Thanks for your questions, by the way. So, to sum up: No, Bitcoin doesn't need KYC, but new social use cases built around Bitcoin like P2P services, borderless collaboration, Network States – often do. We're not enforcing KYC, we're enabling peer-verified personhood — decentralised, voluntary, private by default.

Bitcoin doesn't need KYC. That's exactly why we're not trying to "add KYC on top of Bitcoin" - we're building a decentralised optional trust layer that can support use cases where personhood and accountability are needed, without sacrificing user sovereignty.

Our protocol, Shegby, was inspired by the real-world needs we had when building a P2P marketplace of services - where both buyers and providers need a way to verify trust with each other before entering into a transaction. When people are interacting with each other online, especially when it's across borders, there's a real need to check who they are and what their reputation is, while also keeping their privacy intact. That's the gap we're solving.

You might say our HumanRank system is like Web of Trust, but it's set up like PageRank:

At the end of the day, we're aiming to create a Network State (inspired by Balaji S.), where the flow of citizenship, collaboration and services between individuals needs to be voluntary but also strong identity models - not reliant on state-controlled systems.