Sahil Handa

1 followers · 2 following · 851 views

on the atlas — 14

highlights — 67

It seems like every time we get a breath of hope, we're crushed by something more awful—omnicron surge after a sigh of relief, now an invasion and missiles hitting capital cities.
despair and hope - by Spencer Chang - spencer's thoughts
I agree with the skeptics that much of the crypto market consists of overvalued, overhyped and possibly fraudulent assets, and I am unmoved by the most utopian sentiments shared by pro-crypto zealots (such as the claim by Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter chief, that Bitcoin will usher in world peace). But as I’ve experimented more with crypto — including accidentally selling an NFT for more than $500,000 in a charity auction last year — I’ve come to accept that it isn’t all a cynical money-grab, and that there are things of actual substance being built. I’ve also learned, in my career as a tech…
The Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto - The New York Times
Having the credentials reside away from a credentials authority opens up the design space. We can imagine new credentials that we didn’t imagine or think possible.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part Two - RadicalxChange
But Olympus is largely controlled by its pseudonymous founder, Zeus, whose statements about the business model have baffled industry insiders. The result has been to leave even crypto enthusiasts musing publicly that the operation is probably a Ponzi scheme entirely reliant on participants’ continual faith and inflows of crypto to stay afloat.
Reality Intrudes on a Utopian Crypto Vision - The New York Times
Breathe. Read the air. We are all going online in a new way, and we will never entirely leave again. In this new era, cultural literacy is a baseline requirement for making technology, for making policy, for living and for dying. Squad up. The real knowledge work begins now.
Premonition
If Silicon Valley is going to become more involved with politics, what positions will it be taking? → I expect Silicon Valley will see itself as high-modernist rebuilders of the new economy, the new “captains of industry” who will put in place a new set of public-private infrastructure and public goods, as well as being much more involved in domestic and foreign policy. This will be a centralizing force, and the “decentralization” movement will be the natural counterculture, absorbing both traditional leftists and traditional libertarians into an ideological agglomeration. We will see the tens…
Premonition
We will probably see Zoom competitors emerge in the next 2 months that serve the JTBD of online collaboration and online socializing much better than Zoom does. I think there are lots of low-hanging fruit in this product space that I’d like to see more of.
Premonition
Under quarantine conditions, there is less opportunity to physically signal one’s participation in a culture, so clothing and conspicuous consumption matter less. Instead, public lifestyle display and subcultural posturing will happen primarily online.
Premonition
Decentraland alone has had more than 1,000 different referendums on topics such as “Should wearables including guns be allowed?”
Reality Intrudes on a Utopian Crypto Vision - The New York Times
“The virtual world in your hands” is the slogan at Decentraland, a virtual game space that, like most DAOs, relies on online voting forums to make decisions. Players can use tokens to buy “land” or costumes, and hang out as avatars at virtual social events.
Reality Intrudes on a Utopian Crypto Vision - The New York Times
Although DAOs may select leadership groups or hire staff, the major decision-making power is theoretically left to the members, ensuring in theory that choices serve the majority of participants.
Reality Intrudes on a Utopian Crypto Vision - The New York Times
This messy gestation has fueled a debate: Are these ventures simply vehicles to enrich insiders and exploit consumers, or early experiments in a new way of doing business?
Reality Intrudes on a Utopian Crypto Vision - The New York Times
Many DAOs are wrestling with challenges, including huge financial losses from software flaws and hacks, internal divisions that threaten some entities’ continued existence and allegations of improper diversion of community funds. Others have struggled with low turnout among members when it comes to voting on a strategy or business decision, effectively leaving control in the hands of the investors who put up money to help start them.
Reality Intrudes on a Utopian Crypto Vision - The New York Times
the Securities and Exchange Commission in November effectively shut it down, saying the enterprise was “materially misleading” the public with contradictory filings that failed to disclose key information such as audited financial statements.
Reality Intrudes on a Utopian Crypto Vision - The New York Times
Members of DAOs are clashing with one another about how to balance the need for skilled and experienced managers against the idealistic vision of communal decision-making. In some cases, crypto investors and regulators say, the ventures amount to Ponzi schemes intended to do little more than bolster the value of the digital tokens they sell.
