§6 DECENTRALIZED SOCIETY
Web3 aspires to transform societies broadly, rather than merely financial systems. Yet today’s social fabric—families, churches, teams, companies, civil society, celebrity, democracy—is meaningless in virtual worlds (often called the “metaverse”) without primitives representing human souls and the broader relationships they support. If web3 eschews persistent identities, their patterns of trust and cooperation, and their composable rights and permissions, we see, respectively, sybil attacks, collusion, and a limited economic realm of wholly transferable private property—all of which trends towards hyper-financialization.
To skirt hyper-financialization—yet unlock exponential growth—we propose augmenting and bridging our sociality across virtual and physical realities, empowering souls and communities to encode rich social and economic relationships. But simply building on trust and cooperation is not enough. Correcting for biases and tendencies to over-coordinate (or collude) among trust networks is essential to encouraging more intricate, diverse relationships that span greater social distances than before. We call this “Decentralized Society (DeSoc)”: a co-determined sociality, where Souls and Communities convene bottom-up, as emergent properties of each other to produce plural network goods across different scales.
We emphasize plural network goods as a feature of DeSoc, because networks are the most powerful engine of economic growth, yet the most susceptible to dystopian capture by private actors (e.g., web2) and powerful governments (e.g., Chinese Communist Party). Most significant economic growth results from increasing network returns, where every additional unit of input yields incrementally more output. Examples of simple physical networks include roads, electrical grids, cities, and other forms of infrastructure built off labor and other capital inputs. Examples of powerful digital networks include marketplaces, predictive models and plural intelligences built o data. In both cases, network economics diverges from neoclassical economics, which teaches decreasing returns—where every additional unit of input yields incrementally less output—and where private property yields the most efficient outcomes. Private property applied to an increasing returns context has the opposite effect—throttling network growth by rent extraction. A road between two cities can unlock increasing returns from gains from trade. But the same road privately owned can throttle growth if the owners choose to extract rent up to the value trading between the two cities. Public ownership over a network also has its own perils, being susceptible to regulatory capture or underfunding.
Networks with increasing returns are most efficient when treated neither as purely public nor purely private goods, but rather as partial and plural shared goods. DeSoc provides the social substrate to unbundle and reconfigure rights—rights of use (“usus”), rights to consume or destroy (“abusus”), and rights of profit (“fructus”)—and enable efficient governance mechanisms across these rights that augment trust and cooperation while checking for collusion and capture. We’ve explored several mechanisms throughout this paper, such as community-based SALSA and quadratic funding (and voting) discounted by correlation scores. This third way of partial and plural ownership avoids the Charybdis of private rent extraction and Scylla of public regulatory capture.
Web3 渴望广泛地改变社会，而不仅仅是金融系统。然而，今天的社会结构——家庭、教堂、团队、公司、公民社会、名人、民主——在没有代表人类灵魂的原始人和他们所支持的更广泛关系的虚拟世界（通常称为“元界”）中毫无意义。如果 web3 避开持久性身份、信任和合作模式以及可组合的权利和许可，我们将分别看到女巫攻击、勾结和完全可转让的私有财产的有限经济领域——所有这些都趋向于超金融化。
为了避免过度金融化——同时释放指数级增长——我们建议在虚拟和物理现实中增强和连接我们的社交性，赋予灵魂和社区以编码丰富的社会和经济关系的能力。但仅仅建立在信任与合作之上是不够的。纠正信任网络之间的偏见和过度协调（或勾结）的倾向对于鼓励比以前跨越更大社会距离的更复杂、更多样化的关系至关重要。我们称之为“去中心化社会（DeSoc）”：一种共同决定的社会性，灵魂和社区自下而上地聚集在一起，作为彼此的新兴属性，以生产不同规模的多种网络商品。
