It's a Sunday morning in October. Your window glass just shifted from opaque to clear, and the sunlight gently wakes you. Your new smart speaker cancels noise in your room at night, so you slept well. You're on a healthy farm-to-table diet, but you're out of produce... so you decide to support local businesses, and ask your smart speaker about a farmer's market within jogging distance. You only grab a face mask for the flu season, plus your smart glasses... because Ethereum handles identity and purchasing, and your glasses run a lightweight version of Status.

You triple tap your glasses to start your running playlist, and bone conduction delivers music to your ears alone. Noise cancellation lowers background noise and limits loud noises without silencing the sounds of nearby vehicles and sirens, improving your safety and focus. The virtual dog you created barks playfully to get your attention, and runs a bit faster to encourage your usual running pace. Audio and visual cues navigate you to the market. A neighbor joins your jog, and asks what you're listening to. You both start Status Share, randomizing your MAC address and streaming lossless audio directly over Wi-Fi instead of the Internet.

You wear a transparent mask when buying produce. It lets people see your mouth as you talk, you can easily breathe while wearing it, and it can be sterilized with ultraviolet light for hundreds of uses without any odor. The farmer rewards your hygiene with the farm's unique token, but you chose to wear a mask just because it's the right thing to do. This farmer tracks inventory with RFID tags, so you can always see exactly what's in stock. Status Pay automatically funds a wallet just for this vendor using a token privacy mixer. Local currency tokens are drawn first, and common tokens with above-average current valuation are converted for the remaining balance. The purchase also grants you an online vote for local measures.

After breakfast, you get election updates in Status Browser on your laptop... and find a video of your favorite candidate saying incredibly offensive things about his opponent. You're automatically informed that the video is 89% likely to be a deepfake, and a browser plugin reports it to Twitter. Thanks to others doing the same, the tweet is deleted in minutes. You get on eBay to big on some shoes, and are prompted for multifactor authentication... so you grab your smartphone, and Status provides an oldschool seven digit code to help you log in. You're amazed, but not surprised, that eBay still hasn't moved to biometric or wallet login.

During lunch, a voice message in a Status Chat group informs you of a local protest against a law that would provide law enforcement officers immunity against excessive use of force. You transcribe the message to keep the location handy. The group chat automatically strips metadata, applies vocoders to voices, and blurs people's faces on voice recordings, photos, and video to protect against voice and facial recognition... and does so on the devices from which they were shared. During the protest, law enforcement disables cellular towers... so Status Chat joins a mesh network to relay all nearby Status Chat text messages over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth alone. Messages only appear on the phones to which they were sent.

As you exit the protest, you're questioned by law enforcement as they investigate the destruction of property near where you were. You activate a beacon to inform your friends that police have stopped you, and record video for your protection. You know your rights and decline to be interviewed, only generating a single-use QR code to provide the information needed to identify you... namely your city of residence with no specific address, and a detailed photograph of you to prove that the identification is yours. You also choose to reveal your lack of a criminal record... but you never reveal your name, nor anything else that is new and uniquely identifying. As you've provided what the law requires, you're free to go.

You stop for tea on your way home. Status Pay knows where you are, pulls up a menu, and suggests the same order as your last visit. You don't even have to talk to the staff, but you still greet them. Ethereum's network can't instantly confirm your transaction, probably because Netflix airdropped tokens again... but you place your order by sharing the public key to a wallet, proving you can afford the purchase. The transaction finalizes before your drink is brewed, so you can grab your tea as soon as it's ready. You smile as you take a sip, thinking back to ten years ago... when you had to manage tokens manually, and everyday privacy was just a dream. What a wonderful world.

Chris (tidus.eth)