but it is through that recurring activity, you know positive conscience to that DAO, for instance, where they can gain or unlock that reputation. And it's that reputation that we could then use to unlock.
Additional governance opportunities for them. whether that means, you know, we get, you get some sort of vault multiplier, right? For instance, because you are an active contributor. You're not just someone who's holding tokens, but you're actually someone that's contributing to the growth of that application, to that community.
or it's, it's something else, right? so certainly I think that this is something that Where identity and reputation can play a big role in terms of like how governance could become a little richer and still kind of you know, kind of respecting the pseudonymity or even embracing the pseudonymity of our contributors.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's, you know, you piggybacked on that really, really well, Humpty. and yeah, I mean, I think there is, That discussion around the value of anonymity and pseudonymity and you know, and I think the discussion we had last week was actually really interesting. you know, not not being necessarily held hostage by, you know, the design of who the people designing identity and reputation and being able to, you know, I guess start from zero if, if, You know, is that part of being self solve the right in the ability to create a new identity because something has, you know, gone wrong in a certain community or whatnot.
So, I don't know, may, maybe that's another interesting aspect to unpack. Yeah. Yeah. I think you, you, I think you're hitting on some interesting points there. I, I actually love what get Phillips like thoughts on this, but ultimately, like I have, like one of my like I have a.
One of like my principles is if the governance system you're designing doesn't work for anonymous people. Then it's still trust based, right? You haven't actually designed a trust list governance system. And I'm not saying that's like what we need to be doing now, because I think that is the destination, right?
That is where we need to end up. It's incredibly hard to get to. And I think what we are starting to see is challenging the idea of what it means to be anonymous and even why, And I think being anonymous has been like a code switching. For something else we're trying to do, which is build trustless systems.
Right? So it's kind of re recursive logic. If it works for anonymous actors, then you have built a trustless system. and, and I think that's a little different than the self sovereign piece, right? The self sovereign piece I think is really fascinating because, To, to be self sovereign means you can like fork the entire network, right?
That's what being self-sovereign means. It means you can fork the entire network or you can break it DAOn to most composable unit, which is you, right? And if you're able to be just as productive as a single person as you would in a community, then it's like truly self sovereign. And if you were able to do it while being anonymous, it's like truly trustless.
and so like, I think we should think of these less as like, Inputs into our governance design and more as like barometers and like measuring sticks into what we're building in governance systems. you know, I think that's why we really like voting, to be honest. because voting is a, like relatively, you can be anonymous.
Right. You have to, but there's another component of this where you have to prove to be a human as part of that group, right? And that's where like identity is different. Like proof of identity is different than proof of like human head or humanity. So, That's interesting. I think you hit on two things there.
Chris b go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna expand on sort of the idea of the self sovereignty component to what you were saying or the original question you asked and talk about. One other sort of vein of self sovereignty is being able to take things you've done maybe under a different pseudonym and bring them with you to a new project.
Display them or present them in a way that doesn't reveal what your pseudonym was on the other project, but that you did that thing or maybe some capability, like one example in the way early days of this, I know this is sounds like science fiction today, but imagine if I could generate a zero knowledge proof of a bunch of code that I committed to a very important project and I come into a new community and I can present that zero knowledge.
As proof that I am a developer of a certain capability without divulging the exact project I contributed it to. So that to me is a really new, interesting space for self shower and identity in these sort of suo pseudonyms environments where we maybe wanna have different personas in different projects.
I strongly agree that, that we need to allow people to have different persona. But you can't show up, but you can't show up in one community and pretend to be multiple personas at the same time. And, and have those benefits, like pick, pick one persona to show up in a community. When I first got introduced to Colony, way back, way back in the day, they was talking with or McMillan who totally believed in civil resistance but didn't think they needed it in Colony.
Cause they're like, Well, we have these different, different managers and someone's doing the work and someone's reviewing it. And I said, Yeah, but what if you have a situation where it turns out the person doing the work and the three managers reviewing it are all the same. So like you thought there was thorough distributed government you know, sort of oversight, but there wasn't.