我们强调多元网络商品是 DeSoc 的一个特征，因为网络是经济增长最强大的引擎，但最容易被私人参与者（例如 web2）和强大的政府（例如中国共产党）所俘获。最显着的经济增长来自网络回报的增加，其中每增加一个输入单位就会产生更多的输出。简单的物理网络的例子包括道路、电网、城市和其他形式的基础设施，这些基础设施是建立在劳动力和其他资本投入之上的。强大的数字网络的例子包括市场、预测模型和基于数据的多元智能。在这两种情况下，网络经济学都不同于新古典经济学，后者教导收益递减——每增加一个单位的投入产生的产出就会逐渐减少——而私有财产产生最有效的结果。在收益递增的情况下，私有财产会产生相反的效果——通过提取租金来抑制网络增长。两座城市之间的道路可以从贸易收益中获得越来越多的回报。但如果业主选择将租金提高到两个城市之间的价值交易，同一条私人拥有的道路可能会抑制增长。网络的公共所有权也有其自身的风险，容易受到监管或资金不足的影响。
**当既不将其视为纯粹的公共物品或纯粹的私人物品，而是将其视为部分和复数的共享物品时，回报递增的网络效率最高。**DeSoc 为分解和重新配置权利提供了社会基础——使用权（“usus”）、消费或破坏权（“abusus”）和利润权（“fructus”）——并在这些权利中启用有效的治理机制， 在检查合谋和俘虏的同时增强信任和合作。 我们在本文中探索了几种机制，例如基于社区的 SALSA 和相关分数打折的二次融资（和投票）。 第三种部分和复数所有权避免了私人租金提取的 Charybdis 和公共监管捕获的 Scylla。
In many ways, DeFi today is a decreasing returns private property paradigm retrotted onto increasing returns networks. Built on the premise of trustlessness, DeFi is inherently limited to the realm of wholly transferable private property (e.g., transferable tokens) that mostly bundles “usus,” “abusus,” and “fructus.” At best, DeFi risks throttling network growth by rent extraction and at worst risks ushering in dystopian surveillance monopolies dominated by “whales’’ who harvest and hoover up data in a race-to-the-bottom—much like web2.
DeSoc transforms DeFi’s race to control and speculate on the value of networks into a bottom-up coordination to build, participate, and govern them. At minimum, DeSoc’s social substrate can make DeFisybil-resistant (enabling community governance), vampire-resistant (internalizing positive externalities to build an open-source network), and collusion-resistant (preserving a network’s decentralization). With DeSoc’s structural corrections, DeFi can support and expand plural networks that confer benefits broadly—as agreed upon by the most diverse members—rather than further entrenching networks captured by narrow interests.
Yet, the greatest strength of DeSoc is its network composability. Sustained increasing returns and network growth isn’t simply avoiding the perils of rent extraction, but also encouraging the proliferation and intersection of nested networks. A road may form a network between two cities. But cut off from broader cooperation, two cooperating cities will eventually hit a ceiling of diminishing returns—either because of congestion (roads and housing) or exhaustion (reaching the limits of the people they can serve). Only through technological innovation and growing broader, if looser, cooperation with neighboring networks for new sources of increasing returns can value continue to grow exponentially. Some cooperation will be physical, incrementally extending physical trade across space. But many more connections will be informational and digital. Over time, we will see new matrices of cooperation between physical and digital networks, reliant upon and extending the social interconnections they are built on. It is precisely this intersecting, partly nested structure of ever growing network cooperation across digital and physical worlds that DeSoc enables.
Through composing networks and coordination, DeSoc emerges at the intersection of politics and markets—augmenting both with sociality. DeSoc empowers the vision of JCR Licklider—founder of ARPANET that created the internet—of “man-computer symbiosis” in an “intergalactic computer network” with dramatically increased social dynamism built on trust. Rather than build on DeFi’s trustless premise, DeSoc encodes trust networks that underpin the real economy today and enables us to harness them to generate plural network goods resilient to capture, extraction, or domination. With such augmented sociality, web3 can eschew short-term hyper-financialization in favor of an unbounded future of increasing returns across social distance.
