One area of online life most ripe for disruption is identity: How does anyone really know you are who you say you are?
Nowadays, credit agencies and social networks like Facebook act as the main gatekeepers for identity. But a host of entrepreneurs are designing new solutions to this age-old Internet conundrum by using blockchain technology, the digital ledger system that underlies cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
A few such blockchain boosters participated in a panel discussion about identity at the Silicon Slopes conference in Salt Lake City, Utah on Thursday. There they claimed that these distributed, tamper-resistant databases can counter the monopolizing forces that have come to control people’s identities.
Read more: “How Blockchain Could Replace Social Security Numbers“
The most obvious failure of the current state of affairs is Equifax
, said Vinny Lingham, cofounder and CEO of Civic, a startup that offers identity verification via a blockchain.
“These centralized databases are central points of failure for your identity,” Lingham said, noting that in the case of a hack–as occurred with Equifax–all that information gets compromised.
“With the current model of identity, you’ve got honeypots,” said Timothy Ruff, cofounder and CEO of Evernym, a startup that has …read more
Source:: Fortune.com – Tech
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