Modern Digital Reputation: Trust, Verification, and the Scammer Problem
Icebreaker Labs
1 min read·
Recently, a promising startup had a wake-up call: a pseudonymous but well-regarded co-founder was recognized at an in-person networking event as a developer who was fired for stealing funds from their previous company. This developer had spent over a year crafting a digital identity, gaining influence and trust through online social networks.
It worked, until the offline world caught up.
This case raises a fundamental challenge in the digital age: how do we build trust in a world where people can be anonymous, but still want to be verified and trusted?
We believe that building digital reputation for the future means separating three often-blurred concepts:
• Anonymous vs. Known
• Unverified vs. Verified
• Untrusted vs. Trusted
These are not the same thing.
You can be anonymous but trusted, known but untrusted, or even verified and still untrusted. Reputation systems that lump these together put you at risk of trusting the wrong person or of missing the right one. Both are costly mistakes!
Proving someone is a scammer is fairly easy. Proof can emerge from clear evidence or whistleblowers. This principle applies for many traits. But proving someone is not a scammer is hard. Lack of "proof of bad" does not equate to proof of good.
That’s where time becomes essential. Verifications and peer endorsements over time, specifically.
Continuous signals of legitimacy — verifiable contributions, peer endorsements, in-person confirmations like event check-ins or trusted employment records — make it exponentially harder for fake identities to gain traction.
The takeaway: strong digital reputation is built from consistent, verifiable actions over time, not just well-crafted profiles. If we want trust in a digital world, we need systems that fully integrate privacy, verification, and trust.
If you’re building in tech and want to connect with people who are verified by real-world interactions, endorsements, and credentials try Icebreaker.
The fully doxxed have more skin in the game than the pseuds, which is why it’s perplexing to me how in many instances pseuds are more easily able to accrue trust A pseud’s opinion should be doubly discounted. They have no reputation risk
in the market of ideas reputation is earned by being interesting or right consistently many scammers use the -i’m doxxed excuse to lure you in and divert from their scamming, A pseudonym doesnt necessarily mean much i use my real name for example, i just dont think im famous enough for that to matter to anyone online
I can’t dump my name and get a new one the same way you can with a pseud If Proxy was doxxed he wouldn’t have been able to rinse and repeat Yes all people are bad and deserving suspicion docxed and not doxxed alike But to me the burden of proof should be higher with a pseud, if that makes sense
yeaj, that does make sense. and i thought about proxy too you’re right, but it’s just another data point on someone’s rep. obviously harder to trust an anon/pseudanon account. but i just dont trust, generally. the delta being doxxed of trust you earn from me is small at the end of the day is all about track record, and how much i think i know your charqcter over time. not just identity
>if proxy was doxxed betashop seems to be doing alright with the rinse and repeating
Hard agree here.
maybe crypto is the exception being doxxed in crypto is also a stupid opsec failure, most of the time so makes sense pseuds undoxxed may know or not tf they talking about also an alt offers you freedom from your employer checks, familiy, identity, etc. idk i feel anon has a place for utility somewhere even if not 100% of the time
I think being doxxed is actually a good thing. If you scam, you really only can do it once (people have memories unless you find new marks). But I also do think that with ai, we will trust more anons because they will look so real :)
i guess there are levels to being doxxed. public name public face public famous persona the thing is doxxed or not as you say, you still have to do due dilliegence
“being right” based on what standard?
well for eaxh their own. depends a lot if its personal opinions vs say predictions. i was mostly thinking geo politics and markets, but because rhats what i care about so being right about the things you care about
it’s the whole “oh they must really have something to protect bc they are a pseud hence their op must be high value” effect it’s wild how how the human brain defaults to this??
Yes. Because you don’t really know them, they can become this idealized figure
relevant https://paragraph.com/@icebreakerlabs/modern-digital-reputation-trust-verification-and-the-scammer-problem
We can't see them hence why we have no bias and judgment. It's hard to build a reputation as a pseud though, tradeoffs
It’s often the doxed endorsing their pseuds that builds the trust bridge. Social capital gets transferred and suddenly the pseud feels “safe” to trust, even without reputation risk.