在许多方面，**今天的 DeFi 是一种收益递减的私有财产范式，被改造成收益递增的网络。**DeFi 建立在无需信任的前提下，本质上仅限于完全可转让的私有财产（例如可转让代币）领域，主要捆绑了 “usus”、 “abusus” 和 “fructus”。充其量，DeFi 有可能通过提取租金来限制网络增长，而在最坏的情况下，有可能迎来由“鲸鱼”主导的反乌托邦监视垄断，这些鲸鱼在竞相下收集和吸食数据——就像 web2 一样。
DeSoc 将 DeFi 控制和推测网络价值的竞赛转变为自下而上的协调，以构建、参与和管理它们。至少，DeSoc 的社会基础可以使 DeFisybil 抗性（支持社区治理）、吸血鬼抗性（内化正外部性以构建开源网络）和抗共谋（保持网络的去中心化）。通过 DeSoc 的结构修正，DeFi 可以支持和扩展多元化的网络，这些网络可以广泛地赋予利益——正如最多样化的成员所同意的那样——而不是进一步巩固被狭隘利益集团俘获的网络。
然而，DeSoc 的最大优势在于其网络可组合性。持续递增的回报和网络增长不仅避免了租金提取的危险，而且还鼓励嵌套网络的扩散和交叉。一条道路可以形成两个城市之间的网络。但如果切断更广泛的合作，两个合作的城市最终将达到收益递减的上限——要么是因为拥堵（道路和住房），要么是因为疲惫（达到了他们可以服务的人群的极限）。只有通过技术创新和更广泛（如果更松散）与邻近网络合作以获得新的收益增加来源，价值才能继续呈指数级增长。一些合作将是实体的，逐步扩展跨空间的实体贸易。但更多的连接将是信息化和数字化的。随着时间的推移，我们将看到物理和数字网络之间的新合作矩阵，依赖并扩展它们所建立的社会互连。正是这种交叉、部分嵌套的跨数字和物理世界不断增长的网络合作结构正是 DeSoc 实现的。
通过组成网络和协调，DeSoc 出现在政治和市场的交汇处——同时增强了社会性。 DeSoc 赋予了 JCR Licklider （创造互联网的 ARPANET 的创始人）在“星际计算机网络”中“人机共生”的愿景，并在信任的基础上显着增强了社会活力。DeSoc 不是建立在 DeFi 的去信任前提之上，而是对支撑当今实体经济的信任网络进行编码，并使我们能够利用它们来生成多种网络商品，以适应捕获、提取或支配。借助这种增强的社交性，web3 可以避免短期的超金融化，转而支持跨越社交距离的无限未来增加回报。
§7 IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES
Privacy presents a key challenge for DeSoc. On the one hand, too many public SBTs may reveal too much information about a Soul, making them vulnerable to social control. On the other hand, too many purely private SBTs may also lead to private communication channels that eschew correlation discounting for governance and social coordination—presenting important incentive compatibility questions. Closely related to the issue of privacy is the issue of cheating: Souls may misrepresent their social solidarities, while coordinating through private or side channels. We cannot aspire to know all the possibilities and answers, but instead explore the nature of the challenge here and sketch a few promising paths for future research.
隐私对 DeSoc 来说是一个关键挑战。一方面，太多的公共 SBT 可能会泄露太多关于灵魂的信息，使他们容易受到社会控制。另一方面，过多的纯私人 SBT 也可能导致私人沟通渠道避开治理和社会协调的相关性折扣——这提出了重要的激励相容性问题。与隐私问题密切相关的是欺骗问题：灵魂可能会歪曲他们的社会团结，同时通过私人或辅助渠道进行协调。我们不能渴望知道所有的可能性和答案，而是在这里探索挑战的本质，并为未来的研究勾勒出一些有希望的路径。
7.1 Private Souls
Blockchain-based systems are public by default. Any relationship that is recorded on-chain is immediately visible not just to the participants, but also to anyone in the entire world. Some privacy can be retained by having multiple pseudonyms: a family Soul, a medical Soul, a professional Soul, a political Soul each carrying different SBTs. But done naively, it could be very easy to correlate these Souls to each other. The consequences of this lack of privacy are serious. Indeed, without explicit measures taken to protect privacy, the “naive” vision of simply putting all SBTs on-chain may well make too much information public for many applications.
