Every time we switch platforms, we start from zero.

Our Uber rating doesn't follow us to Lyft. Our eBay reputation vanishes on Etsy. Our track record on one freelancing platform means nothing on another.

We've normalized this. But it's worth pausing to notice how strange it is.

We spend years building reputation somewhere. The moment we leave, those years never happened.

The problem runs deeper than platform lock-in.

Consider a professional with a master's degree and ten years of experience in her field in Korea. To work in the UK, she needs to retrain for two years. As if a decade of demonstrated competence counts for nothing once she crosses a border.

We've all heard versions of this story. Doctors in one country becoming taxi drivers in another. Engineers re-taking exams they passed fifteen years ago. Professionals spending years re-proving what they've already proven.

This is the cold start problem at civilizational scale. And we've just accepted it as the cost of moving between contexts.

We built infrastructure for moving value across borders centuries ago. We never built it for trust.

What changes when our track records become portable?

Not a universal score. Not social credit. Something more specific.

Portable reputation means verified behavioral history that we control and choose to share. Aggregated evidence from multiple independent sources. It's hard to fake because gaming the system would require compromising unrelated parties simultaneously.

A contractor's delivery rate across fifteen projects, visible before the first conversation. A contributor's participation pattern across communities, evident before governance weight gets assigned. An agent's performance history across protocols, queryable before delegation.

Multi-source verification. Not one platform's opinion. Not self-reported claims.

We know where some minds go when they hear "portable reputation."

Black Mirror. The episode where everyone rates each other and society becomes a dystopian performance of forced pleasantness. Social credit scores. Permanent records that follow us forever.

These concerns are legitimate. And they point to exactly why the design matters.

What we're building is not a system that judges us for having a bad day. Everyone has bad days. Everyone misses deadlines sometimes. Circumstances happen.

The point is pattern recognition with context.

Maybe our last coworker had it out for us. That happens. But if coworkers in our last five workplaces all had it out for us, maybe it's a pattern, not a coincidence.

Single data points mean little. Aggregated behavior over time, across contexts, from independent sources, means something.

The difference between surveillance and accountability is whether the system is designed to punish moments or recognize patterns.

There's an old Buddhist story about a man named Angulimala.

He had a dark past. His family died when he was young. He went mad with grief and rage and became a murderer. He wore a garland of fingers from his victims around his neck. He was, by any measure, a monster.

One day he encountered the Buddha, intending to kill him. Something shifted. He transformed completely. Became a disciple. Achieved enlightenment.

When he returned to the towns where he had murdered people, they recognized him. They threw rocks at him. He didn't react as he once would have. He bowed. He forgave them. He was a different person entirely.

The story matters because transformation is real. People change. Sometimes radically. Any system that makes reputation portable must account for this.

This is why decay functions are not optional. They're central.

Old data should become less relevant over time. The person we were five years ago should not define the person we are today, unless the patterns persist. The system must be designed for accountability without permanent scarring.

Angulimala's garland of fingers would have followed him forever in a poorly designed system. In a well-designed one, his decade of compassion would eventually outweigh it.

The question isn't whether this infrastructure will exist.

The demand is too strong. The friction costs are too high. Someone will build reputation infrastructure.

The question is who builds it and how.

Centralized reputation is surveillance by another name. One entity deciding what counts, who's trustworthy, what gets remembered. Platform lock-in with new branding.

Protocol-owned reputation is different. Transparent algorithms. Auditable weights. Forkable for different contexts. Decay that allows transformation. User control over what gets shared.

The end of starting over is coming. What we build now determines whether it's liberation or a new kind of cage.

Every time we switch platforms, we start from zero.

Our Uber rating doesn't follow us to Lyft. Our eBay reputation vanishes on Etsy. Our track record on one freelancing platform means nothing on another.

We've normalized this. But it's worth pausing to notice how strange it is.

We spend years building reputation somewhere. The moment we leave, those years never happened.

The problem runs deeper than platform lock-in.

Consider a professional with a master's degree and ten years of experience in her field in Korea. To work in the UK, she needs to retrain for two years. As if a decade of demonstrated competence counts for nothing once she crosses a border.

We've all heard versions of this story. Doctors in one country becoming taxi drivers in another. Engineers re-taking exams they passed fifteen years ago. Professionals spending years re-proving what they've already proven.

This is the cold start problem at civilizational scale. And we've just accepted it as the cost of moving between contexts.

We built infrastructure for moving value across borders centuries ago. We never built it for trust.

What changes when our track records become portable?

Not a universal score. Not social credit. Something more specific.

Portable reputation means verified behavioral history that we control and choose to share. Aggregated evidence from multiple independent sources. It's hard to fake because gaming the system would require compromising unrelated parties simultaneously.

A contractor's delivery rate across fifteen projects, visible before the first conversation. A contributor's participation pattern across communities, evident before governance weight gets assigned. An agent's performance history across protocols, queryable before delegation.

Multi-source verification. Not one platform's opinion. Not self-reported claims.

We know where some minds go when they hear "portable reputation."

Black Mirror. The episode where everyone rates each other and society becomes a dystopian performance of forced pleasantness. Social credit scores. Permanent records that follow us forever.

These concerns are legitimate. And they point to exactly why the design matters.

What we're building is not a system that judges us for having a bad day. Everyone has bad days. Everyone misses deadlines sometimes. Circumstances happen.

The point is pattern recognition with context.

Maybe our last coworker had it out for us. That happens. But if coworkers in our last five workplaces all had it out for us, maybe it's a pattern, not a coincidence.

Single data points mean little. Aggregated behavior over time, across contexts, from independent sources, means something.

The difference between surveillance and accountability is whether the system is designed to punish moments or recognize patterns.

There's an old Buddhist story about a man named Angulimala.

He had a dark past. His family died when he was young. He went mad with grief and rage and became a murderer. He wore a garland of fingers from his victims around his neck. He was, by any measure, a monster.

One day he encountered the Buddha, intending to kill him. Something shifted. He transformed completely. Became a disciple. Achieved enlightenment.

When he returned to the towns where he had murdered people, they recognized him. They threw rocks at him. He didn't react as he once would have. He bowed. He forgave them. He was a different person entirely.

The story matters because transformation is real. People change. Sometimes radically. Any system that makes reputation portable must account for this.

This is why decay functions are not optional. They're central.

Old data should become less relevant over time. The person we were five years ago should not define the person we are today, unless the patterns persist. The system must be designed for accountability without permanent scarring.

Angulimala's garland of fingers would have followed him forever in a poorly designed system. In a well-designed one, his decade of compassion would eventually outweigh it.

The question isn't whether this infrastructure will exist.

The demand is too strong. The friction costs are too high. Someone will build reputation infrastructure.

The question is who builds it and how.

Centralized reputation is surveillance by another name. One entity deciding what counts, who's trustworthy, what gets remembered. Platform lock-in with new branding.

Protocol-owned reputation is different. Transparent algorithms. Auditable weights. Forkable for different contexts. Decay that allows transformation. User control over what gets shared.

The end of starting over is coming. What we build now determines whether it's liberation or a new kind of cage.