TL;DR
Digital identity is a pressing issue from many angles. First, we need a future-proof way to distinguish between bots and humans. Second, we need to liberate our identity from the walled gardens that are social media companies. And third, we need to ‘identify the unidentified’: the roughly billion people on earth who don’t have a passport or other form of official identity. There are multiple protocols emerging. Some are built on the blockchain, some aren’t. Some issue tokens, some don’t. Let’s have a look.
It’s common knowledge that there are slight issues with people are sick of the existing way of managing online identity. At the risk of exaggerating a bit, we are digital serfs to the colonial social media giants. We can be booted off, and lose our social network and income, and we are vulnerable to data breaches. Not to mention the tedious user experiences of having to manage numerous accounts.
Let’s briefly explore two of the above-mentioned issues with current online identity.
Issue 1: Walled Gardens and Fraud
The issue with walled gardens such as Google and Facebook is that we don’t own our most valuable identification information. It sits on centralized databases and has numerous points of failure. This is appealing to hackers. And if hackers don’t mess with us, the social media giant can simply expel us, without due process.
Issue 2: AI or Person of Flesh and Blood?
This is an issue that will become only more pressing: Are you interacting with human or AI-generated content? Is the entity that wants to access your social media platform a bot or a person? In some cases, you might not care so much. The automatic responder on a customer service call, a chatbot… we are already familiar with and can spot artificial interactions. But as AI infiltrates more interactions and becomes more advanced, the question will nag at us more and more. We will have a more pressing need to simply know for sure who we are dealing with.
The ‘Unidentified’
Being unbanked, like more than 2.5 billion people are, puts you on the back foot in terms of participating in the global economy. But what about the 1 billion (mostly poor) people who have no proof of identity? They can’t enroll in school or apply for jobs. But… many of these people do have mobile phones, so they can access mobile identity solutions that can leapfrog their problem and connect them to the online economy.
Now, let’s look at two main sectors of digital identity solutions: proof-of-personhood protocols and decentralized social media protocols.
Examples of Proof-of-Personhood Protocols
One branch of the digital identity protocol landscape is concerned with proof-of-personhood. The simplest way to define a proof-of-personhood system is: it creates a list of public keys where the system guarantees that each key is controlled by a unique human. In Vitalik’s words in his post about Worldcoin:
“If you’re a human, you can put one key on the list, but you can’t put two keys on the list, and if you’re a bot you can’t put any keys on the list.”
The most prominent proof-of-personhood protocol is Worldcoin. A bit lesser known is Proof of Humanity. Let’s look at the latter first.
Proof of Humanity
Proof of Humanity is a protocol that combines social verification with video submission to create a list of humans….
Erik started as a freelance writer around the time Satoshi was brewing on the whitepaper.
As a crypto investor, he is class of 2020. More of a holder than a trader, but never shy to experiment with new protocols.