This is a super interesting idea. If I might add something here. It's interesting because the more you hear about this idea of bringing a kinda fledged out identity to the blockchain, very often you don't stop and think. How, how big of a scope do you need? And it is funny that you mentioned, or because now I feel like from what I'm reading, his new point on this is you just need to prove you're unique.
Like that's the only requirement. You don't need to say where you are from or what you've worked on before. Like the limitation of what we should strive for in terms of identity is just unique human. And, and I find this, I don't agree with this. But I find it super interesting because just kinda by respect of a few people who can hold these principles I know that they've been around for a very long time and it seems to be a very good first step anyway.
And anything more than actually proving your unique, then you need some really good privacy around it because that part gets really d. The other thing, I'm in a bunch of the tribute DAOs and, and, and the, the Lao and lingo, One of the things we've talked about is, is sort of like a, a seal of approval, a good actor badge that that, that you can, that you can show up somewhere else and say, Hey, this, this can have said, I'm a good actor.
You don't know which community member I am. But, but, but you know, that at least this other community is like, that is vouching for me and that's meaningful and, and that's meaningful. So I, you know, and if you. multiple stamps. Now you can't, I don't think it should be a passport where they can see every sta It's gotta be that, that it's, it's self sovereign and that you can show the ones you want.
So they can't just like triangulate and figure out, Oh, well you must be this person cause you have the points. So two, two pieces on that. I think. first. I think the badges concept gets like pretty fascinating in the sense where I think that like, well without bleeding into like, you know, SBT versus VCs real, like without bleeding into that discussion, I think the idea of badges gets really interesting because I think once you introduce the concept of badges, we immediately add an insane amount of complexity to like the Ecoware building.
but I agree. Having some kind of trusted person. Badge is like honestly how society has operated for thousands of years, right? Like that's how religions are built. That's how communities are built. That's how nations are built. Like if you were just like a pirate going through the waters, people saw how good you were based off all the loo you had.
Like it's all just based off badges. But to, to Nathan's point about uniqueness versus versus badges we'll say, or uniqueness versus like how much you need to give away. I think the, again, we're hitting on a point that often gets conflated is that what is the minimum requirement for you to be able to.
Participate in me. And then what, what are ways to scale up your expertise? Like assumed expertise went right when you show up. Right. And I think, I think where ORN is right, or I don't know if I'm willing to say he's right yet, but something that I agree is, is quite interesting is to say the minimum barometer to participate in any type of community governance is to prove that you are a person, a unique person, pardon of me, to prove you are a unique person.
If you want additional responsibilities in the DAO, You need to reveal additional parts of your identity, right? Whether that's the form of badges or whether that's the form of whatever we want to call it. understanding that that's like a spectrum and that's a, that's a function with a direct correlation.
and I think that is the trade off here and like that's the conversation not being had. Is that a good requirement to have to say, Hey, to show up with more assumed level of ity, you need to tell us more about yourself. Like, is that an okay thing to do? Yeah. Can I just add on a's point Yeah, completely agree with him on the fact that it's like the privacy and like what you wanna show about yourself is a, is a spectrum and like, for example, about this use case again, like, Around the topic of SBT against bc I see that they're kinda both complimentary.
So for example, you can have a badge, a bound token that is, that you. Token and then you can have other information about yourself that are stored in a form of verifi. So then off and for example, can kind of disclose this information. So can kind of mix those two pre for a specific use case. And you don't have to choose.
It's not like everything is public or everything is part private, you can choose or around like the use case underneath that that you wanna accomplish. You know, one thing that I kind of wanna maybe backtrack a little bit that I think kind of set up this discussion, which has been really fantastic is.
Differentiation between two things here, and what I heard was the proof of identity is different from proof of humanity. So I kind of wanna talk about generally what your thoughts are in terms of what we've been discussing so far, and if that is something that has applied to unique identities or human hood or person.
when it comes to these badges or these ways of like you know, recognizing that you're a good actor, right? So these good actor val badges as, as, as Phillip mentioned, are these something that are built on, you know, these identities which you know, aren't necessarily, you know, they may be sys or this actually attack attached to your personhood.
