Speaker 0
0:00 – 3:31
And so, in a nutshell, what sort of DeSoc is is sort of like this vision for the future. But part of this vision for the future includes a few technological primitives that they outline that are based on blockchains. And so the first one that they talk about are souls. It sounds a little bit creepy. I know everybody sort of made that comment, but a soul they describe as an account that can be recovered through social or community relationships. And so, like, the relationships in which you would be a part of or which that would be noted in your soul would be tracked by soul bound tokens or SVTs because the SVTs act as credentials to prove some sort of relationship. So I would have, you know, an SBT showing that I'm part of some group or some organization, and that would be recorded in my soul, which is my account, which rather than being solely like a normal public key which I would have to personally keep track and make sure is safe, my private key in order to access that, your soul would instead be able to be recoverable, so in case you lose your private key, for example, through these social relationships. So since I have an SBT that is associated with, for example, my homeowners association, even though I'm never going to probably own a home at this rate, I can use my relationships with people in the homeowners association to help me recover my wallet if I've ever lost it. So this is something that, Vitalik has actually already written quite a bit about on social recovery, as a way to sort of get around, this critique that having an account on a blockchain is sort of very individualistic and it puts a lot of strain on the single user to be able to track their private key. And if the case that they lose it, they could lose everything that they have if they have everything in their wallet. And so they describe in the paper this quote, so SBTs would be like an extended resume issued by other wallets that attest to these social relationships. And So there is, like, an immediate reaction from me. Right? For me, it's a bit strange to describe soulbound tokens as, like, a resume. To me, that's sort of like a red flag to me. I don't want to have, kind of, my resume publicly available all the time and so necessary for maybe being able to access various services. But to an extent already that is kind of the case as far as, like, if you're in America, you need to have a credit score or you need to have, like, no history of committing federal crimes or something like that. But there is something off putting about having all that information in one place, and could prove to be a privacy nightmare. They sort of note that this could be a privacy nightmare, but they also later in the paper describe some solutions with zero knowledge proofs in order to get around that. But on another side, in that quote, what I think is interesting is that they talk about social relationships. So what they're trying to do is sort of bring in the aspect of the social into blockchain world, which they critique as being too financialized or going down the path of hyper financialization, which is pretty interesting coming from someone who is a founder of Ethereum, which is one of the largest Blockchains out there for decentralized finance.