What might decentralization mean for our identities?
A rather interesting pizza the blockchain puzzle
This is write-up of our second event: Pizza Block. For anyone who couldn’t make it or if you were there and want a reminder, here’s a flavour of some of “aha” moments and the amazing, thought-provoking discussions that took place. This event wouldn’t have been possible without inventors of Pizza Block, the Design Informatics team and our incredible hosts Modern Human.
Thanks to everyone that came. Join the Meetup page to hear about our next event.
Lola, Andy and Ryan
What can Edinburgh’s less-than-adequate* pizza scene tell us about decentralized services and trustless identity
Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write… and I wouldn’t blame you if it’s left you scratching your head or leaning in for a re-read.
But this was the basis of our latest event, Pizza Block and the answer is: well, a lot actually.
What on earth is Pizza Block?
Pizza Block is a wonderfully thought-provoking game devised by Chris, Jonathan and errr, Chris from the Design Informatics team at the University of Edinburgh. It gives participants a glimpse into how decentralized technologies could shape how we do business and prove our credentials without having to share large swathes of personal data.
The basic premise
The workshop has three roles that participants can play:
- Volunteers who need to acquire skills in order to work for the enterprises
- Enterprises who need volunteers to prepare and deliver pizzas to their customers
- Training centres who need to sell their courses which provide skills
How it works
I hope you’re sitting down for this. Here goes…
- Everyone gets a unique stamp — this represents a cryptographic key
- Enterprises advertise jobs that volunteers might want
- Each job has skill requirements that volunteers must meet
- Volunteers pay for skills in tokens, proof of those skills are subsequently tokenised and stored in the volunteer’s wallet. This is signed/verified by both parties using a unique stamp.
- A record of this transaction is sent to the public ledger.
- Volunteers can show that token to the enterprises, proving they have that skill. The enterprise can then give them that job, safe in the knowledge they’re qualified. This is a neat way of thinking about smart contracts: if criteria a,b and c are met, allow x, y and z. This smart contract is then signed/verified by both parties using the same unique stamps.
- A record of this smart contract is sent to the public ledger.
- Volunteers can earn more tokens by verifying that the public ledger is correct. If you know your blockchain theory, this replicates the role of miners well. You can do this by matching the stamps to prove that volunteers did indeed have the skills they were claiming to have when asking for jobs at the enterprises.
- The enterprise with the most jobs completed and verified on the public ledger wins!
What we learned on the night
Firstly, regardless of the subject matter, it reminded us just how great games are at helping you understanding highly complex topics. As designers ourselves, workshops are a go-to format for exploring a complex topic. The detail put into the structure, prompts and tools for the workshop made it not just fun but meant we could get stuck in even before we really understood all the rules.
A little hesitancy and confusion at first was followed by volunteers feverishly rushing between the training centre and the enterprises to add proof of skills and experience to their wallet.
Your identity is more controllable on chain
You have a lot more say over who you share your identity with on the blockchain. You can also be more selective, choosing only to share what is mutually deemed necessary by both parties. For example, in the game the enterprises were only interested that we had the skills required to do the work. So we only needed to share this information with them — they didn’t need anything else. This means our personal data might finally become personal again.
Your identity is tamper-proof on chain
You can store proven claims about your identity in a safe and permanent way on the blockchain because of the chain part. Every transaction is part of a chain, meaning any modification to a record would “unlink” the chain so to speak. For example, if your university signs and verifies that you have the degree you’re claiming and then that gets put on the blockchain — you’ve got yourself permanent proof of your degree. Once we had proof of graduating from our pizza making classes, this was added to the public ledger, where any after-the-fact modifications would have been obvious and immediately discounted.
Your identity is self-sovereign on chain
Once your identity is on the blockchain, claims about you identity can be verified by others in the network. In the game, we were able to use the public ledger to verify that individuals had the skills and experience they were claiming. This means we won’t necessarily need to rely on institutions, which don’t always act in our best interests, to control elements of our digital identity.
When is a wallet not a wallet?
All of this challenged a common perception about crypto wallets. Amidst the boom and bust, bull and bear rhetoric surrounding the space, it’s easy to forget that decentralization is about more than buying low and selling high. It got me thinking especially about whether the metaphor is more damaging than it is helpful. When you’re able to use a “wallet” to prove you have skills, expertise and more… is it still just a wallet? To get technical for a second, your “wallet” never actually holds any funds.
A “wallet” is a UI for showing the data associated with a public key, on the blockchain (or public ledger referenced above). To see that data you need to have the private key. This to me makes it more like a vault or a safe which holds proofs and deeds about what you own, the skills you have and how much value is associated with your public key.
And that closes the pizza box lid on this one
Thanks again to Chris, Chris and Jonathan from Design Informatics and everyone at Modern Human. Get the latest from them on Twitter:
*We can’t speak for the quality of pizza in Edinburgh, that quote’s on our friends at Design Informatics 😉
Here’s that link again if you’re interested in our next event or learning more about a decentralized future ✌️
