Who Am I — Identity
In our previous post we started our journey in search of an efficient process to tell others who am I ? As we move forward in our journey, a second step is to dig deeper to find what makes us who we are.
So lets say I tell you I met Bill Gates today and he loved the idea of Credit Hydra, what would you make of it ?
- First, you have to know who is Bill Gates? This pertains correctly identifying right Bill Gates and not the wrong Gates.
- Second, finding what he did in his life, what is his net worth is, and all about his financial situation .
This leads us to define Who am I to a two step process
- Step 1: Identify the person
- Step 2: Once you are certain that you have the right person find information that helps us to know them as a human being.
Identification
Problem
Correctly matching a person with their legal identity is an important and difficult task. In current settings there are national id’s (SSN in US, Aadhar in India), these id’s are issued uniquely to each individual. So if you can correctly tie an individual to this national id in a tamper proof manner, you can say that you have identified the person correctly. The problem is that it is hard to achieve just that because of various fraudulent activities and identity thefts that exist.
The problem is even more complex for countries where there are no unique ID for its citizens. In this situation we are left with using alternate methods like Biometrics or other Govt issued Id’s to uniquely identify an individual.
Solution
The solution needs multiple levels of approach and is defined more deeply in our Whitepaper . We have identified three prong approach for the solution:
- Partnerships: There are various efforts ongoing in the blockchain world (Uport, Civic), that we will use to identify an user. This will allow us to leverage the work done by some of the leading platforms in the space and allow us to focus on data collection and rating part. We will also identify efforts by various governments and banks and partner with them.
- Our Own Implementation (National ID + Bio-metrics): For places where there are no automated services available we will build out our own identification method. This will involve multiple efforts like mapping to national Id’s, Biometrics, adding multiple government id’s. All this combined should help us to correctly ascertain the identity of the individual.
- Federated Identity: This is more of a new social approach that is possible due to improved in social connectivity. We will create a social platform that will use a federated reputation system to correctly identify an individual and help them to on-board the system. This ecosystem once populated will be way more powerful than any other identification method that exists and will take away a need of any other identification system in the long run. (More in Whitepaper)
Once we have completed the identification and know that we are talking to the right Bill Gates, second part is really interesting. We start to know you as a person. This is where more complications come. Since every person is different and needs a unique way of understanding. We will handle this part in a next series of posts.
Till then Happy Hunting.