Identity, Optionality, and Leo Strauss

I always shelve books together when they’re about the exact same topic.

In Neal Stephenson’s Fall: Or Dodge In Hell, Stephenson imagines a near future where people have cryptographically-secured identities and can spin up alternative ones, which they can verifiably link to their real-world identity, but which can’t be linked back. Since it’s a Neal Stephenson novel, he imagines several thousand other things, some of which will be implemented soon. But the PURDAH (“Personal Unseverable Registered Designator for Anonymous Holography”) can be implemented today. You can use PGP to sign a document, showing that the owner of a certain private key wrote it. You can also use your private key to generate another key, such that you can demonstrate after the fact that you definitely signed something, but it can’t be linked to your key independently.

The technology is there, but the norms are not. Who wants to produce something that they, and only they, can prove they did?

In Fall, one use case is job applications. You want to be judged on your merits, not any identifying details, so you send a cryptographically signed cover letter and some sample code. If your application merits and interview, you deanonymize it and you’re good.

There are approximations of this in the real world, too: people in crypto post anonymous writeups of software vulnerabilities, or anonymously create new projects. (One “Satoshi…