Reality Intrudes on a Utopian Crypto Vision - The New York Times
CryptoFed is a “decentralized autonomous organization” that is supposed to be steered automatically by computer code and governed by a community of users who vote on proposals with crypto tokens
Reality Intrudes on a Utopian Crypto Vision - The New York Times
Sheer size is not all that matters, because complementarity between workers matters even more – a skilled software engineer will likely increase her income more by moving to Berlin (population: 4.4 million) than to Mexico City (population: 21 million). But there is strong empirical evidence that, other things being equal, bigger is better. This helps workers directly: people who moved from small to large cities in a study in Spain gained a wage premium when they did so, and accumulated better experience as time went by – and their experience persisted even if they moved away later, in the form…
The housing theory of everything - Works in Progress
That means people who do get to live in these high-productivity places are less productive than they could be, because they are less able to combine their skills with the complementary skills of the people who have been priced out.
The housing theory of everything - Works in Progress
when housing is scarce in high-productivity areas, some people are priced out of the area altogether, so they can’t move within range of better jobs. This means that many people are working in less productive jobs than they could if it was easier for them to move to more productive places.
The housing theory of everything - Works in Progress
This was surprising to me. So much work, energy, and time has gone into creating a trustless distributed consensus mechanism, but virtually all clients that wish to access it do so by simply trusting the outputs from these two companies without any further verification.
Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> My first impressions of web3
One thing that has always felt strange to me about the cryptocurrency world is the lack of attention to the client/server interface. When people talk about blockchains, they talk about distributed trust, leaderless consensus, and all the mechanics of how that works, but often gloss over the reality that clients ultimately can’t participate in those mechanics. All the network diagrams are of servers, the trust model is between servers, everything is about servers. Blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your br…
Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> My first impressions of web3
A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform. After 30+ years, email is still unencrypted; meanwhile WhatsApp went from unencrypted to full e2ee in a year. People are still trying to standardize sharing a video reliably over IRC; meanwhile, Slack lets you create custom reaction emoji based on your face. This isn’t a funding issue. If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time.
Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> My first impressions of web3
If there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned about the world, it’s that people do not want to run their own servers.
Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> My first impressions of web3
The amount of data points that can comprise one's on chain identity are boundless, thereby posing a design challenge fro an agreed upon method to collect, organize and display for others to comprehend.
On-chain identity landscape — Shrey Jain
Our identities in Web3 can be as private or as public as we want to make them. Due to the lack of centralization and the ability to have all data viewable on the blockchain, individuals can be extremely public or extremely private as compared to their Web2 self. People will be able to construct uniquely verified identities for themselves that can be completely disjoint from one another while still on-chain. The more work we do to put identity on-chain, the closer we are getting to quantifying a humans worth.
On-chain identity landscape — Shrey Jain
Individual assets, transactions, and participation in Web3 communities are done across multiple wallets and chains. This fragmentation of wallet identity will continue to increase with creation of networked products that are not exclusively built on bluechip infrastructure.
On-chain identity landscape — Shrey Jain
By putting identity on-chain, hiring teams can rely on verification instead of trust in hiring. As an example, “Stripe Engineer on X team” is less informative to a hiring manager than having the tasks completed and peer reviews on-chain and available to query.
On-chain identity landscape — Shrey Jain
By proving unique identity on-chain, we move towards a one-person one-vote model within DAOs that increases a protocol's resistance towards Sybil attacks.
