Voting and Identity

Opens April 3rd 2024 on voting and identity, prompted by a Blockchain Life Dubai conference poll the Cardano Foundation tweeted, which blacklists him and lists no Cardano projects except SingularityNET.

Best layer one is neck and neck between Cardano and MultiversX at 3,268 to 3,365, a Mina- and Dubai-focused poll likely driven by Luna PR, Nikita's firm that he has worked with.

Uses it as a teachable moment on legacy-world flaws: no custom field for your favorite project, a required sign-in, and no verification of the vote itself.

IO is in the identity business with Atala Prism, now the Hyperledger open Enterprise agent, an open-source standards-compliant framework that grew out of the Ethiopia work.

Prism's three roles, issuer, holder, and verifier, mapping to the physical cards you carry like a passport, driver's license, or national ID.

Illustrates with a bar: Bob shows Alice a driver's license to prove he is over 21, where the state is the issuer, Bob the holder, and Alice the verifier who trusts the issuing institution.

Moves to a digital ID wallet holding many representations as DIDs and DID documents, giving universality, portability, and infinite scalability across contexts.

Digital identity gains context-specific views, like a personal DID and a work DID with different cards and permissioning, such as a military CAC card requiring a dual signature.

Applies it to the poll: instead of creating an account and handing over PII for their leads list, your wallet provides only the proofs and PII the suitability threshold requires, transparently.

Digital proofs can be globalized and made publicly transparent so anyone can verify all participation, unlike a physical proof seen only by Alice.

Argues a fair vote requires eliminating bots and shills and proving every participant is a real human meeting a contextual, debatable suitability threshold.

A DID wallet with a credential schema automates this into a one- or two-click experience, building a globally transparent network that proves everyone is real.

Attribute-level privacy via AnonCreds, another Hyperledger project, letting you prove one thing without revealing anything else.

Alice only needs a boolean, are you 21 or over, true or false, so an AnonCred proves exactly that and discloses nothing more.

Gives the TSA Pre example that plagues his chief of staff JJ, where paying 85 dollars gets you partially rather than fully screened, and notes the absurdity that a top-secret-clearance holder handling nuclear secrets might lack it.

Shows how an AnonCred lets your wallet prove a high-trust US government status to the TSA agent Jim so he knows which line to use, without revealing that you hold a top-secret clearance.

The same framework that ensures a fair bot-free vote can sort people into categories without revealing sensitive attributes, applying equally to medical and academic credentials and whistleblowing.

Recounts a big tech employee, Mr Smith, afraid to speak up, and shows how a company-issued digital card enables anonymous internal voting that proves membership without revealing who dissented.

Applies it to a DEX the government wants KYC, AML, and anti-terrorist-financing on, via contingent settlement requiring a signed AnonCred for suitability at both deposit and withdrawal.

The scheme is algorithmically defined with whitelisted verifiers paid a slice of the fee, keeping KYC files off-chain while automating compliance so it feels identical to a legacy DEX.

Whitelists can be jurisdiction-specific so the matching engine guarantees US users only match non-OFAC-sanctioned counterparties, segregating the order book by jurisdiction in a multipolar world.

Calls this Regulated Value Transfer Protocols, RVP, being explored with Midnight, composing a wallet, digital ID, AnonCreds, and contingent settlement into an autonomous but compliant dapp.

Applies it to a stablecoin he calls USDB with two flows: a US address structure that can freeze and reverse, and a non-US one that behaves like Bitcoin, selected by the credentials you provide.

Predicts that by 2030 the winning cryptocurrencies will be those that support this framework, pointing viewers to the Atala Prism GitHub and docs.atala.io.

Paradoxically the more identity you hold the more anonymity you gain, moving from Bitcoin's public pseudonymous model to a Monero-style private-by-default model with selective disclosure.

Under this model a verifier only gets what its business logic or statute requires, unlike federated identity providers who take everything and keep the rest just in case.

The two building blocks are the DID framework with its emerging standards and computational privacy through private smart contracts, chased by Midnight, Espresso, and others.

Economy of scale means entities like Blockchain Life will just adopt these turnkey frameworks because it is easier, and that a required sign-in crushes participation that one-click voting could 10x or 100x.

Blockchain is about trust among those who do not trust each other and restoring institutional integrity, going from don't be evil to can't be evil like fourth-generation nuclear reactors that physically cannot melt down.

Argues a world where you must know someone to trust them constrains business, losing economic activity to dopamine-hacked TikTok and YouTube, whereas fair frameworks let you engage strangers on merit.

Teases an upcoming video on securing your digital life with Bitwarden, a YubiKey, and an AES-256 auto-encrypting flash drive as a root of trust, noting FIPS 140-2 validation and the open-source Nitrokey alternative.

Warns that within 24 months generative AI will let hackers clone your face and voice to impersonate you to banks, bosses, and family, so you must verify your channel with an unhackable digital signature.

Closes that DIDs and private smart contracts are the necessary infrastructure, that all the hardware already exists, and that the point of the industry is to give you back your privacy, identity, assets, and consent.