I’ve noticed this here a lot There was one pseud woman yday that was exposed for using stolen photos and a whole thing with that was tagging the reputable often doxxed who followed her
interestingly, i instinctively have the opposite reaction. when someone attaches their name and/or face to their opinion, i assume there is something beyond the truth that they need to protect (e.g. reputation). i apply a small bias against. in internet culture/crypto i also consider it a norm violation. it’s not the end of the world, but i assume variables at play other than “they have interesting things to say”. it’s not a level playing field— they haven’t had to build a reputation from a completely clean slate
Counterpoint: Wealthy doxxed have less to lose than poor pseuds. In America your reputation is only as fallible as your ability to stay solvent through the extremely brief periods of cancellation. For example, I have more to lose from being pro crypto and pro socialist amongst my peers in the Canadian small-medium business world, than I could meaningfully gain in credibility by doxxing. Meanwhile rich folks who maintain massive follower bases on here and other social media and have had no risk to career have literally been accused of corruption, embezzlement, fraud, sexual assault, and sedition. See my point?
Also isn’t the whole ethos of crypto “don’t trust, verify?” You can read a Polynya’s opinions on crypto and decide if you agree. Check their math, gpt-splain their logical fallacies, confirm the truthfulness of statements and note bias, all in the same way you could do for some “doxxed” founder. Additionally, doxxed wealthy people may have pseudonymous alts, they certainly have hidden wallets profiting off the “trust” they have earned, swaying (read: manipulating) markets—it’s basically the name of the game in this world. So yeah, I don’t buy it personally. I’d prefer full pseudo to relying on old school trust in a much more nefarious and gameable online world.
a lot of people think i'm a pseud, but my handle is more doxxed (fully unique and easy to map to real identity) than my government name (extremely common to the point that i get many recruiters reaching out conflating the experience of many people with my name at the same time, i even made andreypetrov.com)
Heck, even my own username sort of straddles this same boundary I feel bad about making this post bc a) I think it was interpreted as an anti anon thing which I did not intend b) reminded me of how evil the world has gotten; people are fearful and feel like anon is mandatory
i think the concept of what it means to be anon is evolving, in kind of a romantic interesting way i also think that people should try maintaining an anon with all the opsec that comes with it, 1. it's good practice and raises awareness about important things we don't normally think about 2. it's really fucking hard!!
most pseudos i know with any following/reputation online are fully doxxed behind the scenes. they go to events, take calls w video, etc. it's v rare to see anyone do anything meaningful without fully doxxing. so while full doxx does bring more exposure, i think the diff in risk between reputable pseudos and fully doxxed is wayy overblown. case in point: if seneca were to become a rugger/scammer, the pain i'd inflict on myself and my family would be enormous. "it" _is_ my entire professional career.
The “pseud online, doxxed irl” is an interesting hybrid my model above kind of fails to consider I wish there were better signals in the online space
I feel seen
ethos is trying to partially solve it. not ideal, especially for filtering good guys. but it does a better job at filtering bad guys. guys like sbf, murad, hasbulla, portnoy etc have low scores, so you can search a profile and see if they did public scams check out here. it's invite gated so let me know if you need invite to try it out https://x.com/ethos_network
+1 to all this
If I could go back I'd make my farcaster account anon. I hold myself back too much People trust authenticity
Nothing can be truly authentic under a fake name imo No way to tell if it’s the person or their character
correct me if I’m wrong, but I assume you mean being able to tie a persona and reputation to an actual human? e.g. we only learned moxie marlinspike’s real name in 2011 (which is a long time ago at this point lol) but that didn’t affect his trustworthiness. he’s a smart and real person even if we don’t know his name or birthday easy to be unhinged if it has no material impact on your life or other parts of your online identity
I haven't come across many projects focused on tackling this problem, @icebreaker seems to be 'the' one 🤔 I'm assuming it's because devs are hoping it will be solved for them through network upgrades? 🤷 https://paragraph.com/@icebreakerlabs/modern-digital-reputation-trust-verification-and-the-scammer-problem
Why haven't attestations been taken more advantage of? 💜
great question. @bap is constantly casting about use cases
They are! It’s still early days and there is wayyyy more work to be done. We need to show more ways attestations can be used. Many builders have a narrow view of what they actually are and how powerful they will become and efficient they are when building.
*sigh of relief* I love seeing more discussions on these topics and have high hopes for the potentials! 🥹
Digital reputation isn't about perfect profiles. It's about consistent, verifiable actions over time. Anonymous ≠ untrusted. Known ≠ trustworthy. Verification without time is just theater. Real trust requires continuous signals. https://paragraph.com/@icebreakerlabs/modern-digital-reputation-trust-verification-and-the-scammer-problem