The Future of Privacy and Identity:
I think it's important to be able to decouple the various faces of your real life identity. I assume most of us do it on a near daily basis (e.g. How you behave around friends vs your boss).
If you weren't able to keep certain parts of your life private, it could end up being detrimental for your overall health.
E.g. An addict not being able to get help anonymously or disclose certain details to their doctor in fear they might get fired/arrested.
Over time, social networks have pushed us towards a single online identity (and forced us to link it to our real names).
The intentions may have been good (e.g. national security, reducing spam/bots, increasing trust), but it's stripped us of our online privacy and anonymity.
We are moving towards a future where the line between your physical and online lives is increasingly blurred.
If we don't re-invent online privacy and identity, people could make mistakes they can't recover from (and people need second chances).
It's a hard problem to solve.
I think we need the ability to create online identities the way we see fit.
You should be able to choose if you want to have a single doxxed identity or multiple anonymous identities which interact with different communities.
If people could easily create online identities, trust becomes a big problem.
This is unlike real life where you gain a certain amount of trust by physically meeting a person (even if you choose remain semi-anonymous and not disclose your name or details about your life).
This is why some sort of online reputation system is needed to make this work.
It will be easy to create a new identity, but it will take time to build a strong reputation which people are willing to trust.
In theory, this reputation system will deter people from acting in bad faith.
The sunk cost of the time it took to build a good reputation should outweigh the short term gains of cheating other people + burning your identity.
In this thread I've talked about personal identities, but I think some of these ideas could apply to financial identities too.
Nefarious applications aside, there could be good upsides to having multiple, decoupled financial identities.
Let's imagine a person with 2 financial identities:
The first is diligent at saving and only spends money on necessities.
The second has an erratic balance because of their love of Poker.
Shouldn't it possible for the first identity to get a loan or mortgage?
Traditional finance doesn't allow us to have multiple identities, they only allow us to build reputation for one.
Web3 (more specifically DeFi) could very well change this.