To deal with over-publicity, there are a number of solutions with different levels of technical complexity and functionality. The simplest approach is that an SBT could store data on-chain.
基于区块链的系统默认是公开的。 记录在链上的任何关系不仅对参与者，而且对全世界的任何人都是立即可见的。使用多个假名可以保留一些隐私：家庭灵魂、医疗灵魂、专业灵魂、政治灵魂，每个都携带不同的 SBT。但是如果天真地完成，很容易将这些灵魂相互关联起来。 这种缺乏隐私的后果是严重的。事实上，如果没有采取明确的措施来保护隐私，简单地将所有 SBT 上链的“幼稚”愿景很可能会使许多应用程序公开太多信息。
为了应对过度宣传，有许多具有不同技术复杂性和功能级别的解决方案。 最简单的方法是 SBT 可以在链上存储数据。
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The choice of how to store the o-chain data is left to the person; possible solutions include (i) their own devices, (ii) a cloud service trusted by them, or (iii) decentralized networks such as the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). Storing data off-chain lets us continue to have smart contracts that permission the right to write SBT data, but at the same time have separate permissions to read that data. Bob can choose to reveal the contents of any of his SBTs (or the data stores which they permission) only when he wishes to. This already gets us quite far, and has the further benefit of improving technical scalability because most data only needs to be handled by a very small number of parties. But to fully achieve properties like plural privacy, as well as more fine-grained forms of disclosure, we need to go further. Fortunately, many cryptographic technologies let us do that.
One powerful set of building blocks that enables new ways to partially reveal data is a branch of cryptography called “zero knowledge proofs.” While zero knowledge proofs are most frequently used today to enable privacy-preserving transfers of assets, they also can allow people to prove arbitrary statements without revealing any more information beyond the statement itself. For example, in a world where government documents and other attestations are cryptographically provable, someone could prove a statement like “I am a citizen of Canada, who is over 18 years old and has a university degree in economics and over 50,000 Twitter followers, and who has not yet claimed an account in this system.”
Zero-knowledge proofs can be computed over SBTs to prove characteristics about a Soul (e.g., that it has certain memberships). This technique can be extended further by introducing multi-party computation techniques such as garbled circuits, which could make such tests doubly private: the prover does not reveal who they are to the verifier, and the verifier does not reveal their verification mechanism to the prover. Instead, both parties make the computation together and only learn the output.
Another powerful technique is designated-verifier proofs. In general, “data” is slippery: if I send a movie to you, I cannot technologically prevent you from recording and sending it to a third party. Workarounds like Digital Rights Management (DRM) have at best limited eectiveness, and often come at great costs to users. Proofs, however, are not slippery in the same way. If Amma wants to prove some property X about her SBTs to Bob, she can make a zero knowledge proof of the statement “I hold SBTs that satisfy property X, OR I have the access key to Bob’s Soul.” Bob would find this statement convincing: he knows that he did not make the proof, and so Amma must actually have SBTs that satisfy property X. But if Bob passes the proof along to Cuifen, Cuifen would not be convinced: for all he knows, Bob could have made the proof with his own key. This can be made even stronger with verifiable delay functions (VDFs): Amma can make and present a proof that can only be made with the required SBTs right now, but anyone else will be able to make five minutes from now. This means it is possible to represent sophisticated access permissions to trustworthy proofs about data despite the impossibility of making the same kinds of selective permissions to the raw data itself, which may simply be copy and pasted. This may take us quite far nonetheless. Just as blockchains oer traceability in transactions that prevents someone from right-click copy-and-pasting a valuable NFT (and sybil attacking the original owner), similarly SBTs can oer traceability in social prevenance, which at minimum can reduce the value of copy-and-pasted data with unverified origins.
