The whole post has a general tone of hand-waving away any decentralized idea as dystopian or a privacy nightmare, without taking any look at the current dystopian landscape of Google and Apple account based identity.
It’s also pretty hard to “address” the post as, in broad strokes, many crypto people will agree with her. Nobody wants all data to be public on a blockchain. Worldcoin is disturbing. SBTs are poorly named and not perfect. Identity data posted on an immutable ledger is dystopian, and why ZK proofs are getting so much attention to try and solve this.
Just to take a specific comment:
> Now [Buterin’s] revealing here that his dreams for soulbound tokens involve police departments uploading criminal records to the blockchain. [..] Not only that, but he’s envisioning a world in which every police department uploads criminal records to a blockchain, providing the level of data completeness required to prove a negative.
That whole paragraph sounds like a crazy rant by Molly. Vitalik never said that criminal records in the real world should be posted to a public blockchain. His statement was that it can be useful to verify some record of a user before taking some action with them. In the real world one way this is done is with a criminal background check.
Vitalik often points to ZK proof primitives to avoid posting any private data online. Molly does not seem to take this into account, and hardly gives it a passing mention when she earlier writes:
> Buterin brushes this off with the argument that such a system could use zk-SNARKs to encrypt the token contents as well as its sender and recipient.
To the casual reader it might seem like Vitalik wants to put private real-world data on a public ledger. But this is not the reality of his statements.
> The whole post has a general tone of hand-waving away any decentralized idea as dystopian or a privacy nightmare, without taking any look at the current dystopian landscape of Google and Apple account based identity.
If the article was about the dystopian landscape of Google/Apple, then it would've talked about that.
As it is, the article talks about the current state of solutions/proposals in the crypto world.
> That whole paragraph sounds like a crazy rant by Molly. Vitalik never said that criminal records in the real world should be posted to a public blockchain. His statement was that it can be useful to verify some record of a user before taking some action with them. In the real world one way this is done is with a criminal background check.
Which literally translates to: let's put people's criminal record on blockchain, and assign them to people without any possibility of revocation. Ah yes, and it's going to be police and/or courts who are going to put those records there.
> To the casual reader it might seem like Vitalik wants to put private real-world data on a public ledger. But this is not the reality of his statements.
Yeah, no. I just watched the segment where he talks about it. He literally brushes aside the privacy implications. It's all "yeah, we could definitely go further, and zk-something could do something". But the underlying reality is that: nope, everything is public. So those criminal records uploaded and attached to you by the police? Yup, they can be as public as police wants.
The implication of zero knowledge proofs is that no private data need be shared. The “zk-something” you and Molly both brush over translates literally to “verifying knowledge without any private information having to be shared or checked.”
I'd like to verify knowledge about your private password, without it being shared. Sounds good? OK, my first question: does it start with an "a"? No? What about a "b"?
How can you verify something about someone's criminal background that doesn't ultimately share the information?
Is that zk thing required by the soulbound tokens?
Ah. No. All Vitalik is saying is that you could use it, but it's not a requirement. So it's on the person/organization who's attaching that irrevocable token to not expose that information.
So yes. He is brushing this issue aside, and so do you.
It’s also pretty hard to “address” the post as, in broad strokes, many crypto people will agree with her. Nobody wants all data to be public on a blockchain. Worldcoin is disturbing. SBTs are poorly named and not perfect. Identity data posted on an immutable ledger is dystopian, and why ZK proofs are getting so much attention to try and solve this.
Just to take a specific comment:
> Now [Buterin’s] revealing here that his dreams for soulbound tokens involve police departments uploading criminal records to the blockchain. [..] Not only that, but he’s envisioning a world in which every police department uploads criminal records to a blockchain, providing the level of data completeness required to prove a negative.
That whole paragraph sounds like a crazy rant by Molly. Vitalik never said that criminal records in the real world should be posted to a public blockchain. His statement was that it can be useful to verify some record of a user before taking some action with them. In the real world one way this is done is with a criminal background check.
Vitalik often points to ZK proof primitives to avoid posting any private data online. Molly does not seem to take this into account, and hardly gives it a passing mention when she earlier writes:
> Buterin brushes this off with the argument that such a system could use zk-SNARKs to encrypt the token contents as well as its sender and recipient.
To the casual reader it might seem like Vitalik wants to put private real-world data on a public ledger. But this is not the reality of his statements.