Identity is and has always been the single biggest mystery throughout the human history.
Who are we? Who am I? Why are we here? What's our goal?
Descartes's Cogito ergo sum in the 17th century seemed to solve part of the problem. We exist because we think. But why do we think? Why do we think as humans and other animals don't?
The difference between us humans and animals is the ability to think, and with that we can invent things: utensils, houses, religions, governments.
Societies. We have invented entire societies based on beliefs and interests.
But also bureaucracy. Processes.
But while interests and beliefs unite people under a same umbrella, processes make sure that those same people don't fight and can live in a state of freedom (either actual or apparent, based on the political regimen). Processes maintain order.
The combination of people having the same beliefs and the order that ensures the status quo is what we call consensus.
The Bitcoin Invention
When Satoshi Nakamoto invented bitcoin, he didn't invent consensus, nor he did he invent digital money: he put them together in the perfect way, at just the right time. Call it Luck.
We, as humanity, successfully grew societies at an increasingly larger scale and only now, in the past 20 years, we're experiencing the effects of living in a truly global society - the biggest one, our ultimate before we become an interplanetary species.
Bitcoin thrived in since the 2010s because it was (and is) an answer to a world that's becoming more aware of itself, a population that grows more literate and connected with each other, and a financial system that's clearly not suited for a truly global, interconnected society.
People could exchange money freely with virtually no jurisdiction, and do it cheaply and fast.
We now know that Bitcoin, the blockchain, has lots of scaling issues and can't possibly take on the whole financial system alone. But we also know that its values will remain forever.
That's how the whole governance of bitcoin, its processes, relies on rough consensus and hard code. We lived for thousands of years with a soft code (written on paper and papyrus) and a strong consensus (by dictatorship, democracy, kingdoms, etc.), while now, with software, we could finally leverage a code that enforces itself, leaving humans to only convene for a rough consensus to improve, and not manage, maintain.
What I mean is that we're moving to a drastically different way of being a society: truly global, free, accessible and with a softer consensus protocol, because software is doing the hard work.
The Soft Code
I remember, when I was a kid, thinking about how a written contract was enforced. I thought there was some kind of 'automatic scrutiny' or something - one of those things you think about when you're little, but that you can't actually understand entirely.
When I knew that contracts between people or companies are enforced simply 'when one of the parties decides it' I felt the world crumble below me. I now understood the role of courts, judges and arbitrations and the burdensome job of justice in a rule of law. And I realised that society is just people that try to say to agree to something with each other and respect that, and if they don't they may have to face consequences, but only if the other party notices. There's no 'automatic' consequence.
But now there is.
The Hard Code
Software, and specifically blockchain contracts, define rules that are enforced no matter what, until they're changed or deactivated. But nobody needs to think about whether the rule will be enforced. It simply will be. In 'crypto' terms, we'd say that the system is trustless, because nobody needs to trust each other. But in a certain sense, we can also say that the system is trusted, because each party gets treated equally.
This is not democracy. It's a new form of society, based on the crypto capitalism that redistributes wealth with tokens and communities. And yes, it's also the society full of scams, speculation and thefts that we know, but it's all transparent. It's not shady. We know about thefts, scams and rugs minutes after they happen, not hours, not days, not months. It's an automatic filtering machine: it spills out everything that's bad, even if it means damaging itself.
FTX, Luna and the likes damaged the crypto world pretty bad, but in a traditional finance world the damages would have been covered for months or years because 'they're too big to fail'.
I don't think there's an actor that's too big to fail in crypto. Anyone can fail, go down and bring something with it. But it doesn't erase anything. It just tests it.
A New Identity
I don't know what a decentralised future holds for us in specific. I know that we're entering a new era in which governments are becoming more and more obsolete, and smaller (sub-) societies spin up every day about anything, because now that we have hard code (blockchain software) we don't need hard consensus, and that changes everything. As order is maintained by default with hard code, people can experiment with finding new ways to unite.
And that gives new meaning to identity.
I am Giacomo IRL. I am Jaack onchain. I am a /tennis amateur player, and I work on /avascan and /routescan. I love /travel, /food and /football. I am all these things, and each one of these is me. My identity is more fluid, complex and complete that it's ever been. Yet, it represents me and what I do, and helps me find new friends, interests and ideas.
And any new agorà, virtual town square that will exists, will be built around this idea: for identities to be interoperable, interests to be niche, and ideas and societies to be built with ease.
This post is taking part in the t2 x Kiwi Writing Contest. I of course read the guideline questions, but I guess I went a bit too far. Nevertheless, I enjoyed writing this, even though it's less of a practical article and more of a philosophical one. I truly don't know what to expect, but I also know that no one will solve social networks if they look at technological challenges. Social networks are a people problem, not a tech problem. Philosophers, anthropologist and psychologists may help way more than some developers building a website.