Something that's you know, you're a unique human. Love that. That's like, man, that's a huge question. And it, and before I forget the thought, I think one of the things that's now become clear is there's actually three different, like axes to look at. There's proof idea, there's proof of uniqueness, and there's proof of human hood, right?
and I would really defer to Phillip on a lot of those different pieces. the way that we see it is, It's based off to your specific question is it's it's profile or per, it's like, Yeah, it's profile or persona based. Right. You earn badges on a persona or a profile. if you like, I, Aaron sometimes am an agent of chaos and sometimes I'm an agent of good.
Right, But I can't take my good actor badge and apply it to my agent of chaos persona, you know? so I don't know. I think that gets like kind of complicated, but I do think in that question there is actually three Xs identity, The unique things that make you up and, and are kind of what explains you, like proof of uniqueness is, How unique I think your persona is.
I'm gonna say, and the humanity is like all trace back to, are you one person or one actor? I don't know, Philip, if you have a different way to think about those three things. I mean, I think that's a, that's a good framing. I struggle to imagine things that are improved by letting more than, letting, letting any human have more than one persona.
In any given context that like to, to pretend to be multiple people within the same conversation within this, within, within the same group. I can think of lots of reasons why I would like people to be able to split across things so that in, in one DAO, like they can be the agent of chaos in a different DAO They can be the, the cooperative one.
Totally fine for them to do that, but I don't, I. Think it helps to be, to have one person playing both of those roles in the same DAO. So that's why that like one proof of humanity part is, is, is important, but, but it's important that when you provide that proof of humanity that you're not providing anything else so that you can choose which persona you wanna show up as.
And, and that's how, how Bright Ideas always thought of it is, you know. When you give your bright ID verification, the only thing that you have given that application is the fact that, that you exist once within the context of, of that community, that application. so I think that's an, that's an important thing that we do.
Sorry, I have a quick question for Philip. I, one you just blew my mind, but two Okay. So we're saying that you. I think it's an interesting idea. I agree with you. I think, and I, and I wanna spend a lot of time thinking about this, that there's very little reasons to have multiple personas within one context.
Okay. Right. That's what you're saying. Or community. Okay. If you have different personas within different, I have persona A and community A and persona B and community B. . and there's other similar actors between those. Do you think there's a responsibility of whatever identity protocol that other community members should know?
You are human with different personas. Like, does everyone else in the group need to know that this is persona be a Phillip, or is it not? Is there not like some responsibility requirement for that? Is that question make sense? I feel like we don't, we, we don't owe that obligation to each other, you know?
My wife knows me, a as as a different person than my friends do. And she doesn't even really know what with my friends when she's not around. Right? But she knows that that person still you, right? Like she knows. She doesn't know what that persona is, but she knows you have another persona and she knows that persona still belongs to fill up, right?
I wouldn't wanna require that at some like protocol, at some protocol level. I think it's, I think it's, it's asking, it's asking too much. I think that people should be allowed to, to show, to show up anew. you know, people always talk about the, the Black Mirror episode with the social credit score. I don't want, I don't want you to, to be able to, to be stuck forever.
because of the actions you did in, you did in one place, in one community. It's never been that way for humans. Like you could always, dude, you blew it in one place. You could get on a boat sale across the ocean and start your life anew. I don't wanna take that way in the digital sense. I if we do allow, So sorry, one last follow up on this.
I think I agree with you, I'm not a hundred percent sure, but is there any kind of then like double dipping here to say like, we do allow you to bring your positive badge, like your positive traits across personas, but we don't allow you to bring your negative traits across.
So, so we, we thought about a lot of people on the broad ID side have said like, Hey, so like GI Bitcoin is like, Hey, we have information, we think about civils, would they be like to like tell you and have it incorporate in your in, in your graph? And basically what we decided was, hey, if people wanted to accept a badge onto the graph, that that's something that we would let them.
But that's really only gonna work for positive things that people want attached because we can't, we, we can't let, we can't let someone attach things to people that, that like, don't, don't accept it and, and have it follow them. So the badge needs to be accepted, to be accepted by the individual, not just placed upon them never to be withdrawal.
