Distributed crypto identity as a mechanism for legal empowerment of the poor | Hacker News Reader

Distributed crypto identity as a mechanism for legal empowerment of the poor

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27 pointsTurukawa17 comments

This is like your hammer breaking and you deciding you need to build a new nail.

If you need "legal" identification, it has to come from your government or be approved by them. Whether it's a "digital" or paper identity, it still has to be processed by your government. If they're already not doing it, they're not going to do it in a new form, either.

Aside from this ID is the idea of digital currency. That could actually be beneficial to remote people using basic cell phones. But it doesn't need any fancy digital ID; just tie the phone identifier to some intermediate personal banking network, and you can send and receive money using just your phone number. Simple, direct, intuitive, using existing infrastructure. I don't think biometrics should be necessary (it's easily broken and costs more money).

The vast majority of people who look at my driver's license are not the working for the government. The vast majority of people who use any identity are not the government. The government simply provides a form of verification because we have nothing better. They will punish you if you counterfeit a piece of physical identity, so this discourages counterfeits. A trust-based cryptographic network could conceivably serve part of that purpose, by making explicit and immediately verifiable the informal networks of trust that already exist.

The only way an ID is useful is if there is a standard bearer that upholds the way in which the ID is created, cataloged, and administered. You would have to create a 3rd-party organization which government would have to sponsor or hire out to provide all ID services.

There are many governments which lack either the physical capacity or the political interest to provide persistent and meaningful legal identity to their citizens. Sometimes they use this to prevent their citizens exercising their democratic rights.

The impact of this is that their citizens lose the ability to create or enforce legal contracts. Take property, for instance. Families from Syria to Haiti to Sri Lanka have been living on and off the same land for centuries then along comes a war or natural disaster and they are forced off their land with no legal way of proving - once their communities are destroyed or distributed - their ownership of title.

There are numerous cases where the lack of a fundamental right to legal identity is a cause of tremendous hardship to people. In the poorest countries it is a recognised and well-researched cause of perpetual poverty.

It's not building a new nail, it's giving people full and persistent access to the hammer that was always their's but was never in their possession.

It comes down to 'legal identity'. 'Legal' meaning 'of the law' specifically applies to an identity that is created by, and upholds, laws relating to identity. A legal identity is only useful if it is administered by the government, since it's the government that makes the laws.

Democratic rights are rights given by the government. Only the government can give or take away democratic rights. Similarly, rights that are based on identification are based on government-issued identification, because if a 3rd party controlled the ID process, they could just print up whatever IDs they wanted and subvert the government's laws.

It seems like some people think that just because your government is oppressing you, you have some recourse. You don't. They will continue to oppress you until you fight them and force them to do what you want. Trying to create an alternative market for what you want will just be labeled illegal and subsequently destroyed.

That's what a "black market" is: goods and services that the government doesn't want you to have. This ID would just create a new black market for identification, and would be completely useless in terms of dealing with property laws, voting, unemployment, and any other government service.

You're coming at this from a very specific perspective related to your experience of government and services. I'm glad you live in a place where you can trust these sorts of fundamental services. This paper was not written for people like you.

Look at something like M-PESA in East Africa. It allows a person to have the equivalent of a bank account and transact with others without having any form of state recognised identity - only a mobile phone. That this is so successful is largely as a result of the complete inadequacy of the local banking system and the regional governments' inability to provide meaningful identity to their citizens.

Consider vaccination programs. Aid agencies responding to the Haiti earthquake in 2010 struggled to place young children back with their parents because no-one carried identity and the state - which had been barely functional before - was entirely non-functional. As reported in The Economist at the time, agencies carried out mass vaccinations against cholera but some people were vaccinated multiple times and others were missed entirely because there were so many agencies all running around like headless chickens.

Again, a simple distributed identity system would have permitted a better response.

Or the other example from the linked paper ... in rural communities in the world's poorest countries, people's identities are vouchsafed entirely by that community. Community-based lending programs (as popularised by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh) are successful precisely because individuals lack identity or their own independent credit record. Micro-lenders offer loans to these community groups rather than individuals and so the individual builds up no credit record of their own.

If they ever need to move (because of drought, joblessness or whatever) they lose the reference and identity they have built in that community. They cannot take it with them.

In the presence of a motivated and functioning state, sure, maybe this isn't needed. Unfortunately, billions of people don't have that luxury.

For non-government purposes this ID can be useful. But it is not a replacement for legal ID. It's worth pursuing for edge cases, but let's not pretend it will protect people.

This whole thing is an attempt at a technological fix for a non-technological problem. It's not practical to 'route around' bad or missing government. The logistics behind each one of these issues goes far beyond having a simple ID.

For places like Somalia, South Sudan, Libya, trust is so incontrovertibly broken that there is no clear path back to central government and rule of law. Government has to start where it has always started, with circles of trust.

This system isn't a hack or 'route around' these circles of trust, it simply makes them verifiable, persistent and mobile. Eventually, once they get large enough, then they can lead to stable, centralised government.

It's not very different from the way circles of trust for lending eventually became large, national banks.

The fact that some governments don't do it is precisely the point. This project would allow identities to exist outside the control of the local government. The identities would be accessible by local communities, competing local governments, foreign governments, NGOs and others.

If the government doesn't control how IDs are administered, they can't create laws that are enforced based on ID. You can create an "extra" ID, but it's effectively worthless for anything related to a law.

Maybe it would be better to divide this paper into two, one dealing with just the technological aspect and the other dealing the the political and economic implications.

Also, are you sure this technology would be decentralizing things? Maybe the technology itself would be decentralized but in a world where everyone has an electronic id, I can foresee an internet requiring said id for everything, just like what happens with government issued ids. In turn this would mean that persons would be much more easily tracked across their daily lives. Does not sound very appealing to me.

As for the whole legal empowering side, these sort of initiatives have backfired before so I'm sceptical. For example, once this is in place, wouldn't it make people more vulnerable to being forced to reveal their identities?

As far as I can tell, there is no technological aspect here. It doesn't offer any solution to providing decentralised, unique identity. It just points out systems with central authority that provide unique identity, and the blockchain, which provides distributed identity verification without ensuring any unbreakable connection between one person and one identity. Then it seems to indicate that the two should somehow be mashed together to create distributed, unique identities, without explaining how.

I don't see how it would be possible to prevent a single person from creating multiple identities in a distributed system.

You could easily create multiple identities, but they would not be worth much. By somehow encoding all the relationships of trust that a person has had throughout their lives, it would become possible for another person in the same, or connected, trust networks to verify the identity and the trust placed in it.

New identities would simply have no trust, and would be quite worthless without years of normal life behind them.

There might be incentives, though, for groups to collude to create artificial identities in their networks, as a form of gerrymandering.

There's a major risk to that ... one person in the group gets discredited and that compromises everyone in the group.

I think this should be the standard for identification and signature. Pen and paper signatures are not very reliable and are inefficient none-the-less.

We can put these keys on cards or phones and have them distributed across services and state boundaries.

Seems far more reliable to me. And verifiable!

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