On-chain identity landscape — Shrey Jain
However this quickly became problematic, as for each online service a user needed a unique account, meaning we each have dozens if not hundreds of different digital identities. The Identity Provider (IdP) became a “solution” to the issue of digital identity sprawl. This step back to centralization means people are required to leverage identifiers issued to them by Google and Facebook as the anchor for their identity and data across the digital world.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
The internet created a proliferation of identifiers the patterns we have today are a patchwork made by private companies for very narrow domains for commerce and media applications, and later for business and productivity. This is arguably the beginning of decentralizing identity registries beyond governments.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
Prior to the modern era, identity was primarily based on community, place, religion and other social relations. However, with the advent of the nation state beginning at the end of the Middle Ages and culminating in the nineteenth century, centralized identity systems have become the default.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
Any identity system depends on the trust a user bestows on the system.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
. To truly diffuse power and spread it across a wider range of operators would require identifiers themselves to rest with a wider range of individuals, groups, and entities in the network, rather than with a few central providers.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
Take for example India’s national digital identity system, Aadhaar. Initially it was conceptualized to deliver services to the most vulnerable of the population. Today, the techal-political leadership sees this identity system as singular link for all domains of identity for residents of India. The problems are manifest, and non-speculative: people who have difficulty enrolling in the system or once enrolled have difficulty doing authentication are not receiving food rations.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
As digital identity systems begin to be introduced in government services, some countries have gone ahead with the patterns and practices of centralized digital identity providers on the internet
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
These perspectives provide richer windows into aspects of your identity than does a name by itself, which after all is simply a description of the family you come from and an arbitrary label assigned to you by your parents. They may even be, together, enough to uniquely identify you. Yet each is separate from the others and (without further references) does not tell you anything about the others.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
This question of “who are you” arises in all types of contexts related to identity, however, the words “who” and “you” are much more complex than we might at first imagine.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
To avoid the worst pitfalls of existing identity systems, we believe any successful system must be humanistic, flexible, decentralized, and social.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
At their core, multi-signature accounts enable composable identity on web 3.0. When we approach identity as an inventory holding multiple contexts, we can expansively navigate the highly varied use cases of a peer-to-peer web, and reimagine what we are. By reevaluating identity in our technical systems, we can also fundamentally remap agency in the political sphere to come.
Inventories, Not Identities. Why multisigs are the future of online… | by Kei Kreutler | Gnosis
The third post imagines transformative of such an identity system for political economy. It explores how it would enable much more flexible and responsive democracy at a global scale than has ever been possible, how it could empower a new data economy based on collective organization to reclaim data value from corporate platforms and how, most radically, it could eventually lead to the replacement of money by a new, more social and system of value aggregation.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
The second post focuses on remedies that decentralized identity have to the current state of the art:
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
It also highlights opportunities that decentralized identity systems create which historically were not possible. For example: resolving the tension between privacy and voting exploits in online communities and governance mechanisms in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
An identity system capable of achieving these properties would not just avoid the flattening of our self-conceptions; it would also open up astonishing new possibilities for social organization that the internet has thus far failed to support. I
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
How can we escape this nightmarish oversimplification that technology foists upon us? Retreating from technology is not a viable option, as so much of our lives now depend on the elaborate information systems we have built.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
By investing in such systems, we can continue to enable technological advance and simultaneously reduce the impoverishment of our self-imagination they are currently causing.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
Facebook single sign-in does not allow you to prove you are an observant Muslim, an accomplished artist, a loving partner, a well-trained markswoman or a volunteer firefighter. Assertions of such attributes are common on personal webpages, but verifying them is something that, while relatively easy in standard social networks in real life (IRL), is challenging or sometimes impossible online.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
At the same time, such identity systems have a severely limited range of application; they do not enable you to prove to others most of the attributes of your identity that, in usual human interactions, would be relevant or that we would use to describe acquaintances.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
Most sign-up systems on the internet ask you to use one of a small number of digital identity providers, such as Facebook, Google to login in with. Some requiring “proof of ID” may also ask you to scan in your government issued identity documents. Such systems reduce you to an appendage of these leviathans and leave your identity vulnerable to theft by anyone who obtains your associated credentials.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
In the most extreme case of the digital world reshaping our lives in its own distorted image, we are increasingly asked to make a stark choice between a complete anonymity that fosters extreme irresponsibility and identification that exposes much of our lives to anyone we identify ourselves to. Where once individuals rotated between a variety of contexts (e.g. social, religious, professional, etc.) and verifiably shared aspects of themselves in each of these settings, increasingly information is either public and open to all or private and tightly concealed.
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange
today’s identity systems do great violence to the richness of who we are
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - RadicalxChange