
ShoCard Is a Digital Identity Card on the Blockchain - mr-ron
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/05/shocard-is-a-digital-identity-card-on-the-blockchain/
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mbesto
The team behind this app is comprised of two marketing execs (very successful
ones, mind you). Successfully implementing blockchains require extensive
crypto, game theory, and security capabilities. Is there something I missing
here?

EDIT: On a more productive note, I assume this is something a team like
Ethereum is going to tackle or already is tackling, no?
[https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/04/13/visions-part-1-the-
valu...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/04/13/visions-part-1-the-value-of-
blockchain-technology/)

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contingencies
Sure, associating a large number of assertions about personal information with
a blockchain-held identity is possible. However, this still doesn't solve the
question of "who put it there", "do i trust them" and "to what degree was this
information vetted?"

Currently, identification documents are defacto vetted by various portions of
government, legal threats thereof and (partly) the incovenience cost (re:
physical presence, wait time, overall hoop jumping) of actually going to get a
new drivers license / passport / etc.

By removing that inconvenience you basically make it cheap to create fakes
unless you have some overwhelmingly new approach to identity verification.

Unfortunately that's unlikely.

Finally, if we observe one of the key properties of the current-era systems as
absolute national segmentation within identity verification systems, this
startup seems to actually be more interested in providing a heavily US-centric
solution on an international blockchain, which doesn't strike me as a good
fit.

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StavrosK
So if your identity is the private key, why do you need the blockchain at all?

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wmf
Because blockchain.

But seriously, public keys are not memorable and thus are subject to spoofing.
Blockchain-based systems (e.g. Namecoin) can more or less solve Zooko's
Triangle by creating a "fair" registration system for human-readable names.

