Why Identity on the Blockchain
A key concept of our approach to identity is that identity should be the ownership of the individual. In my mind, that concept is absolutely self-evident. If you believe in that concept, then it follows that the blockchain is a good fit for storing identity data. In this post, I hope to explain why that is.
The blockchain is a shared database that anyone in the world can potentially read and write to and that no-one can delete. This is a feature that could lead to the ‘de-siloing of information and power’ as Joe Lubin put it so eloquently. No-one controls or owns the database. There is no-one with any special rights or privileges over the database as a whole. The software that runs the database is free, as in freedom.
Now let’s contrast that with the databases we’ve traditionally worked with. They could perhaps best be described as brittle silos. Someone has to pay to run the server, what happens if they go out of business? There is hierarchical access control. What happens when the root is compromised? How is access granted? What happens when we try to suck data out of one silo and squirt it into another? Typically, it’s a big expensive mess. Who owns the data? Can you trust them not to take advantage of that information asymmetry? How can you be sure that data won’t be arbitrarily or accidentally deleted? Or that your access control won’t be revoked?
Even if there was some benevolent entity willing to maintain a database of identities, even if all the data was fully encrypted end-to-end, for the purposes of transparency you would want that database to be fully audit-able, you would want time-stamping to contextualise the audit trail, and in the end your database would look a lot like a blockchain. And as far as I’m aware, such a database does not exist. The blockchain does exist and you don’t have to trust any benevolent entity to do the right thing, now and into the future, to use it.
As mentioned in the previous post, we are currently working on this problem — towards an open-source web-of-trust solution — if you are interested in joining our collaborative effort, please get in touch.
