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Recently, a promising startup had a wake-up call: a pseudonymous but well-regarded co-founder was recognized at an in-person networking event as a developer who was fired for stealing funds from their previous company. This developer had spent over a year crafting a digital identity, gaining influence and trust through online social networks.
It worked, until the offline world caught up.
This case raises a fundamental challenge in the digital age: how do we build trust in a world where people can be anonymous, but still want to be verified and trusted?
We believe that building digital reputation for the future means separating three often-blurred concepts:
• Anonymous vs. Known
• Unverified vs. Verified
• Untrusted vs. Trusted
These are not the same thing.
You can be anonymous but trusted, known but untrusted, or even verified and still untrusted. Reputation systems that lump these together put you at risk of trusting the wrong person or of missing the right one. Both are costly mistakes!
Proving someone is a scammer is fairly easy. Proof can emerge from clear evidence or whistleblowers. This principle applies for many traits. But proving someone is not a scammer is hard. Lack of "proof of bad" does not equate to proof of good.
That’s where time becomes essential. Verifications and peer endorsements over time, specifically.
Continuous signals of legitimacy — verifiable contributions, peer endorsements, in-person confirmations like event check-ins or trusted employment records — make it exponentially harder for fake identities to gain traction.
The takeaway: strong digital reputation is built from consistent, verifiable actions over time, not just well-crafted profiles. If we want trust in a digital world, we need systems that fully integrate privacy, verification, and trust.
If you’re building in tech and want to connect with people who are verified by real-world interactions, endorsements, and credentials try Icebreaker.
Icebreaker Labs
The fully doxxed have more skin in the game than the pseuds, which is why it’s perplexing to me how in many instances pseuds are more easily able to accrue trust A pseud’s opinion should be doubly discounted. They have no reputation risk
it’s the whole “oh they must really have something to protect bc they are a pseud hence their op must be high value” effect it’s wild how how the human brain defaults to this??
Yes. Because you don’t really know them, they can become this idealized figure
relevant https://paragraph.com/@icebreakerlabs/modern-digital-reputation-trust-verification-and-the-scammer-problem
most pseudos i know with any following/reputation online are fully doxxed behind the scenes. they go to events, take calls w video, etc. it's v rare to see anyone do anything meaningful without fully doxxing. so while full doxx does bring more exposure, i think the diff in risk between reputable pseudos and fully doxxed is wayy overblown. case in point: if seneca were to become a rugger/scammer, the pain i'd inflict on myself and my family would be enormous. "it" _is_ my entire professional career.
The “pseud online, doxxed irl” is an interesting hybrid my model above kind of fails to consider I wish there were better signals in the online space
I feel seen
ethos is trying to partially solve it. not ideal, especially for filtering good guys. but it does a better job at filtering bad guys. guys like sbf, murad, hasbulla, portnoy etc have low scores, so you can search a profile and see if they did public scams check out here. it's invite gated so let me know if you need invite to try it out https://x.com/ethos_network
+1 to all this
If I could go back I'd make my farcaster account anon. I hold myself back too much People trust authenticity
Nothing can be truly authentic under a fake name imo No way to tell if it’s the person or their character
correct me if I’m wrong, but I assume you mean being able to tie a persona and reputation to an actual human? e.g. we only learned moxie marlinspike’s real name in 2011 (which is a long time ago at this point lol) but that didn’t affect his trustworthiness. he’s a smart and real person even if we don’t know his name or birthday easy to be unhinged if it has no material impact on your life or other parts of your online identity
Be that as it may, I think doxxing yourself in the crypto world is unsafe. I'd rather have less skin in the game, as long as it means I don't have to worry about someone from crypto twitter showing up at my house because they didn't like something I said, or maybe because they noticed I have just enough money in my wallet to justify a wrench attack. Reputation risk isn't worth worth having to constantly look over your shoulder.
It’s genuinely sad I’m hearing this so much I suppose bullish for my fortified highly defensible insular community idea though
I think it's inevitable when you're in a space that involves a lot of money. Most people are decent, but all it takes is a very small handfull of very bad actors to make it dangerous to expose your identity along side your financial activity on a publicly auditible ledger.
we all are doxxed, just not publicly.
Yeah, my take is bad bc it’s too black and white. @seneca helped me see that too
your take is good to earn some leaderboard points ;)
interestingly, i instinctively have the opposite reaction. when someone attaches their name and/or face to their opinion, i assume there is something beyond the truth that they need to protect (e.g. reputation). i apply a small bias against. in internet culture/crypto i also consider it a norm violation. it’s not the end of the world, but i assume variables at play other than “they have interesting things to say”. it’s not a level playing field— they haven’t had to build a reputation from a completely clean slate
Counterpoint: Wealthy doxxed have less to lose than poor pseuds. In America your reputation is only as fallible as your ability to stay solvent through the extremely brief periods of cancellation. For example, I have more to lose from being pro crypto and pro socialist amongst my peers in the Canadian small-medium business world, than I could meaningfully gain in credibility by doxxing. Meanwhile rich folks who maintain massive follower bases on here and other social media and have had no risk to career have literally been accused of corruption, embezzlement, fraud, sexual assault, and sedition. See my point?
Also isn’t the whole ethos of crypto “don’t trust, verify?” You can read a Polynya’s opinions on crypto and decide if you agree. Check their math, gpt-splain their logical fallacies, confirm the truthfulness of statements and note bias, all in the same way you could do for some “doxxed” founder. Additionally, doxxed wealthy people may have pseudonymous alts, they certainly have hidden wallets profiting off the “trust” they have earned, swaying (read: manipulating) markets—it’s basically the name of the game in this world. So yeah, I don’t buy it personally. I’d prefer full pseudo to relying on old school trust in a much more nefarious and gameable online world.
a lot of people think i'm a pseud, but my handle is more doxxed (fully unique and easy to map to real identity) than my government name (extremely common to the point that i get many recruiters reaching out conflating the experience of many people with my name at the same time, i even made andreypetrov.com)
Heck, even my own username sort of straddles this same boundary I feel bad about making this post bc a) I think it was interpreted as an anti anon thing which I did not intend b) reminded me of how evil the world has gotten; people are fearful and feel like anon is mandatory
i think the concept of what it means to be anon is evolving, in kind of a romantic interesting way i also think that people should try maintaining an anon with all the opsec that comes with it, 1. it's good practice and raises awareness about important things we don't normally think about 2. it's really fucking hard!!
I just want to be safe.
I haven't come across many projects focused on tackling this problem, @icebreaker seems to be 'the' one 🤔 I'm assuming it's because devs are hoping it will be solved for them through network upgrades? 🤷 https://paragraph.com/@icebreakerlabs/modern-digital-reputation-trust-verification-and-the-scammer-problem
Why haven't attestations been taken more advantage of? 💜
great question. @bap is constantly casting about use cases
They are! It’s still early days and there is wayyyy more work to be done. We need to show more ways attestations can be used. Many builders have a narrow view of what they actually are and how powerful they will become and efficient they are when building.
*sigh of relief* I love seeing more discussions on these topics and have high hopes for the potentials! 🥹
Digital reputation isn't about perfect profiles. It's about consistent, verifiable actions over time. Anonymous ≠ untrusted. Known ≠ trustworthy. Verification without time is just theater. Real trust requires continuous signals. https://paragraph.com/@icebreakerlabs/modern-digital-reputation-trust-verification-and-the-scammer-problem