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The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

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Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#161
It won't be 'decentralized' like 'blockchain' it will be 'decentralized' like 'a hundred different versions of tech, standards, identity providers and use cases'. Big Corps, startups, banks, and probably the slowest mover - government.

And it'll continue to mostly be 'account management' and not 'identity management' proper. We are going to want to 'share less' in a way, as the only real means really to keep our privacy.

Your bank account info is effectively secure, so are your medical records. So are your images if you store them with the right provider. The rest ... not so much.

It's neither utopian, nor dystopian, just 'what it is'.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#162

Have worked in the identity space for a long time. Authentication isn't a hard problem, but identity is. It will be decentralized because if it is not fragmented, it is literally just oppression. Trusting authentication is not trusting identity, and the origin of identity is the Ur-problem because it comes down to questions of recourse, collateral, risk, authority, and legitimacy - which are all political economy que…

>All the use cases for digital identity are about enforcement and liability, and there are almost none that anyone would volunteer for. Everything from a LinkedIn or Facebook account to your personal artist homepage with your CV on it establishes identity. People obviously disclose identity voluntarily, because identity is the primary means by which strangers establish trust. If your identity is not transparent to me…

> If your identity is not transparent to me, I won't enter a relationship with you that requries me to know who you are, which in practice is almost every one.

There are two things about this that don't require centralized identity.

The first is that it's very commonly not true at all. If you want to sign up for an account for an online service (e.g. email, YouTube, gaming), they don't need the name on your driver's license for anything. They don't need to know anything about you. You create an account, set up authentication to prove you're the account holder in the future, and that's it. The identity you use can be created along with the account; it doesn't have to exist beforehand or be associated with anything else.

Second, even where reputation is important, you still don't need a single identity, it's just that an identity without any history would be untrusted.

Suppose you go to the bank to take out a loan. If you tell them your name is Barrin92 and you have no financial history, they're not going to give you one unless you get some more trusted party to cosign it or you post enough collateral that they can be assured to recover their principal if you default.

But then you start off with a small loan with a large amount of collateral, or a cosigner, and build a credit history as "Barrin92" with financial institutions. Now you can get a bigger loan, or one without a cosigner or as much collateral. Until you default. Then "Barrin92" would no longer be creditworthy and you'd be back to square one.

This works fine even if you have a thousand separate identities, because identities with no credit or bad credit aren't trusted and good credit is valuable so that you lose something significant (the creditworthiness of that identity) if you default.

People having multiple identities is effectively just equivalent to the ability to declare bankruptcy. It doesn't really break any good important thing and it does break some important mechanisms of oppression that we should want to break.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#164
post #95

Have worked in the identity space for a long time. Authentication isn't a hard problem, but identity is. It will be decentralized because if it is not fragmented, it is literally just oppression. Trusting authentication is not trusting identity, and the origin of identity is the Ur-problem because it comes down to questions of recourse, collateral, risk, authority, and legitimacy - which are all political economy que…

It will be decentralized because if it is not fragmented, it is literally just oppression. I've never understood that way of viewing things. For me identity is a right. The government must provide me with the means to prove who I am and my associated data like birth certificates, academic titles, health (vaccination), real estate and indirectly verifying identity for private contracts that use my national id card num…

> In the USA goverment and even private entities are collecting massive databases of everybody's data. But there's this panic about a centralized service providing identity.

The existence of centralized identity is what enables those databases. They're all indexed by the centralized identity. You give Facebook your "real name" and location and the same thing to your bank and they correlate them in a database. If you were using a different identity for each one they couldn't do that.

On the other hand, creating some kind of national ID authentication system would make it much worse, because then things would require that. You couldn't sign up under a pseudonym, so now even the things that are currently separate or that you can keep separate if you want to would be forced into being correlated with everything else about you in those databases. It's an attack.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, I advise everyone to use real-name identities wherever they can. I understand that pseudonymous and real name accounts have fundamentally different approaches, but I think, for the majority of people, pseudonymous accounts are a mistake. The reason is simple. In 2020, everybody is a brand. Things have become competitive to the point that the inevitable happened: business has occupied free time. We co…

Why not do both? As you say, using your real name builds your brand. However, you must then be very careful to avoid saying stuff that damages your brand. And as you basically say, you must therefore censor yourself online. So why not do other stuff using pseudonyms? That's exactly why I started using them. I'm retired now, so there's really nothing about my meatspace identity to protect. But when there was, having t…

I've given this a lot of thought (I also practice what I preach - I 95% post under my real name).

