Reputation Interchange
Interview
Interview with Siddharth Sthalekar, founder of Sacred Capital.
* What is Sacred Capital’s ‘reputation interchange’?
Distributed ledgers are enabling people to create their own designs for economies. The reputation interchange is an economic backbone for this distributed world. By allowing one form of wealth to be ‘staked’ for another, we enable their inter-portability while maintaining the essence of the original value.
Think of the interchange as social fabric, not a platform. The intention is to model the surface of a liquid such that ripples of any activity are felt in relevant circles. Through this we could see new forms of value benefiting from a formal economic language. It implies that we can validate, measure, scale and amplify subtler forms of capital – social, cultural, intellectual.
* What does it mean to stake reputation?
Think of when a friend asks you to recommend a coffee shop in your neighbourhood. You place your reputation at stake by making suggestions. This reputation is limited only to your suggestions for coffee in this local area (nothing else), and this reputational value is in a non-zero-sum economy. You could recommend things to your friend, to a group of people, maybe even tweet it out to a million people online. The consequences come back to you, but it’s not limited by a material economy.
Where could this be applied? If you were part of a feminist circle, and were known for your nuanced thoughts in the area, you could place your reputation at stake and lend your credibility to a new initiative in another ecosystem. If that were not received well, it would affect your reputation in the original circle.
Traditional apps could also use this to modulate behaviour within their platforms. For example, an Uber-like app could create a reputation for punctuality that could be imported by another rideshare platform like Didi or Lyft. It provides more validity for Uber’s punctuality reputation and helps them create a culture of respect for one another’s time.
Governments could use this to create reputation systems for income, subsidies, contributions in local communities and more. This reputation created by them could be imported by thousands of other apps/entrepreneurs, thereby giving more utility to what the government created. In doing so, Governments don’t need to validate their offering to their citizens purely by traditional metrics like job creation or income increase, they could simply play the role of meta-reputation creators.
* How will government-sponsored reputation in Sacred Capital be different from the Chinese Social Credit System, arguably a step towards surveillance-state totalitarianism?
By moving towards an interchange, we foster an open-source approach towards not only the data, but also the benefits that can be designed into this reputation. That means the state is just one of thousands or millions of entrepreneurs shaping culture and thought." (https://holochaincitizen.com/2018/10/07/the-yin-and-yang-of-wealth-qa-with-the-founder-of-sacred-capital/)