These off-chain data and zero-knowledge techniques are compatible with negative reputation—SBTs that are made visible even if the holder does not want them to be visible. Important examples of negative reputation include credit history, data about unpaid loans, negative reviews and complaints from business partners, and SBTs attesting to social connections relevant for coordination. Blockchains coupled with the same cryptography could offer a potential solution: Souls could be forced by smart contract logic to incorporate negative SBTs into a data structure like a Merkle tree that is stored off-chain, and any zero knowledge proof or garbled circuit computation would require them to introduce that information, because otherwise there would be a visible “hole” in the provided data that the verifier would recognize. The Unirep protocol is an example of how this might be implemented.
The point of these examples is not to show exactly how cryptographic technology can be used to solve all of the privacy and data permissioning problems with SBTs. Rather, it is to sketch out a few examples to show the power of such technologies. An important future research direction is to scope the exact limits of different kinds of data permissioning and the specific combinations of techniques that work best to achieve the desired level of permissions. Another question is what types of plural property regimes are desirable to govern data, and how to properly unbundle access (“usus”), editing (“abusus”) and cash.
如何存储外链数据的选择由个人决定；可能的解决方案包括（i）他们自己的设备，（ii）他们信任的云服务，或（iii）去中心化网络，例如星际文件系统（IPFS）。将数据存储在链下让我们继续拥有有权写入 SBT 数据的智能合约，但同时拥有读取该数据的单独权限。Bob 可以选择仅在他愿意时透露他的任何 SBT（或他们允许的数据存储）的内容。这已经让我们走得很远，并且具有提高技术可扩展性的进一步好处，因为大多数数据只需要由极少数方处理。但要完全实现多元隐私等属性，以及更细粒度的披露形式，我们还需要更进一步。幸运的是，许多加密技术让我们能够做到这一点。
一组强大的构建块能够以新的方式部分揭示数据，它是密码学的一个分支，称为**“零知识证明”**。虽然如今零知识证明最常用于保护隐私的资产转移，但它们也可以让人们证明任意陈述，而无需透露陈述本身之外的任何更多信息。例如，在一个政府文件和其他证明可以通过密码证明的世界中，有人可以证明这样的陈述：“我是加拿大公民，年满 18 岁，拥有大学经济学学位和超过 50,000 名 Twitter 关注者，并且谁还没有在这个系统中申请账户。”零知识证明可以通过 SBT 计算来证明灵魂的特征（例如，它具有某些成员资格）。通过引入多方计算技术（例如乱码电路）可以进一步扩展该技术，这可以使此类测试具有双重私密性：证明者不会向验证者透露他们是谁，而验证者不会向证明者透露他们的验证机制。相反，双方一起进行计算，只学习输出。
另一种强大的技术是指定验证者证明。总的来说，“数据”是很滑的：如果我向您发送电影，我无法在技术上阻止您录制并将其发送给第三方。数字版权管理 (DRM) 之类的变通办法充其量只能起到有限的作用，而且通常会给用户带来巨大的成本。然而，证明并不是以同样的方式滑溜的。如果 Amma 想向 Bob 证明一些关于她的 SBT 的属性 X，她可以对“我持有满足属性 X 的 SBT，或者我拥有 Bob 的灵魂的访问密钥”这一陈述进行零知识证明。 Bob 会发现这个陈述令人信服：他知道他没有做出证明，因此 Amma 实际上必须有满足性质 X 的 SBT。但是如果 Bob 将证明传递给 Cuifen，Cuifen 不会被说服：据他所知， Bob 可以用他自己的密钥来证明。这可以通过可验证的延迟函数 (VDF) 变得更加强大：Amma 可以制作并展示目前只能使用所需的 SBT 制作的证明，但其他任何人都可以在五分钟后制作。这意味着尽管不可能对原始数据本身（可能只是简单地复制和粘贴）进行相同类型的选择性权限，但可以表示对有关数据的可信证明的复杂访问权限。尽管如此，这可能会让我们走得很远。正如区块链在交易中提供可追溯性以防止某人右键单击复制和粘贴有价值的 NFT（以及女巫攻击原始所有者）一样，SBT 可以在社会传播方面提供可追溯性，这至少可以减少来源未经验证的复制粘贴数据的价值。
