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There is a great development that can solve a lot of problems and can open the door to new features, I am trying to figure out if there is a way to build this feature.
The idea is to build an "hash" to identify a real person. There must be 3 property.

1) for every human must be a unique hash id
2) it is not possible to build this hash id without the real person ( it is not possible to build in an automatic way these id)
3) decentralized , without a certifier authority

For example a not working solution can be something related to the dna code , build an hash from the dna but violate the point 2 because is possible to build in automatic false hash id ...

Any idea for a solution?

Yes i have some idea's for this.
What if we hash fingerprints of peoples, its unique for every person on earth, and databases already collcted 

Yes but it is not decentralized you need an authority to certificate the database.
There are a lot of  centralized solutions like id-card etc using the nation as the authority of certification.

Yes I forget to specify a point 3) decentralized

Civic token is looking like what you are saying even if it's not exactly the same: https://www.civic.com/

yeah mate...ive got something. try a thumbprint

it is possible to construct fake thumbprint by programs  :-\

interesting anyway it is using a third party authority for certification so it is not really decentralized

I think the solution related to the DNA code might be combined with some unique information known by this human only.

DNA is the thing which is unique,we can use it to identify but how about accessing ,if someone can use our hair to use that DNA to unlock

Hm, is not easy with the DNA

This is an interesting concept but I can't think of a single truly unique quality that each human has that couldn't be faked. Fingerprints change, DNA is easily acquired, and recognition software can be tricked. Information is the only thing I can think of.

The idea is brilliant, you could use facial recognition function and biometric locks for unique I.D.

We exist in a 4D space-time, I would go for something related to quasi-crystals ( a pattern that is periodic ) ...


quasi-crystals
 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS3_6S2AZFI)

El-Batanouny, M., & Wooten, F. (2008). Symmetry and condensed matter physics : A computational approach. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Thank you everybody for the effort.
I think it is a very powerful idea and we need to investigate trying to find a way, it is not easy.
I though about dna many times and a problem is that it is possible to contruct an algorithm to build fake dna ...
Another way of investigation can be a graph of social relations something like that but it seem not so promising ...
All ideas are welcome

interesting can you shortly explain the main idea ? ( before reading the entire book )

Well the general idea came from the movie, Interstellar - Quantifiable Connection Scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtTkcM9BfXM) (please beware of **Spoiler Alert!**)

What development, what problems and what benefits are you talking about?

I don't like the concept because it makes everyone traceable.  And then everything else about a person be traceable.  Financial transactions, events participation, traffic tickets, ...

You can make an argument for the unknown benefits of this concept, but the potential harm could be tremendous if the system allows its database (blocks) to be linked with other databases (many altcoins describe different features).  I'm sure there will be hacks/governments/merchants who want to take advantage of such information.

Since people need to prove, they are alive, this system will only be possible with a trusted third party to confirm without a doubt, that this DNA belongs to this very person, which always conflicts with point "3) decentralized , without a certifier authority"
There is no way out of this.

The rest is easy to achieve.

Birthday Paradox isn't it ? well at the present moment this <-?> reminds me that loads of 80's snooze alarms clock had 10 minutes default thing ...

hash target net convergence ;-)

You need a self contained problem that only humans can solve, but that a computer can easily verify.

I think, it's really easy:

SHA256("My name is XY, I was born in country XZ and my passport number is 123. This is my secret, that I don't tell anyone.")

Your criteria:

1) for every human must be a unique hash id

The first part consists of some unique information for everyone. I think with the name, country and passport number you have a distinct number for every human. It can be something else, it just needs to be an information, that distinguishes you from someone else. Just in case, someone has the same secret.

2) it is not possible to build this hash id without the real person ( it is not possible to build in an automatic way these id)

It is not possible to caluclate the hash output without the secret, which is only in the thoughts of the person to be identified.

3) decentralized , without a certifier authority

You can sit to any computer in the world and calculate the hash, there is no authority, that needs to approve your identity. Its just Math.
You don't even need an internet connection to prove that you are the owner of this hash.


The main question is: What exactly do you want to accomplish. If it's only identifying people / authentication, you can do it with the above example (if the person accepts to be identified).

How does the blockchain verify this?

I don't know, what you want to accomplish and what your goal is. If it is only identifying someone, you don't need a blockchain.

You can verify the identity of someone by asking following question:

"Please prove that the hash ab6fd77492250e897cf8f0851a9f7de2331aaa3bfb16bb703755b05935effa30 is your's by inputting the correct sentence into the SHA256 function".

Well, there are limitations in this toy example. You should not send your sentence over to the person, so he knows afterwards. But you can solve it with public-key cryptography.

Yes, but without the blockchain being able to *verify* that the hash you supply is indeed the hash of your secret, this doesn't work at all.

