
Distributed crypto identity as a mechanism for legal empowerment of the poor - Turukawa
http://figshare.com/articles/Distributed_crypto_identity_as_a_mechanism_for_legal_empowerment_of_the_poor_and_stimulating_local_economic_development/1292895
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peterwwillis
This is like your hammer breaking and you deciding you need to build a new
nail.

If you need "legal" identification, it has to come from your government or be
approved by them. Whether it's a "digital" or paper identity, it still has to
be processed by your government. If they're already not doing it, they're not
going to do it in a new form, either.

Aside from this ID is the idea of digital currency. _That_ could actually be
beneficial to remote people using basic cell phones. But it doesn't need any
fancy digital ID; just tie the phone identifier to some intermediate personal
banking network, and you can send and receive money using just your phone
number. Simple, direct, intuitive, using existing infrastructure. I don't
think biometrics should be necessary (it's easily broken and costs more
money).

~~~
Turukawa
There are many governments which lack either the physical capacity or the
political interest to provide persistent and meaningful legal identity to
their citizens. Sometimes they use this to prevent their citizens exercising
their democratic rights.

The impact of this is that their citizens lose the ability to create or
enforce legal contracts. Take property, for instance. Families from Syria to
Haiti to Sri Lanka have been living on and off the same land for centuries
then along comes a war or natural disaster and they are forced off their land
with no legal way of proving - once their communities are destroyed or
distributed - their ownership of title.

There are numerous cases where the lack of a fundamental right to legal
identity is a cause of tremendous hardship to people. In the poorest countries
it is a recognised and well-researched cause of perpetual poverty.

It's not building a new nail, it's giving people full and persistent access to
the hammer that was always their's but was never in their possession.

~~~
peterwwillis
It comes down to 'legal identity'. 'Legal' meaning 'of the law' specifically
applies to an identity that is created by, and upholds, laws relating to
identity. A legal identity is only useful if it is administered by the
government, since it's the government that makes the laws.

Democratic rights are rights given by the government. Only the government can
give or take away democratic rights. Similarly, rights that are based on
identification are based on government-issued identification, because if a 3rd
party controlled the ID process, they could just print up whatever IDs they
wanted and subvert the government's laws.

It seems like some people think that just because your government is
oppressing you, you have some recourse. You don't. They will continue to
oppress you until you fight them and force them to do what you want. Trying to
create an alternative market for what you want will just be labeled illegal
and subsequently destroyed.

That's what a "black market" is: goods and services that the government
doesn't want you to have. This ID would just create a new black market for
identification, and would be completely useless in terms of dealing with
property laws, voting, unemployment, and any other government service.

~~~
Turukawa
You're coming at this from a very specific perspective related to your
experience of government and services. I'm glad you live in a place where you
can trust these sorts of fundamental services. This paper was not written for
people like you.

Look at something like M-PESA in East Africa. It allows a person to have the
equivalent of a bank account and transact with others without having any form
of state recognised identity - only a mobile phone. That this is so successful
is largely as a result of the complete inadequacy of the local banking system
and the regional governments' inability to provide meaningful identity to
their citizens.

Consider vaccination programs. Aid agencies responding to the Haiti earthquake
in 2010 struggled to place young children back with their parents because no-
one carried identity and the state - which had been barely functional before -
was entirely non-functional. As reported in The Economist at the time,
agencies carried out mass vaccinations against cholera but some people were
vaccinated multiple times and others were missed entirely because there were
so many agencies all running around like headless chickens.

Again, a simple distributed identity system would have permitted a better
response.

Or the other example from the linked paper ... in rural communities in the
world's poorest countries, people's identities are vouchsafed entirely by that
community. Community-based lending programs (as popularised by Grameen Bank in
Bangladesh) are successful precisely because individuals lack identity or
their own independent credit record. Micro-lenders offer loans to these
community groups rather than individuals and so the individual builds up no
credit record of their own.

If they ever need to move (because of drought, joblessness or whatever) they
lose the reference and identity they have built in that community. They cannot
take it with them.

In the presence of a motivated and functioning state, sure, maybe this isn't
needed. Unfortunately, billions of people don't have that luxury.

~~~
peterwwillis
For non-government purposes this ID can be useful. But it is not a replacement
for legal ID. It's worth pursuing for edge cases, but let's not pretend it
will protect people.

This whole thing is an attempt at a technological fix for a non-technological
problem. It's not practical to 'route around' bad or missing government. The
logistics behind each one of these issues goes far beyond having a simple ID.

~~~
Turukawa
For places like Somalia, South Sudan, Libya, trust is so incontrovertibly
broken that there is no clear path back to central government and rule of law.
Government has to start where it has always started, with circles of trust.

This system isn't a hack or 'route around' these circles of trust, it simply
makes them verifiable, persistent and mobile. Eventually, once they get large
enough, then they can lead to stable, centralised government.

It's not very different from the way circles of trust for lending eventually
became large, national banks.

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lumberjack
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?

~~~
bryondowd
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.

~~~
woah
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.

~~~
lukifer
There might be incentives, though, for groups to collude to create artificial
identities in their networks, as a form of gerrymandering.

~~~
Turukawa
There's a major risk to that ... one person in the group gets discredited and
that compromises everyone in the group.

------
agentultra
I think this should be the standard for identification and signature. Pen and
paper signatures are not very reliable and are inefficient none-the-less.

We can put these keys on cards or phones and have them distributed across
services and state boundaries.

Seems far more reliable to me. And verifiable!

~~~
agentultra
Downvote and no response? What's wrong with this comment?