Yeah. I think that speaks to sovereignty and revocability, right? Which I think is words that get used often when we talk about these credentials or these badges, if you will, where there needs to be a form of revocability. we can't necessarily hard code you know, some of these attributes to an individual's identity because their, you know, that just that, that could get very dystopic.
But, but if you even let them put it there in the first place, like the internet doesn't forget things. So if there was an operation that put it there, even if it gets deleted a second later, like if someone screenshotted that thing, you know, if someone's got the, got the database, they then have it forever.
So like a, a provable revocability, it sounds like. So again, just a challenge. Is that true? Like even if the thing being attached to is a true, are we saying that like you still, It's a like, I think we can all agree that in governance, dissent or negative votes are just as important as positive votes is attaching negative traits and saying even if this is true, the person has to be willing to accept it.
We're saying that that's still not okay, that like we only, like, you have to accept, we have to enable people to accept all, and that even if it's true, if they don't accept it, then it still doesn't matter. I'd like to piggyback on that too. to add to that question, I guess in terms of governance, is this also something that is true in term context?
So in order to participate in this governance, there's almost like a required approval. Some of these attributes or traits on a person's identity, and it's, if they don't want those attributes being attached to their identity, then don't participate in the system. So is it more contextual, I guess, is what I'd like to add on top of what Aaron said, they could certainly be right.
The, the thing is that you should, someone should decide if they're willing to accept the thing. Someone's suggesting to put on them in this, in this permanent way. and, and, and yes, some applications be like, Hey, we require this. We're gonna, we're gonna stick this, this badge on you. That's the requirement of participation.
I, I have, I have that, but I still want the person to agree, to agree to accept it. But I. Technically I can create an nft, send it to your address, make it non-transferrable. And on that NFT I've written that person hacked my protocol or something. And you can't ever take it away from your, from your address.
There's no transfer function in that nft. And you know, you're stuck with a badge that is quite negative and there's not much you can do about it. So there. But I can walk away from the address. Yeah, you can walk away from the address, but then you're walking away from all the good things as well, right?
Like you are walking away from the good person badges that are, that I truly want to keep, like, what I like about what, what we are talking about is just kind this idea that you've also get like a big red button. If, if, if someone's saying like, if, if you really majorly. On an address, like you were saying, you travel the ocean, remake your life in America, new address, clean slates.
you're gonna lose a lot from doing this. But also, like thi this is there is a right to be forgotten that I think is very in the internet. And the truth is that's kind of why, you know, I talk more and more with different. like Csmo for example, that allows you to kind of bundle addresses together without really revealing too much about an individual address.
Showing up. As, you know, this is my main address and I'm choosing what I'm gonna show you about my main address. or, or even stuff like disco, which takes these credentials and kinda all these badges of chain, which I think is actually quite positive. And I think kind of like the next step of this conversation is, What needs to be on chain and what needs to be off chain.
And I think in terms of credentials, stuff that is more than I am a unique human. I think most of it belongs off chain actually, because that gives you a better right to be forgotten and a better, you know, opportunity to show off what you wanna show off to the, you know, to the particular DAO that you'd like to join.
and I think that kind of even works. You know, it works in the sense that you were describing Philip of you show up to a new DAO and you show you are, you are not already in this DAO and you kinda wanna show, you know, let's imagine it's like a design DAO then you show a certain set of skills and characteristics that if it's like a, I don't know, like a, an anime Enjoyer DAO, you know?
so that's how I feel about it. I. Often we strive to put things on chain that shouldn't really be on chain, and we solve a lot of these hard problems by keeping some of that stuff off where it can be, you know, forgotten. And that's not even talking about the fact that any kind of encryption is gonna be broken, but by definition at a certain point in the future.
So even stuff that is protected by ZK proof, You know, I don't want to get too into this because I'm not a mathematician. A day future. This will be, you know, a form of encryption that is broken as well. So, yeah, curious to hear more thoughts on this. I like that somehow we ended up back on the topic of sole bound tokens and verifiable credentials, which seems to be kind of this topic that's pervasive across digital identity conversations and reputation.
And, you know, Nathan and I would agree with you. Off chain data or having some of these you know, kind of reputation or, or credentials be off chain is part of that solution, right? Because there is something to be said about, you know NFTs and kind of this more public facing data