For better or worse, Cryptocurrencies of any sort are distruptive. The single most disruptive feature is privacy of transactions. Cryptocurrency transactions are not secret but they are private. The Blockchain Ledger, generally, makes transactions publically available for consensus purposes. Which is a good thing as it confirms that value has been transferred and avoids double payments and so on. It also means that when value is extracted that the Extractor of Value can be identified post hoc. This is a subtle point. It means that while value is not exiting the Blockchain Ledger, the holders of the value have a privacy. That can be mistaken for secrecy. Who holds the value is revealed at a future date while secrecy would be that who holds the value is never revealed.
This might seem convoluted and complex. It is. There is a lot of fancy footwork to be had from the differences and similarities between privacy and secrecy. For example if you store your Crypto in an online "Crypto-Bank" then you have no secrecy because the "Crypto-Bank" knows your relationship to the whole of the Blockchain Ledger at all times. You have privacy, but that privacy is only guaranteed so long as the "Crypto-Bank" is trustworthy. If the "Crypto-Bank" fails to take the implied duty of care seriously then your stored value could be made public without your consent.
Think about that for a moment. The value in a Crypto is community generated. Much is made of the word Community. It is great marketing hype. It gives a warm fuzzy glow about something that is not really that well defined. With Wallets there is a shift from your personal engagement with protecting your secrecy - you can achieve that with an offline, cold wallet providing you keep physical possession of the wallet - and managing your privacy. To have privacy you need to be able to trust the Wallet Provider.
Wallets are just code. They hold data. if you trust the code then you are expecting the code does what it says it does. If you are not technical that means a level of trust needs to be given on faith. There are lots of things that support that faith. Things such as code bases being publically tested and so on. Another critical, and often overlooked, element is how the code is managed in the long term. A distributed ledger that is administered by one person might seem counter-intuitive. Just think about who creates the code: that amounts to a critical managment function and, if nobody but the coder knows how it works then the Coder, pragmatically and effectively, has control of the distributed ledger. One of the ways to manage that kind of risk is to have an an administrative structure.
The fashionable management structures for Cryptocurrencies is the DAO. The DAO is an organizational structure where control is spread out across the participants, instead of being built on a top-down hierarchy. If the Coder is the only one understanding the coding of the wallet then that forces a hierarchical structure. Similarly if there is a powerful "marketing" presence that can create a marketing driven hierarchy. A DAO can be seen as operating like a machine, with the job it is instructed to carry out determined by pre-written smart contracts. Those smart contracts make the way the Cryptocurrency works embody the things that a community regards as value. The DAO is the embodiment of community trust in privacy. It builds trust if the community is trustworthy.
The open nature of a DAO can foster a high degree of both trust and privacy. The community seeking to foster this degree of trust and privacy requires a gatekeeper. TallyHoWallet have chosen to use Sign In With Etherium which is best described by the actual Etherium Improvement Proposal that relates to Sign In With Etherium: the EIP-4361 Standard, which describes
“how Ethereum accounts authenticate with off-chain services by signing a standard message format parameterized by scope, session details, and security mechanisms (e.g., a nonce). The goals of this specification are to provide a self-custody alternative to centralized identity providers, improve interoperability across off-chain services for Ethereum-based authentication, and provide wallet vendors a consistent machine-readable message format to achieve improved user experiences and consent management.”
In short this means that the user id and password is not managed by, say, Google or Facebook. The user id is managed by the community members. You own and manage your digital assets and the keys to unlock them. This means that the gateway to the community that surrounds TallyHoWallet is owned by the community members. Recall the good faith needed for the Wallet, earlier: well now there is a need for good faith in a community. That is where the DAO becomes an incredibly important part of the mix. Not only is the gateway to the community but it determines the terms and conditions upon which people can participate in the community. The DAO essentially determines the community mores: what it means to be a member of the communty.
TallyHoWallet makes a big thing about being just like MetaMask but with the profits flowing back into the community not a corporation. I hate to be a critic but the reality is that Tally Ho is a corporation, it just happens to be a community owned corporation. Legally, yes, they are quite different. But the point of the criticism is to highlight where the best comparison is. TallyHoWallet should not be compared to MetaMask but rather to Credit Reference Agencies.
This seems a left field swerve. It is not. A Credit Reference Agency essentially acts as a gateway to a community which is private. Yet, that community is made up of all the value transactions of your credit history. The Credit Reference Agency is acting as a Wallet, of sorts, which spits out the value - your credit score - as the endpoint of your own personal credit history ledger. The Credit Reference Agency is, essentially, the gatekeeper of your personal, financial Ledger. Yet, you never get to see the details within. You get to say that "If I have a credit card X then my score will go up - or down"; but, you never get to calculate your own score. The formula for that is behind the gatekeeper and is kept secret. Not private. Secret.
TallyHoWallet does directly compete in the Cryptocurrency Marketplace with MetaMask. Which is fair competiton. But TallyHoWallet disrupts the Credit Reference Agency Marketplace. By bringing together a wallet that has a community owned gateway and offers that community the DAO model with profit flowing back into the community, there is the potential to build a resilient record of "Digital Value Scoring". Which is something the Credit Reference Agency Market cannot offer. Credit Reference Agencies are reliant on data brokerage: which need that secret gatekeeping of your personal financial Ledger. The nature of that business is that the data is always historical and always incomplete. With TallyHoWallet moving the goalposts towards effective administration of personal value transactions.
What TallyHoWallet gains over MetaMask is resilience. While the value of Crypto can boom and crash, the value of the transaction data does not. It holds long term value. For Credit Reference Agencies that has been a source of historical stability and profit. The innovation of a DAO based, Wallet that values community wisdom - in the form of Elder Doggos is something that MetaMask could seek to emulate but Credit Reference Agencies cannot. The simple reason being that the Community of TallyHoWallet are participants while Credit Reference Agencies are seeking profit for external Investors. This compounds the reality that the transaction data is what embodies the value for both the DAO governance - in the sense of trust and privacy - and the profit model for Credit Reference. As that data becomes held within the privacy of a community, Credit Reference Agencies will begin to operate on less data completeness and less data volumes. The value of a credit reference score will plummet. Perhaps not now. Perhaps not in the very near future. But the reality is that DAO based Wallets on the TallyHoWallet Model are a sign of a coming crisis for the Credit Reference Agency model.
