tl;dr: how an immutable record of reputation may end up being a good thing
In some respects, I am thankful for the fact that each of our reputations is not immutably memorialized on a blockchain.
Though that day is coming, I was recently reminded of the fact that, well, people make mistakes.
In fact, it was I who made the mistake.
While it is extremely painful for me to write this and it makes me uncomfortable to acknowledge it to myself, I was caught in a hypocritical situation by someone whose trust I was attempting to earn. And, well, I failed to earn it because my hypocrisy, probably fueled in equal parts ego and avarice, became self-evident.
When confronted with it, I had no choice but to acknowledge it and recognize that, not only had I failed to earn this person’s trust but, as a result, I had preemptively failed to earn the trust of everyone in this person’s network.
What’s worse, it was an anti-trust situation and I could feel my reputation being damaged.
Reputation, however, is the brand. Values are what make a brand. And while values can’t be measured, reputation can (and will be one day).
One day, reputation will be assessed via a blockchain data query based on a serious of attestations by others about you, your company, your creditworthiness, and much, much more.
The absence of an attestation or worse, a negative attestation, will affect your “social credit score” (queue Black Mirror episode).
But that “score” will be meaningless if the underlying values are not as firm/bedrock as the blockchain on which it sits.
I knew this before and I know this now, but sometimes we all fail to live up to our values (or the values to which we aspire to live) and we have to deal with the consequences, whatever they might be.
In a blockchain world, we’ll be much more aware of this and, perhaps, it will force us to think even harder before we act so hypocrisy gets minimized.
And then, just maybe, we’ll do the soul searching to realize how important the deep values really are…and live according to them, blockchain or no blockchain.
