Vitalik Buterin is looking for Web3’s Soul. YourJustice has a solution yet
What if the digitized “souls” of those who start wars would really get to digital hell and suffer forever?.. That was the first thing I had in mind when finished reading this monumental Vitalik’s work. But one thing at a time.
Two events that seemed at first glance to have nothing to do with each other took place in May. First, Netflix has pleased us with the announcement of the sixth season of the “Black Mirror”. Second, Vitalik Buterin, E. Glen Weyl, and Puja Ohlhaver published an article about DeSoc, which many readers thought to be a good plot for one of the very «Mirror» series.
We carefully read the publication to find common approaches with YJ’s vision of web3 and going to reflect a bit on it.
Souls, tokens, and demand for reputation. The DeSoc concept in short.
For those who do not feel like reading, here is a summary of the main points. But if you are immersed in the subject of decentralization of relationships, it is worth having the whole thing.
1. The authors of «Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul» note, that Web3 today centers around expressing transferable, nancialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships of trust. And reputation.
2. Web3’s current ecological defects have led to its increasing reliance on centralized Web2 structures from OpenSea to Binance.
3. A possible solution, from their perspective, is non-transferable «soulbound» token (SBT) representing the commitments and credentials. «Such tokens would be like an extended resume, issued by other wallets that attest to these social relations» — the quote.
4. The key primitive of system is accounts, or wallets, reffered as «Souls» — they hold publicly visible SBT. «Imagine a world where most participants have Souls that store SBTs corresponding to a series of memberships and credentials», the authors urge. It can be a family Soul, a medical Soul, a professional Soul, a political Soul each carrying various SBTs.
5. SBTs held by one Soul can be issued — or attested — by other Souls, who are counterparts to these relationships.
6. The authors are convinced that Web3 aspires to transform societies broadly but “today’s social fabric — families, churches, teams, companies, civil society, celebrity, democracy — is meaningless in virtual worlds without primitives representing human souls and the broader relationships they support”.
7. They suggest creating more intricate, diverse relationships that span greater social distances than before and call this Decentralized Society (DeSoc): «a co-determined sociality, where Souls and Communities convene bottom-up, as emergent properties of each other to produce plural network goods across different scales».
What does YourJustice suggest
Vitalik and colleagues admit there is more than one road to DeSoc, and so it is. YourJustice has been on its way for a year and has already launched the prototype considering reputation as a “soul” of Web3.
We decided to build our platform as we realized that against the backdrop of a technological leap, the world is experiencing a public relationship crisis. The demand for decentralization is growing, so we started working on a constructor that allows everyone to create social relationships in a clean legal environment with built-in decentralized judicial engine. One of the core points in our system is reputation. It is encouraging that the big blockchain players also understand its importance in transforming the web-3 from the world of finance into something more.
— We are offering a reputation system on blockchain that cannot be wiped or deleted and will help make interactions between people smoother and more efficient, says YJ Product manager Andreas Dorau. — Your Justice allows individuals, сommunities, DAO’s to create jurisdictions based on their own rules and values. The token exchange that Buterin proposes may be the most effective within those jurisdictions. In the end, we have a solution not just described but already got a tool to decentralize communities and create a reputation.
Regarding a complete personal “resume” on the blockchain, Andreas has the following opinion:
— I feel as if we want to put everything in the hands of machines too quickly. Launching such systems usually comes with good intentions because it seems like decentralization is supposed to solve lots of the world’s problems. But if we launch it without testing in a small space and conducting the right amount of research, it’s hard to imagine the consequences
By the way, YJ can also be a testing ground for various social theories, utopian and down-to-earth — different ones.
About the mission
Time will show whether the world needs a digital “soul,” reputation or something else. It is encouraging that various players with different approaches are involved in the decentralization of society. YJ is ready to cooperate on the road to DeSoc.
Buterin and his colleagues end their paper with an Einstein quote. He told the 1932 disarmament conference that the failures of the “organizing power of man” to keep pace with “his technical advances” had put a “razor in the hands of a 3-year-old child.”
We, also, believe that the issue of decentralization is nothing less than a matter of human survival.
Ira Helfand, M.D., recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize told the author of this text in an interview:
— I think whether or not we get out of this conflict in Ukraine without a nuclear war will depend only on luck. If we’re lucky or not. But if we’re lucky enough to survive this conflict and a nuclear war doesn’t start, we should be certain that we’ll never be in this situation again.
Looks like we all need to move towards #DeSoc and #DeLaw without wiggling or procrastination.
Nick YJ.
