The Torn Identity

This is the first of a two-part article that explores the connection between Blockchain and identity systems, and how I believe this fundamental relationship could be the biggest game-changer in our current digital ecosystem.

PART 1: IDENTIFYING THE PROBLEM

Among the countless proposed use cases for Blockchain, ranging from potentially revolutionary decentralised government systems, to yet another shitcoin, to CryptoKitties and everything in between, the debate about which one will be the next Google or Amazon in the cryptosphere has been in the mainstream for a while now, invariably overshadowed by the usual forecasts about which coin or token is consequently supposed to be headed to the moon. Who would have thought that cats could ever break the internet? Oh wait

That’s great click-bait material and it sure must work to drive a few more people into crypto, which may or may not be a positive achievement. However, we have yet to see a scalable, functional blockchain-based solution that has the appeal, user-friendliness and fundamental problem-solving capacity to be finally adopted by the masses

If history taught us anything is that, when it comes to predicting the future of tech, both skeptical naysayers and radical optimists invariably end up ridiculed (except maybe for Elon Musk - with that guy, all bets are off).

Even if we’re unable to see clearly into the future, there’s still a pattern to how innovation works its way into the human psyche. For instance, so far, every technological revolution has been spearheaded by ideas that solved real problems in more efficient and intuitive ways - with adoption exponentially following advances that pushed for a simpler, more seamless user experience.

As I previously argued, I believe that a good deal of the challenges facing today’s hyper-connected world derives from the same age-old problem of trust in its many incarnations. Perhaps the most fundamental of them, of which most others are really just another abstraction level, is our identity system. While the prediction business is a murky one and nobody can tell the next killer app from just another Altavista, I dare say that whoever gets this right will fundamentally transform the way we interact with all things online - and perhaps offline, too.

TRUST ME, I AM MYSELF

The Oxford dictionary states that identity is “the fact of being who or what a person or thing is.” And that’s all perfectly fine if you are the aforementioned person (or thing) herself, or perhaps a family member or even a close friend, who’s watched said identity form, evolve and spend three sleepless nights in a row trying to beat your brother’s time in Super Mario Kart.
)
Forever alone

But apart from increasingly rare, isolated tribes, and the odd (failed) attempt at yet another hippie commune, the absolute majority of us have to rely a great deal on interacting with strangers for our survival, either directly - the Uber that brought you home last night can’t drive itself just yet - or indirectly - the ingredients didn’t magically turn into that pepperoni pizza.

And the farther you go down the line from the original source (you), the harder and costlier it is to validate that you are yourself, and therefore to get other people to believe that you are who or what you say you are.

That is revealing. Whatever the case may be, we’re still a fundamentally social species. Hence all trust stems from social and cultural ties, and identity systems are our way of validating, qualifying or quantifying trust to enable collaboration between strangers. And right now, most of our solutions to that necessarily involve a never-ending stream of proofs and validations by (sometimes not-so) trusted third parties.

THE TORN IDENTITY

If you’re honest about it, the many ways of validating your identity are something that rarely cross your conscious mind while you go about your daily routine - and that’s leaving out the endless philosophical debate about the nature of being, the infinite shades of one’s personality, what the hell is consciousness, and all the really interesting stuff.

I’m talking about the boring stuff - not who you are with all your nuances and your strange fondness of chocolate-covered cheese, but the ways by which you prove that you are who you say you are to the world at large. Yes, I’m talking documents.Credentials. Ugh.

Italians took their time getting it right

Birth certificates, identity cards, social security/national insurance numbers, passports, driver’s licences, Facebook or Twitter accounts, Tesco rewards cards, or that possibly-Orwellian Swedish microchip implant - be it paper, plastic or a few bytes on a hard drive, what do these means all have in common?

A short-and-witty answer to that - and sadly a very real one - would be, not much. They are each their own self-contained silo, never speaking to one another, each one requiring different proofs and validations, each one requiring three thousand levels of authentication, KYC, AML, under myriad layers of passwords, stamps and paperwork that consume godless swaths of one’s life just to state the obvious - that you are indeed yourself. Some services require a combination of several different proofs of identity that just end up aggregated into yet another silo. So each of these is only good for its own varyingly narrow use.

That goes also for aggregate, mutable traits of your identity, such as address, abilities or credit rating. Think about every time you move to a new house, or change phone numbers. How many account updates must you painstakingly go through, utilities subscriptions included? Or every time you apply for a new job at a company’s website where you have to fill your CV yet again, in their own form, because each has its own independent database.

Try forgetting your driver's licence at home and being stopped by the police - your passport will be worth precisely nothing.

And it gets even worse when it comes to reputation systems. Try relocating to a new country and watch, in despair, as your perfect credit score and impeccable work references become as worthless as wheels on a fish.

But all witticism aside, to really answer that question, all those identity mechanisms do share one very important thing in common, and one that does not speak wonders of the walled, centralised systems we ended up building to mediate our existence here on planet Earth.

Even though it may be tempting to think otherwise, in a broad sense none of them actually belongs to you.

Let that sink in for a while.

That means unless someone or some trusted third party agrees to endorse your existence, status or skills -- be it a government, a bank, or Tesco’s rewards team -- you lose access to a host of services, can’t participate in the economy or even be granted basic rights.

Be it due to a centralised systems breach or autocratic decision, you’re cut off the system, sometimes leading to rather mind-boggling situations.

Not so boring now, is it?

***

Ok, so what does Blockchain have to do with any of this? On the second part of this article, I’ll go deeper into the connection between Blockchain and identity systems, talk about some projects that are making progress in this front and explain why I believe that a blockchain-based sovereign identity system could be the killer app on the road to mass adoption, and perhaps even the basis for a new economic model.