Not only money secured by the blockchain, but pseudonymous identities with money and reputation secured by the blockchain.
Satoshi was after the money in the seignorage tax. There is also a lot of money in eBay and Amazon owning other people’s reputations, a lot of money in the domain name system, a lot of money in limited liability company name registration, and a lot of money in the financial institutions of the stockmarket. eBay is entirely a search engine for the reputation data of people doing transactions and Amazon is largely such a search engine, and the primary asset value of most businesses is the goodwill accrued by their registered company name.
Our vision is a web 3.0 whose root of identity is not domain certificate authorities and registrars, but the master secrets of wallets. The seizure or blocking of domain names by authorities has become a big problem, as is Amazon and eBay casually mistreating and exploiting the people who rely on their reputation systems.
Satoshi’s objective with Bitcoin was to allow people to transact over the internet without an intermediary that could reverse, freeze, or confiscate transactions. This has been accomplished, though we are hitting scaling problems hard, resulting in slow and expensive transactions.
We now, however, need a mechanism of communication and pseudonymous identity that can neither be censored, nor shilled and spammed into oblivion, where private pseudonymous communications can carry money, and can be revealed and proven by the parties to the transaction if they so choose subsequently, enabling pseudonymous identities to accrue reputation as with Amazon and eBay. And we want long accrued reputation to be also provable on the blockchain, and not confiscatable or poisonable by third parties like Amazon or eBay or the government.
At present the big weakness and privacy hole in crypto currency transactions is that the metadata about the transaction must go other some other channel, usually a channel that is insecure and far from private, and the agreement to exchange money for goods and services cannot be easily and provably linked to the payment. The linkage is made ad-hoc by some mechanism outside the blockchain. We need an uncensorable net, and we also need private communications that support secure transaction metadata that is testified to by a hash in the blockchain.
Our project is to provide the tools and protocols for cryptographically secure transactions and communications, such that identities are not rooted in a certificate authority, and such that the parties have a timestamp on the blockchain to the transaction metadata, a timestamp as to why the transaction and what it was about. To replace eBay and Amazon, we build a reputation system on top of that, and to replace limited liability name registration, bookkeeping, including book keeping for funds shared to a common purpose.
Suppose an identity solicits money from other identities for some common purpose. He then has to prove that he is spending it on this purpose. Which at present is done by the formation of a corporate identity subject to government oversight, which tends to oversee that you are hiring people of the right accreditation, race, sex, and sexual preference, rather than oversee that you are using the money for the intended purpose. We need to provide, not just reputations of buyers and sellers, but the means for trust in the collective use of funds. The corporate form is collapsing under a pile of government interventions intended to secure results that do not reflect the interests or desires of the corporation, which undermine the cohesion and unity of the corporation. The CEO lives in fear and terror of HR, legal, and accounting, because their powerbases are in the state, not in the corporation.
To make a start to resolve these problems, we implement the Zooko name system for encrypted private and signed public communications, and then a blockchain whose transactions contain within its timestamp of the hash of the communications about the transaction. We need a crypto currency that is inside of and on top of a secure system of communication and identity.
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