Bitcoin Forum

For one of my projects, I would really like a way for people to be able prove their identity.. ideally in a trustless way.  Is this possible?

I believe the answer is an obvious it's not possible.. but just curious to hear thoughts.  As far as I'm concerned, anonymity is not an issue.

Jeff Garzik (and possibly also Mike Hearn) authored a bit ID concept, it made it's way into the Bitcoin wiki somewhere. There's also still a thread about it in the Development & Technical sub board. I was a big fan of that idea, but it's not really priority stuff for bitcoin, and way more suitable as a side chain anyway (probably a few ideas will get tried out in practice before people settle on what works and/or they prefer)

so easy

sign a msg with your a photo of yourself holding a paper with date and time

there you've proven you own the public key that signed that msg

you can now sign msg with the same key anytime proving your Identity

Very interesting..  The issue though is that I would like to be able to prove that you don't have multiple identities as best possible.

Actually that is a very interesting idea adamstgBit...  issue is on a massive scale and people faking photos.  But there might be something there and it might be good enough.

You won't like the Garzik idea, it proposes exactly that. But you could choose to use one of your bit ID's for photo ID, referenced by a trusted third party to disincentivise faking. You're never going to be able to prevent fakes without really pervasive authoritarian government policy, this sort of tech can't do that sort of thing itself. As described, it promotes the opposite trend if anything.

need to find a way to incorporate biometrics.

imagine a big metal box bolted to the ground, and have that "cameraman bot" take the picture sign it and then you have to sign it too.

you can no longer fake the photo without physically breaking into the "cameraman bot" and somehow hacking its system to get the private key its holding, at which point any ID it made in the past few hours are invalid.


BAM Decentralized Provable Identity! at a fraction of the cost government can do it at.

you could ask new born baby to take a photo with there mother and name the baby.
5 years later you take a picture again with the mother
10 years later the mother signs a the new photo Declaring her son is what she considers "legal age" and this 15 year old boy can now go buy cigarettes!

no longer do we have to socially standardize "legal age"

http://cdn.meme.am/instances/59743012.jpg

imagine the possibilities !

http://cdn2.mommyish.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bar8.jpg

 :D

Identity has no other meaning other than keypair, and thus always provable by definition (provided of course you do have that private key). 
I'm not sure what you want to decentralize, if you want to decentralize the public key server you use namecoin. 

the key is tying a keypair with a RL person.
in a way that cant be faked

I want to give them 'special abilities' or rights if they are a unique person, I'm thinking maybe combine POC with picture or something like that.  So you need to spend at least a minimum amount of economic resources as well as providing an image.

So a private key isn't enough by itself.

convert a retina scan, fingerprint profile, dna? etc to data format/qr code.... This cant be that difficult.

What is this project?