Vitalik Buterin's Soulbound Tokens aim to put credentials on-chain, but anyone could issue false or harmful statements attached to your identity permanently. The conversation explores whether users can control what gets posted about them and how to design systems that let people ignore unverified credentials.
In the internet that we are building, you will always be able to publish the data about yourself or you'll always be able to post a status update.
Yeah.
You'll always be able to tell that you did something. If you don't tell to the world that we just recorded this podcast, nobody will know about it. You need to be the source of the information. But at the same time, it's going to be less credential that you— the things that you say about yourself will be less valuable than some credible institution saying that, oh, Michelangelo is actually excellent. He actually completed this with great outcomes. And when you just post this on LinkedIn that, oh, this was a great success. And of course the team was super motivated. Everybody was was happy and we reached 120%. You know, like, it's fun that you said that, but I would like to have some, you know, verifiable information to it. So that's the fun twist. But of course, you will always be able to represent yourself online however you want.
Right, right. But like, my point is, if we get an automated system that sort of drags the information directly because it makes it more convenient, it's not like you're going to have to opt in every time. You're going to be like, yeah, that is true, or no, that is false. Like, something could be— is it ever going to be just dropped on you because you participated somewhere?
This is a controversial and ongoing debate on, like, you know, let's go there. We're in this system, like, is opt-in, like, how much of, like, the system is opt-in, how much is, like, opt-out, how much, you know, do you have control over, you know, what people say about you? So, okay, I'm going to introduce this fun concept. In May this year, Vitalik and a few researchers from digital identity world dropped a paper about decentralized society. The paper was really widely acknowledged and I loved it. It was made mainly in the context of how can we use blockchains To represent human interactions and how can we represent each other within communities. And as part of this paper, they introduced also a concept of soulbound tokens. You maybe have heard about them. The name is famously terrible, but the concept is really—
Why famously terrible?
Soulbound. Will your mom understand why are you collecting soulbound tokens? Maybe it works in Italian. In Polish, it doesn't work. So yeah, there is this name, it's taken straight out from Warcraft. So it's not really meant to be used professionally.
Well, it's interesting because it goes directly to your soul. It's not even personalized.
Yeah, the concept is that it represents your identity. It's not meant to be resellable. It's issued by one institution or one community to you, and it's just stuck with you. And now, I'm going to go straight to the downsides right now, even because obviously I love the concept. We're using it with Mazure, and I believe that SBTs, these solvent tokens, are the future of how we present ourselves on the internet.
Okay. So something that is dropped upon you that says something about you.
Yes. And I love the concept. And of course there are things to improve, but I'm in the camp of people that like the concept of these NFTs that represent you and you cannot transfer them. But here's the problem. If you cannot transfer it or you cannot get it out of your soul, what if somebody, one, tells something just wrong about you or just they say to the world that you are actually slacking at work and you're not really that cool and you're honestly boring. You don't even speak good English or something like that. And Like, you know, 2, maybe they will just like lie that, oh, maybe you like committed crime in the past.
But now I'm marked forever.
You're marked forever. And like, you know, it has to be like you suddenly need to opt out somehow, you know, because like there is something said about you that, you know, was not verified, but people can already start making some assumptions.
But is this permissionless? Like, can anybody drop anything about anyone?
In the design proposed by the paper, yes. And here comes your question, is your identity something that is just dropped in on you? Probably not. It's not going to work exactly like that because of these problems of if people can permissionlessly drop stuff on you and mark you on chain and you kind of get rid of that. It's not going to work.
Or it could work, but it will be meaningless. It's like, yeah, those are the shitty certificates that you received that are unverified. undouble-checked or something.
Hopefully. But again, here comes the innovation and responsibility on the builders, developers, and entrepreneurs. We are responsible for building the future. And if we build this very viral product that gets incredibly fast, gets traction and adoption incredibly fast, but it doesn't show up on the front end and doesn't display the fact that something is unverified. As you mentioned, it's not double-checked and should be ignored, but maybe it's going to show that, oh yeah, you committed the crime because somebody said so. It's going to be a problem. And it depends on us builders, on us entrepreneurs to actually build systems that will properly reflect that and will support the end user with the decision of, should I value this credential? Should I trust this identity provider?
