This week marks 1st anniversary of my working in the privacy and scaling exploration team—the team which specializes in zero-knowledge proof and other L2 scaling projects. Today, I'd like to share design thinking during my experiments and learnings.
My main project is UniRep while helping with various projects within the team, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how this protocol will affect our future society.
UniRep stands for Universal Reputation. In the real world, when someone has a high reputation, that also comes with popularity and fame. But in UniRep, everyone is anonymous; user on this platform has to perform interaction to earn a reputation. It's quite an interesting concept to start with, and it's conflicting with the typical understanding when we talk about the reputation of someone. Reputation has a considerable influence on interaction, for example, you won't be comfortable purchasing from a brand that has a bad reputation, you will raise suspicion about a source that has a low reputation. In short, reputation helps us decide on the action and trust. On the other hand, UniRep uses zero-knowledge proof, preserves the user's complete privacy, and it's impossible to determine which user is the creator of certain items.
It took me some time to balance these two things better: Reputation vs. Anonymous. When designing, we should always remember how to balance the concept with a common understanding, a great design is transparent; it should instantly meet people's expectations without confusion. That being said, if the design thinking is applied with "Reputation" > "Anonymous", then it will be a conflicting mental mind.
Let's try another angle, "Anonymous" > "Reputation". Anonymous this term has various understandings for everyone. Often time, people will be questioning why being anonymous, are you doing something bad or illegal? Well, that's feedback when we mention anonymity in general. I think that comes down to awareness, being anon is about being in the comfort zone where you can fully be yourself, the true you. When your data is stored in a centralized server, or you leave a trail for others to identify you for good or evil, you will realize the value of being anon.
You can always argue that you can create different online identities to protect yourself, and people won't be able to find out that it was you. Nah, that won't work. Imagine that you want to raise your voice for a particular concern; let's say it's the government's choice, and since there is not enough publicity for the bills, it somehow passes, and you strongly believe that was wrong. Now you want to create awareness online with your online identity, the first challenge will be; whether you are a trustworthy source that people can take your word for, and the second challenge will be how you will be able to protect yourself. It will be dead simple to track who you are from the government's setup; OK, let's minimize the impact, the government doesn't care about you, but how about people who hold different opinions? It will take little effort to find or troll who you are.
These are just small sets of samples of being anon. Let's go back to "Anonymous" > "Reputation" design thinking. In UniRep protocol, we want to enable people to be who they want to be, comfortably. While the user is anon and preserves their full privacy with zero-knowledge-proof, how might we allow people to gain a reputation over time so that platform cultivates the community and trust in a decentralized way?
Will we be able to design the social experience for the open web and not repeat the failure? How might we shift the ordinary mental mind from the user to this new paradigm? How should the reputation be earned in the open web setup? Should the reputation be materialized?
I invite you to join the conversation.
If you want to dig into UniRep, here is the repo:
To be continued…