Tim Draper hosts a panel on identity in blockchains, debating known versus decentralized identities and how reputation systems work for businesses. Speakers including Sean and Catherine Nicholson explore identity for IoT devices, progressive disclosure of data, and whether DNS or Bitcoin could replace traditional name servers.
Chapters
So that being said, what is going to be the importance of identity in the future of blockchains in general? And where do you guys see that going? Because that's sort of like the theme I'm sort of hearing. I mean, now we're sort of approaching that identity question, which is why I'm asking now. Sean, let's start with Sean and then we'll come back this way.
I mean, just going back to what I was saying earlier, Businesses need to know who's essentially in their network and what they're transacting and who they're transacting with. And that's important. So identity can take many different shapes, I should also preface in saying. There's the idea that you can have known identities, like you can use a blockchain to store your identity so that you can do transactions or do— let's say you want to get a Like a mortgage on an apartment. You can have your identity stored on a blockchain so that other businesses can use that identity in secure and trusting ways and not abuse your data. And so you know what they're doing with your data so that you can do the things you want to do, such as get an apartment. But in terms of doing transactions, the key thing for having— if you're building the infrastructure, you want to know who's in your network in a permissioned sense and what they're going to be doing with it. You want to make sure that you're working with trusted parties. If anyone tries to do something unscrupulous, you can actually catch them in the act and do that. You don't want somebody tampering with the data. So I'll end with that.
Yeah, we think of identity a little bit more broadly. So identity of things, identity of firmware upgrades, identity of scripting, identity of users, is one of those. And I think our model— we built a protocol that's very similar to OneName that Blockset Labs created. And so we're trying to adopt sort of what's the most known protocol for things. You know, there's a number of consortiums that are looking at the intersection of identity of devices and how we can have an interoperable protocol across blockchain. So I can't predict how that will all play out, but I think that we're pretty committed to trying to find a decentralized solution for identity of devices that we create and that we attach to. There's like an interesting framework where you can leverage the DNS architecture but replace the root name servers with the Bitcoin blockchain. And so you're using something that we can all sort of follow a pattern and have used before, and it works in a similar way, but it You know, you're not trusting something that is ultimately centralized. So that's sort of what we're looking for by design.
Okay, so I'll take a much higher-level attack. So with identity, when I talk to our customers, you know, they're very interested in blockchain as a way to reduce friction. One of the big things is we care a lot about identity, and big businesses will do business with someone that they know. And that means that the suppliers that they use are very limited because they spend a lot of time getting to know them and making sure they can deliver. But I think identity can start to get wrapped up with your reputation as well. So in a business world, this would be, I can show that I am Supplier X, and I can show you on considered blockchain a history for everyone to see of my delivery on time schedule, my quality, the level of returns, my payments, I pay on time, etc., etc. That's a huge opportunity because then I can source, you know, whatever I need for my business from anyone. I can trust them based on that, you know, immutable record of identity and reputation that's on the blockchain. On a personal level, I think something like, you know, I don't know, Like if you go on Stack Overflow or something like that, you might not want to reveal your entire identity, but you do want that reputation. So you'd want, you know, David6633 or something, that my entire history in that domain, that identity to be preserved. So I think we're going to see this layers of identity, and certainly in the business world, people are very, very interested in knowing who they're doing business with, but also the reputation.
Yeah, so I think identity is a loaded word, and as many of the panelists have said, it's an it, it's a who, it's a reputation, it's a social identity. There's a progressive disclosure that you need for identity. It's not all or anything. Why do I need to give my Social Security number to get something when all I'm really trying to do is identify that I'm actually Catherine Nicholson? And so because it's multifaceted, There again is not a one-size-fits-all in defining what identity is. Machines are great at processing cryptocurrency payments because of the whole slew of alphanumeric numbers, which we as human beings have a very difficult time doing. Machines also, in the whole Internet of Things, will need to identify and prove the fact of what their identity is prior to interacting with another machine or another human being. And so again, when we talk about open permissioned identity, progressive disclosure, what's the identity used for, there are going to be multiple uses of defining what identity is. Some will be appropriate still for databases as a centralized entity who wants to control that one database, and some of them will need to be much more open in a permission chain, and some identity has to be pervasive throughout the world, in which case, how do you have something that's immutable? And so then it bears the question of which blockchain you choose for that.
I just also want to bring up one thing about reputation in businesses, and sort of one of the affordances of blockchain technology is that you don't have to necessarily trust the reputation of businesses or existing systems. So You know, I don't work for Oracle or IBM, so I don't have to hold that flag. But, you know, as both a consumer and someone who's engaging with a number of Fortune 500s, and, you know, we interact with government bodies, having to trust based on reputation is sort of the older way of doing things. This idea of trusting cryptography and not business reputation, I think, is an opportunity. So obviously we need to cover our bases as we're designing these systems, but I think designing for the reputation-based interaction is not like the utmost principle that we're holding in how we think about future interaction.
