Smart Contract Summit 2021: Identity, Reputation, and Local Economies
Channel: Smart Contract Research
Date: 2021-08-05

Join us at https://www.smartcontractresearch.org/t/603 after watching to share your thoughts and experiences on identity and reputation, ask the panelists questions, and explore the source material.

This panel explores how the transparency inherent to Distributed Ledger Technologies can be used to increase community trust and help turn those relationships into robust local economies. Both the projects discussed by our panelists (Defterhȃne Protocol and ZUZ) allow users to monetize their reputations. Defterhȃne, through check-based credit creation and transfer, and ZUZ, by allowing local businesses to issue localcoins that backed by their own goods and services.

We explore the emergent consequences of allowing users to mint and trade individually-backed tokens, the tensions between transparency and privacy, how systems can increase trust and economic value in a community, how they can lead to increasingly sustainable economies, and finally, how to position this kind of technology so it can be used by everyday users from around the globe.

We're joined by:

- Cemil Şinasi Türün (@Jetwell), Co-Founder of Defterhane Protocol, a decentralized credit protocol, and lecturer on blockchain at @UniBogazicil. 
He gives us an introduction to DEF: https://cemilturun.medium.com/defterhane-protocol-f4406e4ab070

- Seth Goldstein, Associate Professor at @SCSatCMU; who's focused on the impact of tech progress on the labor market and exploring how alt money systems can reduce poverty and inequality. Whos discusses BoLT:
https://cs.cmu.edu/~seth/bolt/

We then compare the mechanism design of these two promising projects and look at how they address privacy, agency, and efficiency when traditional economic primitives move on-chain. Attention is paid to the role of reputation in pseudonymous technologies.