Vitalik: The "Show Account Country" feature on platform X will only bring short-term positive effects.

According to BlockBeats news, on November 24, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin shared a post predicting the feature of “showing the country of the account owner”: in the short term, it will bring many positive effects. In the medium term, experienced players will find ways to disguise themselves as being in a different country. There are countless ways to rent someone else's passport, phone number, IP address, etc. It would be somewhat difficult to forge 1 million accounts with fake locations, but it would be very easy to create one fake location account and then grow it to 1 million followers. Six months later, political bot accounts that are actually located in some random Eurasian country but operate under names like “defending Western civilization” will likely have their location tags changed to “United States” or “United Kingdom.” (The above is what I believe will happen, not what I hope to see. What I hope for is: (i) that we can truly see different communities' views on different issues, and that this is not an easily forged signal; (ii) that these “communities” are not just highly identifiable narrow labels like countries or educational backgrounds, but rather a broader, more spontaneous structure composed of multi-source evidence. However, I believe it is very difficult to maintain such a system's robustness in a confrontational environment.) After further reflection, I also agree with the respondents' views: it is wrong to display the user's country without user consent and without providing any exit options (not even the “deactivate account” option as a last resort). In most cases, displaying country information would still retain a large anonymous set, but there are indeed some individuals for whom even a few bits of data leakage can be very dangerous, and they should not have their privacy reversed stripped away by the platform without any remedy.