Blockchain and identity reading list
Recommended articles, presentations, books and references to prepare for our upcoming workshop on Blockchain and Identity
Recommended introductions to blockchain
In October 2015 the Economist published a cover story on blockchain technology under the title “The trust machine”. It was one of the first mainstream media publications with a full cover and featured stories on blockchain and its consequences on business. The articles triggered many new players to get interested and fueled the hype around blockchain technology.
Vinay Gupta is one of the most visionary thinkers on technology and its consequences. He helped organize the launch of the popular blockchain platform Ethereum and wrote (among many other great pieces) a very readable and non-technical introduction to blockchain:
Explaining blockchain in one slide by William Mougayar:
Recommended talk on identity on the blockchain
David Birch is a UK consultant, expert on payment systems and digital identity and a great speaker.
At a recent blockchain conference in the Netherlands he gave an excellent presentation (slides) about his three-fold model of identity:
Real (mundane), digital, and virtual identity, which are used for identification, authentication, and authorization respectively.
We think this could be a useful framework to relate to when talking about blockchain and identity.
Identity concepts and visions
The laws of identity by Kim Cameron of Microsoft was published in 2005 and provides a good set of principles and definitions. It has remained a relevant and useful resource for discussing digital identity until today.
Alex Batlin is the blockchain lead at Swiss bank UBS. He shares his predictions about Digital Identity on Blockchain.
Christopher Allen is chief architect at Blockstream, a blockchain development company, and one of the authors of the widely used TLS standard for Internet security. In his blog post he presents an overview of the evolution of digital identity towards self-sovereign identity.
Additional references
You feel like you need to understand more about blockchain? A great list of resources has been put together by Brian Forde for the MIT media lab digital currency initiative:
The UK government published an interesting review looking at the future of distributed ledger (or block chain) technology in January 2016.
I can also highly recommend the following two books:
- “The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice and Application of the Next Internet Technology” by William Mougayar for a business perspective on blockchain. William also blogs heavily on blockchain and business.
- “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction” by Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Edward Felten, Andrew Miller & Steven Goldfeder for a deep technical understanding. The draft version is available as a free PDF and the authors also offer an online cryptocurrency course on coursera.
More on identity
If you want to know more, dig deeper into identity and blockchain, here are some more references as starting points.
Vitalik Buterin the founder of Ethereum and one of the most influential individuals in blockchain published a blog post on the value of blockchain technology, in which he also writes about the identity use case.
Two additional interesting and inspiring pieces come from Chris Skinner on applying blockchain to identity and Vinay Gupta on identity, institutional memory and the persistent illusion of the self.
David Birch wrote a seminal book on digital identity, which I can highly recommend: Identity is the new money.
He also provides more details about putting identity on the blockchain in this multi-part series of blog posts.
Notable digital identity projects
- ID2020 is a non-profit initiative to advance technology for identity and their UN ID 2020 Summit workshop repository is a great source of information in the form of short papers.
- ID3 is a research and educational nonprofit organization in Boston. They published “The Windhover Principles for Digital Identity, Trust, and Data” and among others a great piece on self-sovereignty.
- The World Economic Forum (WEF) published a report on digital identity targeted at financial institutions in August 2016.
Notable blockchain identity projects
- uPort, a ConsenSys project to manage decentralized identity on the Ethereum blockchain
- Evernym aims to build a dedicated distributed ledger for identity applications. They also maintain a useful list of resources in their research section and wrote a white paper “Identity System Essentials”.
- BlockoneID is a relatively recent project by Thomson Reuters, mapping identity providers to blockchain addresses.
- Proof-of-identity by oraclize, is a simple and hackathon-winning decentralized application on Ethereum to identify users on the Blockchain using the Estonian digital identity card.
If you think we missed something, please inform us at contact@disrupt-consulting.com
