For any good network state three things are needed from a technological perspective in my opinion: - **a chain/token** - **an ID system**, - and a **digital shared space**. These are necessary but not sufficient to form a network state. Hell they might not even be sufficient to form the core of the tech stack. But they are so far as I can tell the bare essentials to do the types of experiments people are wishing to do. We want to play with different economic structures so we need chains/tokens, we want to experiment with new ideas of citizenship so we need an ID system, and humans still need shared space to form communities wether they be physical or digital. Given the above I wanted to jot down some thoughts around different stack options for mixing and matching and then give my preferences with exploring this design space. #### Chains In this arena there is a lot of noise ETH vs BTC vs Cosmos vs etc, L1 or L2, native? permissioned? or permissionless? I think for most of the experiments people are talking about doing honestly these are almost all equivalent with a bias towards the ETH ecosystem. #### ID Systems These are relatively new as product category and as such there is a ton of work to be done here. But we're already beginning to see an interesting myriad of approaches there are proof of personhood ID systems like: [Human](https://joinhuman.com/) and [WorldCoin](https://world.org/), and to some extent [Circles](https://www.aboutcircles.com/) is one of these as well. On the other hand there are unified digital ID solutions like urbit's [Azimuth](https://azimuth.network/), and [ENS](https://app.ens.domains/). These are almost always deeply linked to what chain a project chooses. The current ecosystem lacks some key features that I think would be really worth implementing on an ID level, namely reputation systems. This next part gets a little strange but trust me it's worth it. Social credit systems are essentially what most good social tech boils down to, money is a way to communicate about a persons financial trustworthiness sans personal knowledge of them, Social media algorithms are essentially giant machines built to create social credit scores around the quality of someones content output. The US and China both have robust social credit score systems one privately managed (FICO scores), and one managed by the state. There is a great opportunity for something like this to be worked into a decentralized ID system that captures the value of a thing like this while avoiding the Orwellian pitfalls. As I see it there are two great pitfalls here: - The boiling of reputation down to a scalar - The control of something as fundamental as reputation by single monolithic entity I think the design space for the first problem actually leads to a great mechanism to deal with the second. I can't take credit for the idea I'm about to explore as it was shown to me by a friend named ~sarlev-sarsen who should be given all the credit for this. But essentially the concept is that everyone maintains their own reputation accounting. Essentially dolling out vectors to people that encodes the different dimensions that someone's reputation can be measured with like: financial (-7), movie taste (+5), writing (+15), recipes (-200). This can be used to triangulate reputation for people who you haven't directly interacted with by seeing what people who you do know say rate them and then using your rating of those people to guess at a rating for them. #### Digital Shared Spaces I think the ideal implementation of the subject social reputation interacts with a new social media structure but that's detailed here: [[PostModern Public Squares]]. The current offerings here are bleak, you either can do normie social media (mainly twitter/X), or discords. That's really practically it when it comes to the creating community shared spaces market. There are a few things trying to do a little more like [gather.town](https://www.gather.town/) but for the most part if people are trying to create a digital community space it's a shitty discord with a million channels and little to no thought is put into space curation. A community does not a chat room make. --- Some examples of stacks below | | [Cabin](https://cabin.city/) | Urbit | [Build_](https://www.buildcities.network/) | | ----- | ---------------------------- | ------- | ------------------------------------------ | | Chain | ETH (op mainnet) | ETH | ETH | | ID | ₡abin Citizenship NFTs | Azimuth | ??? | | DSS | Discord | Tlon | Discord |