The core concept proposed in Vitalik's web3 soul paper is around “soulbound” tokens (SBTs) that encode on the blockchain useful information about a person such as what communities they belong to, credentials they may have, encounters or relationships they have experienced, etc. An important quality of SBTs is that they can be self-certified (e.g. encoding “I work at a venture capital firm” into my SBTs) as well as certified by others (e.g. “I, as a coworker of Mary, attest that Mary works at a venture capital firm”). These SBTs form the basis of “Decentralized Society” (DeSoc) which are various levels of communities and networks that form around various properties of the SBTs.
The challenge with this paper is that it describes a dogmatic end state (a philosophy on what ought to be) without advancing us on challenges that make that end state hard to achieve.
For example, it would be fantastic if we had control over our data such that we received some amount of payment when social media players use our data to generate revenue. The issue is not that we disagree with the philosophy, it’s that it’s hard to get to that end state.
Similarily, it would be very interesting if all the relevant information about a person was available on a public database with proper privacy controls (this is the concept of SBTs), and that we could form social groups based on computations over that data. But the challenges that plagued web2 (how do you collect the data, maintain that data, and do so in a non-gameable way), are not answered nor advanced by this paper.
It is easier to criticize than to create. So here are some interesting tidbits the paper does propose:
Social context is lacking from most tech-only crypto solutions. For example, who is worthy of lending money to would could be better contextualized by people who personally know the lender, vs. just those who belong to and know how to navigate an existing financial system
One way to figure out who is gaming a programmatic system is to examine the correlation between SBTs of different souls (e.g. correlation can indicate collusion)
In Roman legal tradition, the right to use, the right to consume or destroy, and the right to profit from are distinct (e.g. having one does not give the right to all three). Crypto has and should continue to make those distinctions for our digital lives more granular (e.g. art on the internet includes both the right to consume, right to use, and right to profit, but if that art was an NFT, the passive viewer (and not owner) has the right to consume but not the right to use or profit)
By and large, this newsletter is about the technology that underlies crypto products. At times, like this one, it’s about the philosophy, which is of course more subjective.
*Vitalik is a cofounder of Ethereum
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