But wait a second. Crypto wallet addresses are just indecipherable hash - that's what makes crypto pseudonoymous, you don't need to give anyone your ID to create one. If I'm careful enough not to do anything that would tie my wallet to my identity, how can anyone find out this wallet with its gibberish address belongs to a specific real-life person which is me?
You'll be relieved to know the creators of The Future have some thoughts on that!
Vitalik Buterin is one of the original creators of Etherium. He proposes a "soulbound token", a special kind of token which isn't just non-fungible, but non-transferable too. Once it's in your wallet, it's there forever, by design.
The name "soulbound" is a reference specifically to World of Warcraft, although other MMOs have the same kinds of things under different names. In WoW, a soulbound item, once you receive it in-game, is locked to your account - you can't sell it or give it away to another player via the in-game marketplace.
It's kind of a strange choice to make something that's theoretically going to be used for many applications worldwide and give it an official, technical name that's only going to make sense to fans of a specific online game and would just look like some weird and potentially uncomfortable religious reference to anyone else that's unfamiliar with that game, but anyways. Main idea: an SBT is, hypothetically, a token that is locked to the first wallet it's dropped in and can never be moved out of that wallet. Why might we want something like this? Let's see:
So that's the basic idea. If an institution, company, organization, whatever wants to give you a token that is not meant to be sold or traded but is meant to be owned only by one, specific individual person, they can mint it as an SBT and put it in your wallet and there it stays for ever. You can't sell it or give it away, and on the plus side no malicious actor can ever steal it either, whether with a malicious smart contract or by somehow getting your private wallet key. They can steal your other stuff, but your university diploma will always be safe and sound.
And, well, there's one way to tie your identity to your wallet. If I see a personalized SBT with your name on it, like a college degree - or a birth cert, or a state driver license, or whatever else that cryptobros have mentioned they envision being tokenized - in a wallet, I know that wallet is yours.
But that's just where the problems start. Look how one-sided the examples in those tweets are. Notice how they all have the same flow?
1. You get an SBT from X (a school, a conference committee, a certification board)
2. Y (someone - another school, a potential employer, a project manager) looks in your wallet and sees the SBT from X
3. You win (you get accepted, you get the job, some other positive thing happens)
But that's an incredibly optimistic way of looking at how these things will work. It's treated like an unspoken axiom that only positive decisions will be made by people based on seeing what SBTs are in your wallet.
But let's say I'm a hiring manager for that corporation you're applying to and you give me your public wallet key so that I can look into your wallet and see your SBT bachelor of science in widgeteering from the University of Woolloomooloo or wherever and that's great - but remember I'm a MAGA chud, so I happen to see while I'm looking that you also have that SBT attendance badge that the environmental conference helpfully dropped into your wallet that you can't get rid of, and now I know that you're a whiny treehugging liberal cuck and I'm especially mad today because a climate change protest slowed my commute this morning so I toss your job application because it makes me feel better. Oopsie, that didn't go so well after all.
Or what if instead of an untransferrable, undeletable conference attendance badge, it's an untransferrable, undeletable note added to your wallet by your local police department because you were arrested for - whatever, something - and even though you were ultimately cleared and never even charged, anyone who looks in your wallet gets to see that.
Or an SBT from a bank or utility company because you had a rough month and made a late payment.
You see where I'm going with this.
And those are just assuming that only institutions and government agencies and legitimate corporations will have the power to mint SBTs - but, who knows if that would even be the case? What if anyone can make them? Like, right now you CAN get that unsolicited dick pic out of your wallet by sending it somewhere else, like a garbage wallet. It'll cost you a transfer fee, but you CAN do it. But what if the dick pic is an SBT? Well then you're just out of luck.
And let's go back to that little fact about how someone who compromises your wallet couldn't steal an SBT from it. That's true, but...once someone manages to get your private key, your wallet is compromised forever, because private keys are made when the wallet is created and can't be changed. If you want a new private key, you need to make a new wallet. And right now, that's the way you deal with a wallet that is known to be or potentially compromised because it's all you CAN do - you make a new wallet, and transfer everything you have (left) out of the old wallet into the new one, and then just stop using the old wallet. Well, if SBT's are a thing, you'll never be able to transfer them to your new wallet, they're permanently stuck in the old compromised wallet; and if some of those SBT's are like, vital personal records as these guys say they want to be the case, then your identity is now permanently available for use by the malicious actors who stole the key. Marvelous.
And these problems are so incredibly obvious. It takes a kind of culty willful blindness to just assume that only good things will happen, the system will always only work as intended, and just ignore all the potentially bad things that can and are just as likely to happen.
And this is where we pick the whole "Web 3.0/Metaverse" thing back up, and the argument that because that game character armor is "a token in your wallet" that you more meaningfully "own it" and the game company you bought it from "can't take it away from you". The unspoken assertion is that people somehow have no choice but to care about your token, but the elephant in the room is that you can keep the token in your wallet all you want but that doesn't mean the game company has to honor it forever. Because the game itself isn't on the chain. It CAN be changed, it CAN be patched. If they want to punish you by taking your armor away, or simply no longer want to support whatever expansion pack your armor was a part of, they can blacklist your token, and just like that your token simply doesn't do anything anymore. Think being banned from one game doesn't affect your access to other games? What's to stop game companies from sharing blacklists? Some games do this already - why would your game subscription being tokenized stop them? Heck, if SBT's become a thing, they can just drop a scarlet letter token right into your wallet and you can't ever get rid of it, lol. Or what about things besides games - what about those NFT-project member-only forums? What if I'm the project creator and I have a deep irrational hate-rivalry with some other NFT project, and set up my forum so that if it detects any NFT's from that other project in your wallet, you don't get into the forum even if you have one of my NFTs, because you're just a double-timing traitor?
