We have a lot of concerns around the web about our privacy being eroded, and I'm one of the people who are really concerned about this stuff.
However, in many cases it's beneficial to be able to demonstrate that you are unique person and to let your counterparty know and verify your data.
For example, when you want to get a loan. Or when you want to do business with someone, like hiring freelancer. Or when leaving feedback about contracts held or broken.
Currently, it's almost impossible to establish unique identity of people online, however, this problem can be solved with blockchain technology.
Here's how this could be done with blockchain.
Each user would have to submit a proof of work to establish that the profile is hard to generate. For example, someone could send .1 BTC to an address and submit that address and proof of ownership as proof of uniqueness (note that in my idea, the user retains the ownership of the money, however, his profile will become invalid should he choose to move that money). There is no reason to be only limited to BTC, or for the developers to pre-set the exact value that is needed to establish that the profile is hard to generate. I think that free market is going to take care of that.
Next, the user could submit to the network his data encrypted with asymmetric encryption. The users would be than able to share with each other public keys needed to verify data and leave feedback for each other. You could, for example, leave feedback about someone stating that you know that person personally (or through doing business with him, or not at all), you certify that you didn't leave similar feedback for any other profiles owned by him, and that he lives by the address whose encryption is published on the blockchain. The strength of your feedback would be defined by the strength of your profile.
I’m thinking about this for some time now, and I’d love to hear some ideas or suggestions
I think I'm going to write about this soon too, but I'd love to to read more about how you think a system like this could work. If you don't mind me saying, you're a little light on details 😜
For example, there's nothing in your idea to prevent someone from simply claiming to be someone else and their buddies could vouch for them, which that would be enough to establish trust. But this is clearly not based on anything real about a person, which is what we're trying to verify.
The usual way banks or government agencies use to verify someone is who they say they are is with a combination of their name, their signature, their state ID number (social security number) and perhaps proof of this (such as a card), and proof of address, which could be a couple of recent utility bills in the name of the person, or even something mailed out to them as a verification step.
This is clunky, takes time, and does not take into account the variety of situations people can find themselves in (not having directly paid a bill in the last three months for example), being homeless or itinerant, or not having a name (!?).
So in my opinion we're looking for something that beats this in terms of usability, but also works well to establish identity.
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