What is the reason for Identity verification?
A lot of identity verification is down to legislation. For anybody running a business online, they are subject to local laws and regulations.
At the moment it is still possible to operate anonymously online but there are a lot of groups lobbying to change how we use the internet and want to regulate our every thought and movement. More transparent and more restricted.
It will come to the stage soon where to use any of the major online sites that you will need to identify yourself fully in one form or another.
Here on hive know that it will be possible to operate on #web3 and avoid all of this but for a lot of people they will believe that it is the only way unless educated otherwise.
Imagine having to link your personal info to your twitter account, to your citizens Id to everything under one government based system that can be accessed by different groups as they need to verify what you have been up to?
I know that I don’t want the government seeing my search history. Do you?
All jokes aside but I wouldn’t like them to audit my online activity and tax my @Splinterlands account. My noise.cash earnings. Track what I bought on Amazon and how I paid for it.
While there are some brilliant uses for an online passport, I would only see it for official use like booking flights or applying for jobs. I certainly don’t want it tied to my tweet of something funny ten years earlier that lands me in court because it’s not acceptable anymore.
Electoral voting good. – Employers seeing my Internet history very bad.
Self-Sovereign Digital Identity – Decentralised identifiers (DID)
“A Decentralized Identifier (DID) is a new type of identifier that is globally unique, resolvable with high availability, and cryptographically verifiable. DIDs are typically associated with cryptographic material, such as public keys, and service endpoints, for establishing secure communication channels. DIDs are useful for any application that benefits from self-administered, cryptographically verifiable identifiers such as personal identifiers, organizational identifiers, and identifiers for Internet of Things scenarios.”
W3C
Reference: https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-primer/
Use for blockchain enabled digital identity.
Digital identities are a very interesting concept as they have so much application in the real world and online. They are an inevitability going forward into a digital age so the real question is how they are integrated into our everyday lives.
We will no doubt have a digital passport at some stage with all of our relevant information and life details stored onto the government system. Accessible by any party with the relevant permissions to see our education, career, criminal records, monetary profile ect…
It will be very handy for the operations we do now involving paperwork or any governed body. There are so many different sectors in the government which are all intertwined but don’t interact with each other’s systems. Blockchain will fix this and once your details are on a secure government private blockchain, they will be accessible when you want to pay tax, apply for a job, claim a benefit or try to interact with anybody who needs your info. All you will need to do is give them the right permissions and verify that it is your identity. All of the addition details will be stored to your digital identity.
This brings up a larger problem however as the more information that is tied to your digital identity, the more restricted that your life becomes. If all of your data is available to be accessed then it becomes very easy to lose control of your actions. You operate according to a set of rules created by society which in itself sets a dangerous precedent. If the people setting the rules don’t have the best of intentions then you will be operating on bad data and your options restricted based on what people see attached to your digital identity.
My online identity is tied to the hive blockchain and gives me access to hundreds of apps built onto the eco-system. It gives me access to finance, social applications, investment opportunities, gaming, social media and a built in reputation system.
Everything that you do is on the eco-system and visible to everybody else unless specifically encrypted. While it is not linked to my national identity there is a very interesting study here as your online reputation linked across all of the applications and this carries weight. In an immutable, decentralized, censorship resistant system your reputation and voting power are the things that matter the most. Since your one identity carries across all applications built onto the eco-system it becomes a very important identity to build up.
It will be there as long as the blockchain lasts. It can’t be deleted or censored. If one hive platform blocks you it will still show up on all of the other platforms. You will hold onto your name, your followers, your holdings, your nft’s and everything else tied to that identity.
It can be anonymous but your anonymous identity can still be a very valid identifier and point of reference. Just look at Banksy or Satoshi Nakamoto. Name and reputation still count regardless of who those things are really tied to.
There is a huge gap in the market for immutable, easy to use web3 accounts like hive has to offer and it is a niche that will be filled very soon as government pile on restrictions and web2 based sites fall in line and keep wiping out identities that took years to build up but can be deleted in seconds.
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