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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

>using your legal identity at work is unnecessary, and puts your safety, security, and privacy, at risk.

It is?

I want this?

I tried watching a bit of the video but it kinda lost me with the bitcoin stuff as I don't really think of bitcoin and my relationship with my employer ... have anything to do with each other.

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For crypto, this is actually somewhat reasonable. I'm sure this sounds "dumb" to traditional users, but if you are a community manager of a cryptocurrency, you will probably have near continuous 7x24 attacks on you in an attempt to take over accounts or other similar BS. They frequently try exponentially harder on the non technical members because of the assumption that the people working on the tech are more likely to have 2FA etc, while "community manager" will probably have to click any link they get.

That being said, all of the entries on this site are for cryptocurrency/NFT/whatever, so that sounds about right.

It's interesting how this plays out with crypto and not exactly the same / intensity with traditional finance employees.

No, it's not really a surprise when you step back and think about it—the core purpose of cryptocurrencies is to provide for immutable, "trustless" transactions that cannot be refunded or disputed. Instead, these transactions are based only on technical constructs (passwords, private keys), rather than social constructs (signatures, invoices, remittances). Additionally, the internal controls that are designed to prevent one rogue employee from doing anything are much more extensive and mature in the finance industry, since it's had longer to develop them and doesn't have to rely on purely "automatic" technical factors. "Compromising" a traditional finance employee's account might be embarrassing for their employer, and may result in the leaking of trade secrets or other sensitive information, but the actual financial loss is going to be very minimal.

My assumption is that traditional finance money is often a lot more refundable.

FWIW, different industry, but I did a few months as a contractor at two AAA game devs and my god the amount of shit you have to deal with, having a staff flagged forum account with 0 posts, people would go through the member list, send hundreds of DMs begging for free shit, try to find your email to harass you for free beta keys or cash shop items, friends IRL would be like "haha does that mean you can edit my character to be max level"

Yeah, the majority of the financial world has reversible transactions (in fact, it's so rare that they are NOT that it becomes news when it happens: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1019909860) and the places where they are NOT access is limited or double-checked (think stock trades).

Admittedly, that sentence might be a tad hyperbolic right now, but I do think increasingly it will be the case.

I do think there's no inherit reason why we need to know peoples' legal/irl identities in order to assert that they're suitable for a job. I can even imagine using Zero Knowledge Proofs to prove that candidates reside in certain territories, if that's a requirement that your job might have.

While I partly agree on asserting they're suitable for a job, actually employing them is entirely different. If someone has access to proprietary information/IP/Assets/etc, I don't want a pseudonym and a bitcoin transaction receipt when any of those go missing or an employee used my infrastructure to commit crimes and the feds are now asking me questions and my only answer is 0xPersona that I met on anon.com whom I pay with crypto.

Absolutely! I would just posit that the organizations listed on the site seem to be handling this somehow (for now). I myself would be really curious as to how.

As a general tip:

Trusting that someone doing something markedly unusual is "handling it somehow" is a great way to get some ugly surprises later. Companies do things wrong all the time and in many cases you can find yourself liable for their mistakes/abuses in some way or another. Sometimes at great cost. Obviously, you need to trust every employer/client to some degree, but you'll benefit yourself by developing a sense for what smells fishy.

Unregistered, anonymous work in a world of borders, worker protections, and taxes smells like the dumpster behind a Red Lobster. You don't have to rule out an opportunity that interests you, but do be careful!

Paying an anonymous person in crypto doesn't sound much different from slipping that same person an envelope of unmarked bills to do some work. Which is something people with fiduciary responsibility at a company are not going to generally sign off on.

The bills are much less traceable and petty cash exists for a reason, but the point stands.

No, you're definitely right! I definitely wouldn't feel confident saying they're handling it well, because I just don't know how they're handling it! But I do hope to bring some of this info to light. I think it's an area that deserves attention and discussion :)

I do think there's no inherit reason why we need to know peoples' legal/irl identities in order to assert that they're suitable for a job.

Respectfully, are you extremely young?

Someone near me was recently convicted of embezzling $3.2 million from our local government. Should she be able to work as a city controller at another local government when she gets out of jail?

I could bring up another certain population applying for jobs at childcare centers but hopefully I am just misunderstanding your position because it seems so ludicrous.

To clarify, I don't think pseudonymous work is appropriate for all types of work. I'm not a maximalist. Much of my thinking currently is about pseudonymous work in the context that I've noticed it being done, which is largely in cryptocurrency. Of course none of the people in the scenarios you mention should be able to work those jobs.

Much of my thinking currently is about pseudonymous work in the context that I've noticed it being done, which is largely in cryptocurrency.

Would you want to hire a pseudonymous cryptocurrency programmer who purposely created a security flaw at his last employer and then exploited his own flaw himself to drain all of his employer’s wallets? How is that any better?

No. Which is why I would ask them to submit a resume, interview them, do reference calls, check their Github, check their social media, etc.

I would hire a pseudonymous programmer. I probably would not hire a pseudonymous programmer with zero history or reputation accrued to their pseudonymous identity.

How do you prevent someone from buying a new identity? In the future you describe, there will surely be a market for an internet profile corresponding to a mid-level programmer. If everything is based on task work, a competent developer could farm multiple identities simultaneously, then use each to pull off a different crime or scam.

If they're sufficiently active on social media, tied into the rest of this, that starts to be their primary identity and it's not really pseudonymous anymore.

No employee should be able to have the opportunity to steal 3.2M, especially if that's money that has been extorted under threat of imprisonment from honest working people.

Sure, people may want to voluntarily pool money for some reason or another; I would recommend smart contracts to manage this in a safe way, but there may be a point where trust is required.

Offering a service based on trust means having a reputation-based system (third party reviews, third party audits, third party certifications) of competing people offering the service.

The reputation could be based on a pseudonym but an address is be needed for a potential court case.

There are plenty of services where this is not relevant though.

Regardless of the philosophical debate of whether this should be the case or not, it is definitely not true in most places simply for existing legal reasons.

Yeah, I definitely agree. But I do think this philosophical debate is one worth having! I'm hoping the site will at least help kick it off or facilitate it to some degree.

Hilarious, isn't it? Bitcoin isn't remotely anonymous.

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