I advise against that, because in my experience, when you have a real name and a pseudonym account, there's a strong temptation to post all your edgy, attention-grabbing content to the alt, and all the boring content to your real name account.

Which is really bad for your main account, actually.

Note that some of the most popular personalities on Twitter - Elon Musk, Balaji Srinivasan - take this "carefully moderate your opinions unless it's a pseudonym" approach and stomp all over it. They are the total opposite of that. I think there's a lesson there, too: to really reach the stratosphere (including fame and wealth), as an unknown person, you probably need to take some risks and post risk-taking content, and associate it with a name+face where people can rally to you.

To be clear, I'm not making the moral argument that pseudonyms are cowardly or a moral failing, so don't use them. I'm making the purely self-interested argument that your content is worth money and you should monetize it under your real name, because it's the best vehicle for that.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#166

Have worked in the identity space for a long time. Authentication isn't a hard problem, but identity is. It will be decentralized because if it is not fragmented, it is literally just oppression. Trusting authentication is not trusting identity, and the origin of identity is the Ur-problem because it comes down to questions of recourse, collateral, risk, authority, and legitimacy - which are all political economy que…

What is the Ur-problem? I googled it and the top result was this post.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#167
post #166

Have worked in the identity space for a long time. Authentication isn't a hard problem, but identity is. It will be decentralized because if it is not fragmented, it is literally just oppression. Trusting authentication is not trusting identity, and the origin of identity is the Ur-problem because it comes down to questions of recourse, collateral, risk, authority, and legitimacy - which are all political economy que…

What is the Ur-problem? I googled it and the top result was this post.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/ur

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#168
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be decentralized because if it is not fragmented, it is literally just oppression. I've never understood that way of viewing things. For me identity is a right. The government must provide me with the means to prove who I am and my associated data like birth certificates, academic titles, health (vaccination), real estate and indirectly verifying identity for private contracts that use my national id card num…

"In an oppressive state identity surely could be oppression, just like everything else, but in a democratic country?" What makes you think a democracy can't be oppressive? Even in perfect democracies there is something called the tyranny of the majority, where the majority can oppress the minority. If we're talking about the US in particular, we have to recognize first that it's not even a perfect democracy, and ther…

>>Then, to get specifically to the oppressive aspects of the US, they range from slavery and lack of women's rights from its foundation, to segregation that existed in law up to the middle of the 20th Century (and arguably still exists in fact to some extent and in some places in the US even now), to the imprisonment in concentration camps of Americans of Japanese descent, to discrimination against people who weren't heterosexual, to the War on Drugs and police brutality which primarily impact minorities, to abuse, killing, and imprisonment of people who come to the US from other countries.

To the imprisonment of those who refuse to surrender their privacy and submit an income tax return, and pay the income tax, to the prohibition of mutually voluntary economic interactions, like getting a haircut from an unlicensed barber, where barbers are licensed.

The important thing to remember is that oppression in a democracy is not perceived as oppression to the majority, so democracy will generally be perceived as non-oppressive, due to the subjectivity of what constitutes it.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Identity can’t be “imposed,” come on. Personhood is continuous across time and space. All a system can influence is your ability to lie about this. Ability to deceive the state can protect your freedom but inability to trust others also has a cost, there has to be a balance.

(Knowing nothing about the author of this reply at all, upon reading the comment as a reference) - as spoken by someone who has yet to have been down the rabbit hole of what "personhood" might mean. Identity is a philosophical problem and a relationship, and so far we've managed to kick the can down the road of what an identity might mean outside the nation state, but the internet may prove to be a bit of a forcing f…

This is a really fascinating conversational pattern. It's like I said "when I let go of a ball it falls down to the ground" and you said "the meaning of 'falling' is a question as old as Genesis, and 'down' depends on your frame of reference." There's a sense in which both of those things are true, just like everything you've said here. And yet.

Re: The Future of Online Identity Is Decentralized

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never understood that way of viewing things. For me identity is a right. Historically "identity" wasn't a right, but something imposed on people, for better tracking and controlling them by authorities... > In an oppressive state identity surely could be oppression, just like everything else, but in a democratic country? Oppression is not about democratic vs totalitarian state. McCarthy and Hoover, to mention…

> Historically "identity" wasn't a right, but something imposed on people, for better tracking and controlling them by authorities... I used to own a wonderful book about the history of data science. As I recall, starting in maybe the 1600s, experts in France and Germany were tasked with tracking populations, birth and death rates, economic activity, and so on. And the primary goal was to aid in military planning. Un…

Was it "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk"?
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