[somebodythere]

In the crypto space I'm most excited about the ability to have open projects where anyone who contributes can have a stake in the financial rewards of the project, and there are no barriers to becoming a contributor. A lot of the time the financial benefits of open-source contributors are fully captured by a "host" corporation, and open collaboration platforms for non-software projects like textbooks and IRL shared spaces are almost nonexistent.

Proof-of-personhood a la BrightID is something that governments could theoretically provide, but most don't, and even if they did, there are serious privacy and interoperability concerns. SaaS companies trying to provide a free trial can prevent abuse by verifying unique personhood using web3 tech without needing to ask for any more information about the user. I'm sure you can think of other applications for that tech. Even if every government in the world provided this service, everyone who wants to use it either has to implement 195 different APIs or fork over money to a cottage industry whose sole job it is to unify those APIs.

Finance and commerce on blockchains has a lot of real-world benefits that traditional finance can't or refuses to provide. You can't easily set up a 3-of-5 multisig for your photography club in traditional finance. A lot of normal people have their payments blocked or funds frozen in TradFi for arbitrary reasons. Sex workers get kicked off of platforms all the time, and a friend recently had their PayPal frozen while raising funds for a school reunion party.

I'm not super into NFTs personally, but I can see them having a use case as a more consumer-friendly business model for gacha games and games with similar mechanics. There are probably other promising applications that I just don't know about because I don't follow that space very closely.

[rezonant]

> SaaS companies trying to provide a free trial can prevent abuse by verifying unique personhood using web3 tech without needing to ask for any more information about the user

A trial is usually backed by a financial instrument. Usually that financial instrument is a credit card. A credit card can be uniquely identified, and so if you really are concerned about trial reuse, you can check reuse of the credit card, and that gets you pretty far. Folks can use prepaid cards, but you can also block those, which isn't totally unreasonable when you are talking about a subscription-- and a lot of subscription services do block them. Is it indefeatable? No. Is it good enough? Yeah actually. So why do I need to replace the concept of a credit card with an entirely new type of financial instrument that most users (especially non-technical users) don't have or understand?

[somebodythere]

SaaS just seemed relevant to the audience here, but there are a lot of applications which want to limit one account per natural person, not just SaaS. For example, social networks want to prevent astroturfing, and video games want to prevent cheaters from ban-evasion. Anyway, a lot of people don't want to provide their credit card info for a service they are not sure if they want to use yet (purpose of a trial), and a lot of services want to allow credit card-free trials without opening themselves up to abuse.

I think the vast majority of reflexive dismissals of crypto tech have two themes in common: "if the technology doesn't satisfy this use case, or the UX is not perfect yet, then surely there is no way to fix that and we should discard the whole idea;" and "why use this decentralized solution when we can use this centralized one which, in many cases, doesn't work as well?"

I've reached my weekly budget on the amount of time I want to spend explaining this tech online, but maybe consider if problems you see are truly insurmountable, or if you are simply uncomfortable with the idea of an economic layer that is actually open to build on.

[rezonant]

> I've reached my weekly budget on the amount of time I want to spend explaining this tech online

Granted, take care of yourself! I hope you feel no obligation or attack in my line of questioning, and perhaps others can fill in here if they are active over the weekend.

> SaaS just seemed relevant to the audience here, but there are a lot of applications which want to limit one account per natural person, not just SaaS. For example, social networks want to prevent astroturfing, and video games want to prevent cheaters from ban-evasion

That's true, so then I wonder what stops someone from farming these identities and selling them?

> I think the vast majority of reflexive dismissals of crypto tech have two themes in common: "if the technology doesn't satisfy this use case, or the UX is not perfect yet, then surely there is no way to fix that and we should discard the whole idea;"

The main issue for me is that quite often existing well-known problems are tackled with this new hammer that ostensibly offers no real benefit on top of solutions we already have. This is not true of all applications of blockchain technology, but it's clear that there is not a strong case that it is as generally applicable as a movement like "web3" would suggest.

> and "why use this decentralized solution when we can use this centralized one which, in many cases, doesn't work as well?"

It's just not clear that this is the case.

[somebodythere]

The traditional financial system is basically not available for an individual to build on without the blessing of VCs. If you do manage that, you have to come head-to-head with money transmitter licensing, collecting personal info from your customers and keeping it safe, implementing rules about who can send money to whom (that differ by country), and playing by Visa et al's rules about who isn't allowed to use your app and for what (which includes a lot of normal people doing normal things.)

It feels wrong to me that building financial apps for public good basically requires creating a capital class and handing over profits and control to them. Will VCs fund another Kickstarter or Open Collective?

I got into crypto because I realized the things I actually wanted to build I could basically only do so using crypto. (Also, watching myself earn interest every 15 seconds was just incredibly cool.) Granted, that was in 2018, and prices are a lot higher now, and so is the level of grifting and hype. A stronger layer of psychological self-defence is warranted both from people in the space and outside of it.

