wallet/docs/manifesto/vision.md

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title:
Vision Statement
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Not only money secured by the blockchain, but pseudonymous identities with money and
reputation secured by the blockchain.
Satoshi was after the money in the seignorage tax. There is also a lot of money in
eBay and Amazon owning other people's reputations, a lot of money in the domain name
system, and a lot of money in limited liability company name registration. eBay is
entirely a search engine for the reputation data of people doing transactions and
Amazon is largely such a search engine, and the primary asset value of most businesses is the goodwill accrued by their registered company name.
Our vision is a web 3.0 whose root of identity is not domain certificate authorities
and registrars, but the master secrets of wallets. The seizure or blocking of domain
names by authorities has become a big problem, as is Amazon and eBay casually
mistreating and exploiting the people who rely on their reputation systems.
Satoshi's objective with Bitcoin was to allow people to transact over the internet
without an intermediary that could reverse, freeze, or confiscate transactions.
This has been accomplished, though we are hitting scaling problems hard,
resulting in slow and expensive transactions.
We now, however, need a mechanism of communication and pseudonymous identity
that can neither be censored, nor shilled and spammed into oblivion,
where private pseudonymous communications can carry money, and can be revealed
and proven by the parties to the transaction if they so choose subsequently,
enabling pseudonymous identities to accrue reputation as with Amazon and eBay.
And we want long accrued reputation to be also provable on the blockchain,
and not confiscatable or poisonable by third parties
like Amazon or eBay or the government.
At present the big weakness and privacy hole in crypto currency transactions is
that the metadata about the transaction must go other some other channel,
usually a channel that is insecure and far from private,
and the agreement to exchange money for goods and services cannot be easily
and provably linked to the payment. The linkage is made ad-hoc by some
mechanism outside the blockchain. We need an uncensorable net,
and we also need private communications that support secure transaction metadata
that is testified to by a hash in the blockchain.
Our project is to provide the tools and protocols for cryptographically secure
transactions and communications, such that identities are not rooted in a
certificate authority, and such that the parties have a timestamp on the blockchain
to the transaction metadata, a timestamp as to why the transaction and what it was
about. To replace eBay and Amazon, we build a reputation system on top of that,
and to replace limited liability name registration, bookkeeping, including book
keeping for funds shared to a common purpose.
Suppose an identity solicits money from other identities for some common purpose.
He then has to prove that he is spending it on this purpose. Which at present
is done by the formation of a corporate identity subject to government oversight,
which tends to oversee that you are hiring people of the right accreditation, race,
sex, and sexual preference, rather than oversee that you are using the money for the
intended purpose. We need to provide, not just reputations of buyers and sellers,
but the means for trust in the collective use of funds. The corporate form is
collapsing under a pile of government interventions intended to secure results
that do not reflect the interests or desires of the corporation,
which undermine the cohesion and unity of the corporation. The CEO lives in fear
and terror of HR, legal, and accounting, because their powerbases are in the state,
not in the corporation.
To make a start to resolve these problems, we implement the Zooko name
system for encrypted private and signed public communications,
and then a blockchain whose transactions contain within its timestamp
of the hash of the communications about the transaction.
We need a crypto currency that is inside of and on top of a secure system of
communication and identity.