🧠 Vitalik Buterin Wants You to Have More Than One Identity

Because one ID to rule them all is how dystopias start

🔍 What’s the Problem?

Digital ID sounds good — until it doesn’t. Vitalik Buterin says the whole “one-human-one-ID” trend might backfire. Sure, zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are great — but if your ID is tied to everything, you’ve just handed Big Brother the keys to your life.

• 👁️‍🗨️ One ID = Easy surveillance
• 🧑‍💼 Employer coercion? Inevitable
• 🏦 Corporate overreach? Guaranteed Even with ZK tech, social pressure kills privacy. No amount of cryptography saves you if someone forces you to dox your key.

🧩 Vitalik’s Fix: “Pluralistic Identity”

Vitalik’s answer? Multiple IDs. Multiple sources. No one in charge. Call it pluralistic identity. It looks like this:

• 🧠 IDs from governments, DAOs, wallets, social networks
• 🔄 No central authority or registry
• 🛡️ Better for inclusion, privacy, and resilience

This means undocumented people aren’t excluded. And if you lose an ID — you don’t lose everything.

📉 One ID = Death of Pseudonymity

Let’s be real: You use different accounts for different things — work, memes, lurking, dating. Now imagine if you’re forced to use one verified ID for all of it?

• Goodbye anonymous shitposting
• Hello blackmail, censorship, social scoring
• Even ZK-wrapped ID won’t help if an app demands to know who you are

This is the end of the free internet if we let it happen.

💸 “Just Stake Tokens!”? No Thanks.

Some crypto bros say we don’t need IDs at all — just make users stake money to prove they’re real. But Vitalik calls that what it is: exclusionary nonsense.

• Poor users get locked out
• Doesn’t work for UBI, voting, or fair access
• Turns identity into a rich kid’s game

Identity needs to be fair, not financialized.

📐 N IDs = N² Cost (Genius)

Vitalik’s solution? Let people have many IDs — but make it cost more the more you make.

• ID #1: 1 unit
• ID #2: 4 units
• ID #3: 9 units

That means:

• 🧍 You can stay pseudonymous
• 🤖 But whales and bots can’t farm a thousand fake IDs
• 🛡️ Protection against manipulation, without sacrificing freedom

🌐 The Battle Between Identity Systems

There are two ways we already live pluralistically:

• ✅ Explicit: Friends vouch for you (Circles-style social graphs)
• ✅ Implicit: You already have 10 IDs (Google, Discord, ETH wallet…)

Both work. But if one system becomes too dominant (👀 Worldcoin?), we lose the pluralism — and Web3 becomes WebOnePartyState.

🔮 The Hybrid Future

Vitalik’s vision for identity in Web3:

1. Use biometric or 1-human systems to verify you exist
2. Spawn pseudonymous sub-IDs from that root
3. Build trust and reputation without revealing everything

It’s modular, privacy-preserving, anti-coercion, and inclusive. Basically, the opposite of what most digital ID proposals are today.

🧾 TL;DR

• Vitalik Buterin says digital ID should be plural, not singular
• ZK tech is powerful, but not enough to protect users from social coercion
• One-per-person ID models kill pseudonymity and enable surveillance
• “Pluralistic identity” means multiple, decentralized IDs from various sources
• A quadratic cost model prevents spam without punishing normal users
• The future? Private, modular, and human-first digital identity

"When any one ID system becomes dominant, it risks undermining privacy, decentralization, and inclusivity. The only real defense is pluralism." – Vitalik Buterin