Anyway, the short answer to your question is that the time cost of Zoom verification will in many cases deter low-level and botting fraud, but Zoom verification overall is a stopgap to bootstrap the network, and over the long term applications will require users to be verified by a few of their IRL F&F (and Zoom parties can be used to connect their social network to the rest of the graph.)

[rezonant]

> The traditional financial system is basically not available for an individual to build on without the blessing of VCs. ... implementing rules about who can send money to whom (that differ by country)

Building on the blockchain does not indemnify you from following the relevant laws. You mention also Visa's rules, which also mostly tend to be based on the relevant laws (though there are exceptions, like their restrictions on adult content).

> It feels wrong to me that building financial apps for public good basically requires creating a capital class and handing over profits and control to them

The amount of "financial apps for public good" being made are exceedingly few. Acting like the apps being made by "web3" companies just want to faciliate trade for underserved populations with no gain to themselves is perhaps disingenous. Yeah sure if you are one person it might be easier to build an app to allow folks to send money to each other when you build it on a cryptocurrency, but is it easier or have you ignored all the ways nefarious people will use your app to do things that are absolutely something that should be stopped? Is that better than gatekeeping these apps for those who can manage these sort of protections?

> I got into crypto because I realized the things I actually wanted to build I could basically only do so using crypto. (Also, watching myself earn interest every 15 seconds was just incredibly cool.)

Hey, if you want to build some financial apps, that's great. Go forth! But it is not "web3". I will say that I don't think of earning interest in real time as anywhere near as "cool" as literally any other aspect of technology/engineering I can think of. And I don't feel compelled to enable that feeling you had in everyone else either.

> prices are a lot higher now, and so is the level of grifting and hype

The prices are a lot higher because of the hype, not the other way around. In fact, the prices are above zero because of the hype. To be clear, that is not to say the hype isn't warranted, but I think it's important to have the ordering clear.

> Anyway, the short answer to your question is that the time cost of Zoom verification will in many cases deter low-level and botting fraud, but Zoom verification overall is a stopgap to bootstrap the network, and over the long term applications will require users to be verified by a few of their IRL F&F (and Zoom parties can be used to connect their social network to the rest of the graph.)

The time cost of Zoom verification will deter individuals from performing it, but not specialists who do it on individuals' behalf. I could imagine starting a business solely to participate in these Zoom calls, generate identities, and then pass the credentials for one or more of those identities to anyone who puts up the ETH. Since I have to assume it's not just the same people in every one of these Zoom calls, I have no doubt you could send the same "seemingly unique" person to many of them and get a new set of credentials for each one, and then sell those off like anything else. Given how things like Spotify botting and phone farming are actually happening, this will be compromised in no time, just like all the previous prevention techniques have been.

> but Zoom verification overall is a stopgap to bootstrap the network ... over the long term applications will require users to be verified by a few of their IRL F&F (and Zoom parties can be used to connect their social network to the rest of the graph.)

Even after the stopgap is stopped and the network is strapped and booted, is someone without a network of "acceptable" social contacts not worthy of being able to participate in this ecosystem? So folks who do not want to divulge their social contacts literally cannot participate? This seems like one of the core audiences of decentralized privacy-conscious technologies, and yet they could not participate without (publically?) divulging personal information.

[somebodythere]

> Building on the blockchain does not indemnify you from following the relevant laws.

You are right. The relevant laws apply to money service operators and blockchain software developers, in most cases, are not money service operators. Software developers, in most societies, cannot be deputized to enforce particular uses or non-uses of their software.

> have you ignored all the ways nefarious people will use your app to do things that are absolutely something that should be stopped?

I think freedom to transact is as valuable as freedom to access information (uncensored, using Tor) and freedom to communicate (securely, using E2E.) In fact, the latter two freedoms boil down to the former. If you disagree, you are correct to not like DeFi.

> And I don't feel compelled to enable that feeling you had in everyone else either.

I know you don't, but I wanted to share the first time using a blockchain tech was more pleasant than using its traditional counterpart for me. Trying to convince people that "blockchains are useful" is not very compelling either. It's not my job, but I can spend hours on it with no benefit to me.

> So folks who do not want to divulge their social contacts literally cannot participate?

You are right that Zoom verification is a low level of verification. On BrightID today, you can be verified by a friend without having to divulge the identity of yourself or your friend to any blockchain, any application, or any other person in your social network. Using zero-knowledge proofs, the entire anonymous network graph can be hidden as well.

In addition, the only apps they cannot use are those which require anti-Sybil guarantees. Is "has 3 friends who will vouch for you" too high of a bar compared to "qualifies for and has a credit card"? If it is, is it bad to have the former as an option for those who cannot reach the latter?

ETA: government/institutional ID verification is a valid BrightID graph node as well, for institutions/individuals/applications which choose to use it.

[rezonant]

Not super familiar with BrightID but I took a look at the website. So I guess the idea is that other humans verify a human and issue cryptographic proof that they are a human.

My question: What about BrightID stops you from verifying and creating multiple identities by simply joining these Zoom-based verification parties multiple times? If someone does that, what's to stop someone from then providing those multiple identities to other people?