这些链下数据和零知识技术与负面声誉兼容——即使持有者不希望它们可见，SBT 也会变得可见。负面声誉的重要示例包括信用记录、未付贷款数据、负面评论和业务合作伙伴的投诉，以及证明与协调相关的社会关系的 SBT。与相同密码学相结合的区块链可以提供一个潜在的解决方案：智能合约逻辑可以强制 Souls 将负 SBT 合并到数据结构中，例如存储在链外的 Merkle 树，并且任何零知识证明或乱码电路计算都需要他们介绍该信息，否则在提供的数据中会有一个可见的“漏洞”，验证者会识别出来。 Unirep 协议是如何实现这一点的一个例子。
这些示例的重点并不是要准确说明如何使用加密技术来解决 SBT 的所有隐私和数据许可问题。相反，它是勾勒出几个例子来展示这些技术的力量。一个重要的未来研究方向是确定不同类型数据许可的确切限制以及最适合实现所需许可级别的技术的特定组合。 另一个问题是需要什么样的多元财产制度来管理数据，以及如何正确地拆分访问（“usus”）、编辑（“abusus”）和现金。
7.2 Cheating Souls
If SBTs are the social substrate upon which plural property, network goods and intelligences are coordinated, one might be concerned that Souls will try to trick or cheat their way into communities to gain access to governance or property rights that we imagine SBTs permissioning. For example, if many applications depend on SBTs representing conference attendance, unscrupulous conferences could offer such SBTs in exchange for bribes. With enough bribes, humans (and bots) could generate a fake social graph that makes the account look like an authentic human Soul, richly ifferentiated by (fake) SBTs. Just as DAOs can be bribed, so can Souls and the on-chain voting mechanisms which they use. Conversely, if SBTs are used to discount coordination, Souls may avoid SBTs to maximize their influence. Why should we believe that the SBTs a Soul possess accurately reflect their true social commitments rather than simply how they choose to play this game?
One argument is that the varying incentives to cheat may “balance out.” Souls may sort and self-identify into the networks that are important to them at the right scale, much like how Harberger taxes balance out the incentive to over-value and under-value assets to elicit approximately accurate market valuations. Souls will want to hold more SBTs to gain influence within their communities, but on the other hand will eschew SBTs from communities they care less about to score lower on correlation metrics and increase their influence in governance over broader networks.
But it would be naive to assume that the two incentives—to gain access and maximize influence—always evenly cancel out, or even come close to canceling out, as though by magic. There may be many communities that use systems other than SBTs to gate access and governance. Or communities may—counter to our primary assumption about publicity—dole out private SBTs to reflect governance rights, but induce community members to keep these SBTs secret in broader decisions.
