Pseudonymous Identity

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” - Oscar Wilde

The rise of cancel culture puts a new type of self-directed censorship to society. We no longer feel safe expressing our true opinions, because we fear that it might one day come back to haunt us. The more controversial an opinion gets, the least incentive we have communicating it publicly, regardless how strongly we feel about such opinion. Over time, we are trained to simply comply with the mainstream point of view.

We want to bring new primitives to enable pseudonymous economy by allowing users to diversify their reputation across different names. One way to make that happen is to enable the anonymous transfers of reputation.

Interep is a reputation mixer where users meeting certain criteria (e.g. any Twitter users with at least 10 followers) can join a group, and later on prove that they are members of the group without exposing their actual identity. For details on how that works, check out how we generate and verify semaphore proofs.