Crypto's next bottleneck may be social, not financial, as identity, privacy and reputation form a 'social trilemma

The author argues that crypto's main adoption bottleneck is social rather than financial, proposing a 'social trilemma' of identity, privacy, and reputation where removing any one breaks the others. The piece suggests ENS names as human-readable identifiers, NFTs evolving into containers of verifiable personal history using standards like ERC-721, ERC-5192, ERC-5484, ERC-6551 and the Ethereum Attestation Service, with sensitive data kept encrypted offchain. It also proposes a 'proof of knowledge' layer where validators verify claims, such as a researcher's 100 published articles, based on expertise rather than staked capital.

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