The problem of “gaming” should not be understated. It is a significant issue and resolving it is one of the most important foci for future research. Indeed, it is a major reason why open-sourcing many existing algorithms that prioritize or filter for human users is very challenging. To mitigate and deter SBT gaming, we suggest several norms and cryptographic directions:
如果 SBT 是多种财产、网络商品和智能在其上协调的社会基础，人们可能会担心灵魂会试图欺骗或欺骗他们进入社区，以获得我们想象 SBT 允许的治理或财产权。例如，如果许多应用程序依赖于代表会议出席的 SBT，则不道德的会议可能会提供此类 SBT 以换取贿赂。有了足够的贿赂，人类（和机器人）可以生成一个虚假的社交图谱，使该帐户看起来像一个真实的人类灵魂，并被（假的）SBT 丰富地分化。就像 DAO 可以被贿赂一样，Souls 和他们使用的链上投票机制也可以。相反，如果使用 SBT 来降低协调性，Souls 可能会避免 SBT 以最大化其影响力。为什么我们应该相信灵魂拥有的 SBT 准确地反映了他们真正的社会承诺，而不仅仅是他们选择玩这个游戏的方式？
一个论点是，不同的作弊动机可能会“平衡”。灵魂可能会以适当的规模分类和自我识别到对他们来说很重要的网络中，就像哈伯格税收如何平衡高估和低估资产的激励，以得出大致准确的市场估值一样。 Souls 将希望持有更多的 SBT 以在其社区中获得影响力，但另一方面，他们会避开他们不太关心的社区中的 SBT，以在相关性指标上得分较低，并增加他们在更广泛网络治理中的影响力。
但是，如果假设这两种激励措施——获得访问权和最大化影响力——总是均匀地抵消，甚至接近于抵消，就好像施了魔法一样，那就太天真了。可能有许多社区使用 SBT 以外的系统来控制访问和治理。或者社区可能——与我们关于公开的主要假设相反——发放私人 SBT 以反映治理权利，但诱使社区成员在更广泛的决策中对这些 SBT 保密。
“游戏”的问题不容小觑。这是一个重要的问题，解决它是未来研究的最重要的焦点之一。事实上，这也是为什么开源许多为人类用户优先考虑或过滤的现有算法非常具有挑战性的一个主要原因。为了减轻和阻止 SBT 游戏，我们建议了几个规范和加密方向：
- The ecosystem of SBTs could bootstrap off “thick” community channels, where SBTs signal authentic off-chain community membership with strong social bonds and repeat interactions. This would make it easier for communities to filter and revoke SBTs of impersonators and bots. Such thick channels—which we often find in churches, workplaces, schools, meet-up groups, and organizations in civil society—would provide a more sybil-resistant social substrate to police gaming (e.g., through bots, bribes, impersonation) in more “thin” social channels.
- Nested communities could require SBTs to force context on potential collusion vectors “just below” them. For example, if a state were holding a funding round or vote, the state might require every participating citizen to also hold an SBT of a defined county and municipality.
- The openness and cryptographic provability of the SBT ecosystem could itself be used to actively detect collusive patterns and penalize inauthentic behavior—perhaps discounting the voting power of collusive Souls, or obliging Souls to accept SBTs representing negative attestations. For example, if one Soul attests to the humanity of another Soul that turns out to be a bot, the case can be escalated and publicly verified, leading to that Soul having a large number of negative attestations. This already happens to an extent within the GitCoin QF ecosystem, where a range of signals are used to detect “collusive groups.”
- ZK technology (eg. MACI) could cryptographically prevent some attestations made by a Soul from being provable. This would make attempts to sell certain kinds of attestations non-credible, because the briber would have no way to tell whether or not the bribe recipient followed through on their side of the deal. There has been a large body of research on the use of such techniques for voting, but ultimately any non-financialized social mechanism may end up benefiting from similar ideas.
- We could encourage whistleblowers as a way of making collusion of significant size unstable. Instead of detecting and penalizing incorrect or abusive behavior, we detect and penalize abusive patterns of collusion. This technique is risky to overuse because of the possibility of false-flag bribes, but it is nevertheless part of the toolkit.
- We could use mechanisms from peer-prediction theory to encourage reporting to be honest in all cases except where collusion is extremely large. Instead of the conference attesting to attendees’ attendance, attendees could attest to each other’s attendance, so the number of participants that would need to be bribed to attest to a false claim becomes very large. The rewards need not be financial, but could be SBTs, making the rewards more useful to genuine community members than they are to attackers.
