Hello. In this blog post I’ll be talking about pseudonymity, current pseudonymous activity, and how I think pseudonymous crypto domains will play into the future of the internet and economy.

Note: most of this blog post is influenced by Balaji Srinivasan’s Pseudonymous Economy ideas. I really enjoy and recommend consuming his content.

Sharing opinions and information without revealing personal identities has been creating a growing unique user class on social media, social networks, and online forums. A simple example of this is a “Finsta” or “fake instagram”. This consists of a user who will choose their own handle, reveal aspects of their personal identity, and usually restrict access to people they know and trust. Ironically, users will be their real selves on their Finstas and their fake selves on their “real” Instagram. On top of this irony, users are liking posts that they do not really like or commenting things they don’t really mean.

Regardless, and more importantly, internet users are increasingly utilizing concealing their ‘real’ identities often due to a fear of an awakened cancel culture fueled by online mimesis, scapegoating, and woke internet mobs. Ideally and personally, I hope that I can respectfully challenge other peoples perspectives and ideas in an interdependent way without negative social consequences. More importantly, I welcome others to challenge, critique, and evaluate my perspectives and ideas too so I can see my flaws and improve. Ray Dalio’s book Principles: Life and Work helped me to realize this:

“Practice radical open-mindedness. Appreciate the art of thoughtful disagreement.”

A good example if pseudonymity is unfamiliar is Neo from The Matrix. His real name is Thomas Anderson, yet many link his reputation to “the one who will bring peace”, or also just Neo.

An ideal example is Satoshi Nakamoto. Apart from constructing Nakamoto Consensus, originating an improved proof of work, creating a breakthrough in computer science, facilitating peer to peer transactions, mainstreaming blockchain technology, and jumpstarting Web3 ideas and the next stage of the internet, Satoshi is also a pseudonym which is arguably of equal importance in my opinion. It was crucial that the bitcoin network began with both a pseudonymous creation and a decentralized network. This example shows how pseudonymous behavior can be critical to successful value creation. Just imagine if Satoshi had revealed their/his/her identity! It would be a woke festival.

Both examples showcased different types of pseudonymous activity at different levels. To summarize, here are some takeaways from utilizing pseudonymity currently, and in the past:

• optional level or tiers of identification (real, pseudonym, anonym)

• independent reputation creation or isolation (demographics, social standings, expertise)

• character shielding (personal values vs cancel culture mobs)

• remote social network (detached connections to societal groupings or affiliations)

• separates ideas and people (eliminates problems of conflating the two)

“Your bank account is stored wealth. Your real name is stored reputation. Only you can debit your bank account. Anyone can debit your reputation” - Balaji Srinivasan

I think there is a huge opportunity to create a mega platform that combines payments, social media, and communication into one. Personally, I’d bet Elon is pushing for this with Twitter. China already has a version of this mega platform with WeChat.

With this in mind, going forward its important that each user has a domain similar to my jakele.eth using Ethereum Name Service or other services. It’s important because it combines a customizable username for levels of anonymity or pseudonymity, payment methods with wallets and addresses, a domain for content creation, and even forms of communication. A platform that’s catered around crypto domain abilities and provides a UI to harness them would be pretty great. Once again, I bet Elon is on top of this, but we’ll see!

Soon everyone will have a crypto domain mainly because it allows micropayments which is already massively benefiting content creators. The next wave of value capturers in Web3 will, for the first time, be able to utilize personalized content sharing and capture. The biggest difference is that with the future pseudonymous economy in place (crypto domains) they can capture 100 percent of the value for the utility they provide to other users just like you can collect (new equivalent of liking something) this blog post. It will also be interesting to see how the intertwining of AI and content creators plays into this as well. Creativity is about to go crazy with things like ChatGPT which will challenge Google’s search engine for the future’s default search bar.

If this hasn’t been sounding that revolutionary so far, just imagine posting some awesome content (inspiring blog post, beautiful picture, cool video, song, etc.) and instead of a like, you get some money. Instead of a useless, ego inflating like, you get useful, useable money. This would create a much more efficient social media platform because creators that are actually working hard to create great content will be rewarded. It’s an entirely new, yet seemingly very obvious, social media incentive method.

Example:

I post a skiing and snowboarding edit.

It gets 2000 views.

Of those viewers, 500 think it’s really cool.

Those 500 actually like it (in Web3 lingo they collect it).

In doing so each liker (collector) automatically sends a dollar from their wallet to my jakele.eth address.

I get 500 dollars.

Unfortunately, someone would have to really like my video to send a whole dollar. In reality, these future likes will probably only be a tenth of a cent or so. The amount per transaction is going to be largely platform dependent because, for example, downloading, adding, or even just listening to a song will be really cheap. However, a 10 hour interactive data science course will be worth quite valuable. A cool feature for a platform like instagram would be to have different levels of liking (a “super-like” worth a dollar or something similar). Hopefully this makes sense because I think it’s going to be big.

Crypto domains, elements of pseudonymity, and the possibility of a mega-platform. The combination will likely majorly disrupt the current state of social media, communication, work, profiling, payments, value accrual, identity, and even governance.

Zooming back out, some might feel that creating a pseudonym feels sneaky or maybe untrustworthy even. But in fact, it’s the opposite. Building a reputation off of things that actually matter like hard work, providing utility, personal morals, values, or just being nice to people instead of things like class standing, race, gender, age, or location is a big potential yet to be realized.

-Jake