Foundation for Genuine Global Identities
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About 1Bn people around the globe are born and live without identity documents. In addition, displaced people, projected at 1Bn within a generation, often find themselves without worthy identity documentation even if they had any in their country of origin. Given that centralized, top-down identity-granting solutions are failing a large portion of the world population, a bottom-up, grassroots, decentralized solution that allows every human being to create and own a trustworthy genuine global identity is an urgent necessity. Such a bottom-up solution is worthy only if it is resilient to malicious antagonists that create fake and duplicate identities (so called sybils). Furthermore, for a solution to be truly grassroots, the people that rely on it for their global identity should also be its sovereign. Hence its governance has to be sybil-resilient as well. Here, we present a foundation for a decentralized, grassroots, bottom-up, self-sovereign process in which every human being may easily create and own a genuine global identity, realized as a public key. The solution relies on the formation of a "Web of Trust" among global identities, but does not rely on biometrics, nor does it require to store any personal information on public or even third-party storage, except for the public key itself. The approach is designed for natural realization using distributed ledger/blockchain technology. For the solution to be complete, additional components are needed, including a mechanism that encourages honest behavior and an egalitarian cryptocurrency to fuel the mechanism. These are a subject for future research.
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