What does it mean to be human online? In an age of AI agents posting, interacting, and transacting across the network, the question has stopped being philosophical and started being structural. Avi is joined by David Strayhorn (Brainstorm) and Nathan Day to dig into proof of personhood and why your social graph might be the most non-intrusive way to solve it.
On Nostr, bots are first-class citizens. The problem isn't that they exist, it's that we have no native way to tell who is who they claim to be. Nathan traces his path from BTC Map's proof of place to the attestation primitives that grew out of that work, and now to the Person NIP he's preparing to publish. David comes at the same problem from the other side: tags and decentralized lists, community-curated structures where web-of-trust scoring filters the spam by default. The two approaches turn out to be complementary.
The conversation maps the natural progression – proof of person, then proof of profession, then proof of competence – and lands on the inversion underneath it all: first-person credentials, issued by sovereign individuals and verified by the people who actually know them. Music discovery becomes the worked example. Spotify surfaces the popular. So does ChatGPT. But a Brainstorm-style service operating on social proof can finally surface the Joe Martins of the world. Timeline: Nathan says weeks. David says definitely this year.
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