Standing · Your good conduct, and only the good, carried by you

When someone dodges a ban, they do not break anything. They make a new account. And a new account costs this:

That is the real price of dodging your ban. You can have the best fingerprinting in the world: while being new costs twenty-seven cents, detection is losing. The race is set up wrong.

So we stopped chasing the one who comes back

What standing is

A credential you keep and you present, proving a single sentence:

Without saying which communities. Without saying who you are. And without two places you show it to being able to compare notes and tell you are the same person. Whoever checks it learns one bit: over the bar, or not.

The four rules that do not move

1. Negative standing does not exist. Ever. A sanction never travels, anywhere. The only portable thing is what you choose to show, and it can only help you.
2. There is always a path without standing. A community may use it to let you through sooner; never as the only door. If it were mandatory it would be a caste, and that criticism has to be made impossible, not answered.
3. It expires, and you can burn it. Starting over is still a right: it costs you time, never your identity.
4. Each community sets the bar, not us. There is no global score on anyone, and there will not be.

How it is built

1. You request your attestation in 3 different communities where you have time and no sanctions. Each signs one sentence about you and hands it to you.
2. You bring them together and mint your credential. This is where everything is blinded: a blind signature is used, so whoever issues it cannot see what they are signing and cannot recognise it afterwards. Not even if they wanted to.
3. You show it wherever you like. Each place checks the signature on its own, with a public key. Nobody has to ask us anything.

Why this is not the usual thing

Traditional reputation systems work the other way round: you send someone's identity to a third party and get back a score you can neither argue with nor verify. Here nobody sends anybody's identity. The credential travels with the person, the signature is checked on your server, and what it says is so little that it would be useless for hunting anyone even if we wanted to.

No biometrics, and not by accident

The other way of proving there is a person behind an account has been settled by scanning irises with a dedicated device, and it already drags the retina-farm problem behind it: someone is paid once for their eye and an intermediary keeps their digital identity forever. Standing asks for time and behaviour. That is exactly what an account farm cannot manufacture — and exactly what a person in Lagos has as much of as one in San Francisco.

What this is NOT

• It is not anonymity. The place you show it to still sees you arrive; what it does not see is your past.
• It is not impossible to sell. It is expensive and it shows: it expires every quarter, and if it turns up from another device and another network while behaving differently, that is visible. The honest guarantee is not "it cannot be done", it is "it costs more than it returns".
• It replaces nothing. It is one more signal, and one of the kind that can only add.
• With few issuing communities it is not worth much, the same way a witness system with zero witnesses is not. That is said here, not in the small print.

Check it yourself

The keys used to verify standing are public, at /api/aval/keys. The tool tools/verify-aval.js depends on nothing of ours: it checks the signature and also lists the credential's fields, so you can see it carries nothing identifying inside. A correct credential that said too much would still be a betrayal.