1/ Our idea to make this space more ethical is by making morality more valuable than money in the future. It will pay off to behave ethically and it will cost you if you behave immorally. We provide a decentralized self-regulatory blueprint as a starting point for discussion.
2/ Most people active in the NFT space have now (finally) seen the amount of bad actors that are very active/productive and they manifest themselves in all kinds of different ways. The most problematic is when they continue to remain or become more influential in this space.
3/ It's about influential nefarious actors that have either been exposed or haven’t yet been exposed but are currently still able to remain active and even expand their influence, buying into blue chip projects, and enjoy all the NFT perks that you can possibly imagine.
4/ We have thought about some self-regulating mechanisms that will either remove any bad actors completely (and will reduce the value of all their NFT holdings to nearly zero), or ensure they do compensate for their past wrongdoings. How?
5/ We call it TRUSTH and it stands for Transparency, Trust and Truth. Trust refers to your digital actions on the blockchain, Truth refers to your digital words on social media, and Transparency pervades both. They are all (inter)connected.
6/ Let’s start with the blockchain. Recent advances in AI have made it possible to create algorithms that can identify how “trustworthy” each wallet address has behaved over the past months/years and assign a TRUSTH score to each wallet based on that.
7/ The TRUSTH score associated with your wallet and listed on every NFT marketplace will become more important than anything, and people buying NFTs from wallets with a low TRUSTH score will see their own score immediately decrease significantly.
8/ Discord channels and any future minting will be based on a particular TRUSTH threshold, so if your score is too low, you are basically not part of the community and won’t be eligible for any of the perks that people with a score above the threshold will have.
9/ Any new projects that will be created will have to have the wallets and TRUSTH score of their founders listed, and if the founders “rug” the project, either they will see their TRUSTH score getting very low or they can refund/compensate the community.
10/ Of course only wallets with significant NFT assets and high TRUSTH scores may be deemed reputable enough to invest in (with or without doxed teams), so we don’t have to constantly assess each upcoming project and in particular all these scam projects.
11/ So how is this TRUSTH score calculated? That remains of course up for further debate, analysis and consensus, and it’s not meant to be petty and punish people for opportunistic mistakes and experiments that they made in the past.
12/ We also don’t want to punish people who happened to be “fortunate” enough to discover the NFT space first, but we need to be able to trust the people that are currently so influential in this space based on their actions (read: blockchain behavior).
13/ If you are consistently showing opportunistic, selfish and unethical behavior (large amounts of wash trading, lots of TornadoCash’ing, lots of WL/minting abuse, lots of undisclosed paid ads revenue streams, etc, etc), your TRUSTH score will likely be low.
14/ Once the algorithm is defined and tested, the idea is that everyone will receive their score which remains invisible for a few weeks. If you have a low score you can do nothing, but you risk the value of your NFT assets will go to 0 and not being part of the community anymore
15/ Or you can pay a one-off “fine” to increase your TRUSTH score and compensate for all the errors of judgement that you made in the past. The money will be distributed to those with a high(er) TRUSTH score that were affected by your wallet transactions.
16/ After that moment, the TRUSTH scores will start to become dependent on your trading behavior, and how much it can go up/down will depend on a smart algorithm that takes into account your buying/selling pattern and volume.
17/ A similar sort of approach can be taken for Web2/Web3 social (media) networks and we don’t rely anymore on the amount of followers someone has, someone’s IRL reputation or promises, but each account has a TRUSTH score.
18/ This can be based on different metrics: the repetitiveness/originality of messages, the amount of deleted messages, the number of times people are blocked by this account, the number of times the handle has changed, ratio of followers to friends, interaction, etc.
19/ If an account has a lot of engagement from “fake” followers or “bots” via inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means its score will be low. In the future further weighing can be given to accounts that have shown to be more “truthful” than others.
20/ But this will require further evaluation as “truth” is a social construct that is (more) difficult to algorithmize. Some think that certain “truths” are misinformation that should be censored, while others think it’s wrong to censor “truths” by calling it misinformation.
21/ The famous quote “History is Written by Victors” comes to mind. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated and the winner writes the history books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered enemy.
22/ Transparency pervades all domains and each person will be asked to provide certain basic input such as your wallet addresses, disclosures about (financial) relationships with (past/future) projects, alpha groups and/or other influencers (and their wallets).
23/ If you don’t disclose this information, but it is found out by others/algorithms, it can have an impact on your TRUSTH scores. It’s unfortunate that mechanisms and measures like this are necessary, but as we said earlier:
24/ In some way it’s ironic and paradoxical that Web3 will likely require us to rely more on technological regulation via AI that will restrict our freedom more than we gain via decentralization. George Orwell's 1984 might well be a reflection of the future metaverse.
25/ Some have claimed that our world view has been distorted by absolutizing things that are more relative ( e.g. power, money) and relativizing things that are more absolute (e.g. morality, truth). Maybe that can be turned around with the future that Web3 deserves.
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