Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Any organization can deny access to a public key associated with a person. The person is still completely free to create another identity and participate.


Identity centralization is inevitable. I do not believe that if the proposed future of DAOs mediated by NFTs comes to pass that it will be feasible to actually possess two public keys that both engage in various systems of any meaningful complexity and cannot be recognized as belonging to the same person.


I hope you realize that your argument is based on the impossibility of proving a negative.


Huh? Of course nobody can prove what the future of blockchains will be. I don't think it is unreasonable to make predictions, though.


I mean your affirmation re: "centralization of identity".

You can not prove that people identities can/will be easily correlated. If there are people handling multiple avatars successfully, you will see them as two separate entities!


I can't prove it mathematically, but it seems obvious given the development of web3 technologies, the motivations behind various organizations involved in these systems, the fact that tighter integration enables more desirable features, and the continued demonstration that it is super easy to reidentify people from all sorts of surprising places.


I think you are still missing the overall point.

What you call "re-identifying" is basically correlating known identities across different systems. But what about alts?

You can quickly go to keybase and find out my "public" reddit account, and someone with direct access to reddit databases could even use the extra information to find some of my alts. But I can bet real money that no one could precisely look at any random reddit account and say "this account is/is not an alt from rglullis".

In a world where creating identities is infinitely cheap to create, you can not rely on identity as a mechanism for censorship or blacklisting.


> In a world where creating identities is infinitely cheap to create

Can you prove that this will be the case? Given that there is value in integration, I don't actually believe that useful identities will be infinitely cheap to create. In the same way that being able to set up a new email address with zero history doesn't actually mean anything when it comes time to apply to jobs.


You are moving the goal posts. The first issue was about denying access to someone completely based on one single identity. Now you are also trying to add the idea of having reputation as a requirement?

Anyway, it is still something to be managed. You just create multiple identities and you work with them to suit the target audience. To go with your "membership to the Communist Party" example, there is nothing stopping any actual communist to have an identity where they act as someone who is not a communist, and use it when needed.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: