Comment by lumberjack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lumberjack | Hacker News Reader

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com