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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Pseudonymous. Just like anyone who is willing to do the work can identify my real identity from my HN writing, a pseudonymous chess handle gives a lot of information. A chess player who wants to be anonymous should not re-use a handle for two games. There is no anonymity anywhere if you provide enough entropy which you do if you use a persistent pseudonym.

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If you want to play against good players you need some games to gain rating

Yes. That’s fine so long as you never play in person as well, thereby tying a real identity to your pseudonym.

Otherwise you can remain pseudonymous (not anonymous) for as long as you want.

But there is no way to do a mix of in-person and pseudonymous writing/chess/art/anything with a personal “style”.

Mmmm this could be solved using Zero-Knowledge proofs.

When registering pick an elo. Provide a proof that you own the account in that Elo range and then you can create another account that will start in that Elo range.

An account that you never play with doesn't have much value. And as soon as you play one game, thereby revealing your unique playstyle, you have pretty much signed the account with all your previous account names, which also potentially tie into your real identity.

So you get ONE pseudonym and then any other account you create are known aliases of that pseudonym.

And if you play in person, then any account/pseudonym you ever create are linked to your human identity as well.

So, to solve such issue we can add noise? So, lets say I play 1 game, i let another people/bot to play another game using same account?

What if the playing style of one game is already enough to hint at who might be playing?

Then you are never entirely anonymous. I doubt that’s the case though.

They aren’t comparing two sets of games. They are comparing a single game with all player's known set of game. Any FIDE rated player will have a set of games that is known to everyone.

Yes. If you played enough as a human then you can't play a completely anonymous/pseudonymous game. Just like if you have written 10 bestsellers you probably can't write even a short pseudonymous newspaper column without someone recognizing your style. They can't be sure from that little information, so you aren't completely exposed - but if you keep writing a series of columns they'll be more and more sure.

The same thing with chess. Play chess under your real name (or write texts or draw illustrations whatever) and you'll never do so anonymously again. I'm not sure what's so upsetting or revolutionary here.

The fact that entire games have been repeated, even in top-level play, proves that there's not enough information to determine a player's identity from a single game.

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