- We could use correlation scores that focus on correlations where there is a large incentive to be honest if a group of Souls share a common interest. For example, the correlation scoring technique used in bounded pairwise quadrating funding uses quadratic funding donations themselves to determine how correlated two participants are, and therefore how much to discount their intersection. If two participants share many common interests, their incentive to express this fact to the QF mechanism is certainly diminished with correlation discounting, but it never becomes zero or negative.
While the range of identity frameworks proposed is almost limitless, there are four particularly prominent and adjacent paradigms widely discussed in the web3 space that merit comparison: the dominant “legacy” identity ecosystem, the pseudonymous economy, proof of personhood, and verifiable credentials. Each paradigm highlights important contributions and challenges for future development of the social identity paradigm we advocate, and we use such limitations as a springboard for exploring future directions. All that considered, we also explain why we believe our social identity primitives of Souls and soulbound tokens are a more promising path forward for privacy regimes.
- SBT 的生态系统可以引导“厚”的社区渠道，在这些渠道中，SBT 通过强大的社会纽带和重复互动表明真正的链下社区成员身份。 这将使社区更容易过滤和撤销冒充者和机器人的 SBT。 如此密集的渠道——我们经常在教堂、工作场所、学校、聚会小组和民间社会的组织中发现——将为警察博弈（例如，通过机器人、贿赂、冒充）提供更具抗女巫性的社会基础。 “瘦”社交渠道。
- 嵌套社区可能需要 SBT 将上下文强加在“正下方”的潜在共谋向量上。例如，如果一个州正在举行一轮融资或投票，该州可能会要求每个参与的公民也持有一个确定的县和市的 SBT。
- SBT 生态系统的开放性和密码学可证明性本身可用于主动检测合谋模式并惩罚不真实行为——可能会降低合谋 Souls 的投票权，或迫使 Souls 接受代表负面证明的 SBT。例如，如果一个灵魂证明另一个灵魂是机器人的人性，那么案件可以升级并公开验证，导致该灵魂有大量负面证明。这在 GitCoin QF 生态系统中已经在一定程度上发生了，其中使用一系列信号来检测“合谋团体”。
- ZK 技术（例如 MACI）可以通过密码防止灵魂做出的某些证明是可证明的。这将使出售某些类型的证明的尝试变得不可信，因为贿赂者无法判断受贿者是否遵守了他们的交易。已经有大量关于使用这种技术进行投票的研究，但最终任何非金融化的社会机制都可能最终受益于类似的想法。
- 我们可以鼓励举报人，以此来使大规模的串通变得不稳定。我们不是检测和惩罚不正确或滥用行为，而是检测和惩罚共谋的滥用模式。由于存在虚假贿赂的可能性，这种技术有过度使用的风险，但它仍然是工具包的一部分。
- 我们可以使用来自同行预测理论的机制来鼓励在所有情况下都诚实报告，除非串通非常大。与会议证明与会者的出席不同，与会者可以证明彼此的出席，因此需要贿赂以证明虚假声明的与会者数量变得非常大。奖励不一定是金钱上的，但可以是 SBT，这使得奖励对真正的社区成员比对攻击者更有用。
- 如果一群灵魂有共同的兴趣，我们可以使用关注相关性的相关性分数。例如，有界成对二次融资中使用的相关评分技术使用二次融资捐赠本身来确定两个参与者的相关性，从而确定他们的交集的折扣程度。如果两个参与者有许多共同利益，他们向 QF 机制表达这一事实的动机肯定会随着相关性折扣而减少，但它永远不会变成零或负数。
虽然提出的身份框架的范围几乎是无限的，但在 web3 空间中有四个特别突出和相邻的范式被广泛讨论，值得比较：占主导地位的“传统”身份生态系统、假名经济、人格证明和可验证的凭据。每个范式都突出了我们所倡导的社会认同范式未来发展的重要贡献和挑战，我们将这些限制作为探索未来方向的跳板。考虑到所有这些，我们还解释了为什么我们相信我们的灵魂和灵魂令牌的社会身份原语是隐私制度的一条更有希望的前进道路。
