New form of ID allows you to be a citizen of the world!
LONDON, England (PNN) - January 23, 2015 - Since the media storm around the birth of Silk Road and its eventual takedown, Bitcoin has made its way into the popular consciousness. Even luddites are now vaguely aware of its existence, though usually tied to the idea of unsavory characters buying guns, drugs or worse from the darkest recesses of the Web.
What has received less attention - outside of tech circles, at least - is the totally revolutionary technology that underpins it, known as the blockchain. Without getting too technical, it's like a giant public ledger in which every Bitcoin transaction is recorded; but instead of it being held by one central authority, it's distributed among thousands of individual computer nodes, so the chance of faking any of the information in it - claiming you have a thousand Bitcoins when your account is empty, say, or spending the exact same coin twice - is effectively zero.
Though it was first created for digital currency exchange, the blockchain's core concept of a decentralized, free-to-access, unchangeable public record can be adapted for a whole host of other services.
It was at a meet up for Bitcoin users that I discovered some of these uses through Janina Lowisz, aka "Blockchain Girl", a 24-year-old management student billed as the first "World Citizen On the Blockchain".
A few months back she became the proud owner of the first ever decentralized, cryptographically signed proof of existence, in a ceremony that was live-streamed across the Web. Since then she has become not just a poster girl for these crypto-IDs, but an advocate for a hard-line libertarian future where private contracts and distributed information replace more and more of what are now public functions.
At the moment, the ID is more of an addition that you can use for things like online verification. But it can be used by stateless people - that's important - and there's a plan to develop the process in the future and make it more simple for them to get one. Or if people want to declare themselves as world citizens and not just whatever nationalities they happened to be born as, this is a good way to express that view.
Also, as it's a pilot scheme for a private passport service, it shows private solutions are capable of lots of the same functions as centralized government. There are so many things that government currently does that can actually be done in a voluntary and decentralized way; there's really no need for central governance services - people can just pay for whatever services they want.
If you're interested you should look up the BlockchainID on Github and see all the Bitnation projects, like land registry, marriages, and many other things that will be possible in future.