The problem is in the point 2 , it is possible to create a program to construct fake Names and fake passport numbers . Only a third party authority can claim that person is not really existing

That it is not true . Such feature is not in contrast with privacy . You can build a system with this ID and all the transactions are encrypted impossible to read without the ID .

This ID CAN identify uniquely a person and it is different from MUST identify

The are so many benefits with this ID evrytime I think to solve a problem in cryptocurrency I found that can be solved by this ID.

For example the intrinsic power of POW can be replaced by a system with these ID, or the problems of a lighting network can be solved if there are these ID . It solve a lot of problems of POS .
It is also possible to develop a cryptocoin where 1 Human = 1 coin .
It become possible to develop a coin where the system give coin to IDs not strictly to miners .

In general you can take almost all the advantages of a "centralized" management and all the advantages of a decentralized management

There is no way to create this because you need some way to ensure one person doesn't create a billion different IDs, and for that you need a central authority.

Your best hope is create a puzzle that only a human can solve, but is easily verifiable by a machine - once you have this, you can replace PoW with it.

yes that is the problem it is not possible to use a system like captcha because one person can create a lot of ids

Normal Hash function would do the trick if only you could find something that have following properties in human:

1. Something that can be represented in digital form
2. Something that you can't remove/replace in you
3. Something that no outsider can extract from you

Sad part is that you is the major part of the problem since if you once leak your "key" you will never ever have any option to create new one.

Human have a lot of unique parts (for example DNA, eye pupils, fingerprints, auricles) however once malicious entity take digital "picture" of that part he can recreate "you", so it's inherently flawed as an ID method (still strong enough to avert most of attacks). Certain private part can be copied if it can be digitized.

Same with BitCoin - once attacker have access to your private key - it is game over for this key.
If your private key is your body - it will be much more sad to leak it since you can't just start over by generating a new one....

In theory something bitcoin-like can be done with the parts human can regrow (like hairs) - they all have same "seed" - DNA, but they all unique (i.e. hair = bitcoin address, DNA = your public key, but something still should act as your private key and that is another dead end).

I don't think the majority of the people in this thread actually understand the problem correctly. When you provide your hash of whatever ID system you come up with to the blockchain, the blockchain has to be able to verify the correctness of this hash, which it cannot possibly do without a central authority.

Yeah. That as well.

Nice to see you here Colorblind ...

Hey guys do you remember years ago when  
Motorola filled this patent about ingest a pill to log on in the systens surround you ?
 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140273829A1/en?q=pill&q=password&assignee=motorola&oq=motorola+pill+password) ???

The only way is with a central authority that control the access to a digital identity and its anchoring on the blockchain. But this doesn t mean it won t be a decentralized system, it s just a way to certificate one shot authenticity.

Nice idea out there, I think adding some artificial intelligence neural network attached to the hashing method will increase the possibility to detect if a certain transaction is performed by a human or a bot. I'm not good about it but I have just read an article suggesting the two could be mixed it up to make system more powerful. Anyway, good luck with your project and wish you a great success.

This is a very tough challenge, because they system has to distinguish between real people and procedurally generated "humans".
Here's an example: let's say we have a person who is precisely 20 years old, so the id of this person is valid today because it's a real person. But 20 years and 1 day ago this person hasn't existed yet, so its current id should have been false on that day. And even if you use a perfect Turing test, it won't be enough, because a real human can pass it on behalf of a dummy. So, maybe some Web of trust solution would work instead - participants will sign each other's id's to authenticate new members, and all the data will be stored on the blockchain of p2p network.

Note: DNA is not unique, identical twins have identical DNA.


1) Uniqueness is easy. The most secure method would be to assign a random number (or, rather, allow the individual to assign themselves a random number) and register its hash with a blockchain-based notary.

2) This constraint is impossible to satisfy through any non-interactive system because it requires a continuous proof-of-life. Let's say Alice and Bob are in a room together. They can each be sure that the other is alive simply by observing the other person (let's call this "visual verification of liveness"). As soon as Bob leaves the room, however, Alice cannot be certain that Bob is still alive without some updated proof-of-life. Even if he gave her a public key just before he left the room and a message arrives one hour later signed with the matching private key, someone could have kidnapped Bob, composed the message, forced him to sign it, and then shot him. So, when Alice acts on the belief that Bob is alive - based on "his" message (as verified by the PK signature), she is mistaken about his actual state of liveness. Instead, Alice would need a provably fresh "proof-of-life" or "remote verification of liveness" and, no matter how you set this verification mechanism up, it must by definition be interactive since the definition of "Bob is presently alive" is "Bob can be presently interacted with."

That said, if your need for identification is sufficiently paramount, then the individual to be ID'd can be troubled with an interactive verification. There's an ID company I read about recently (the name escapes me) that is using a multi-factor ID system pioneered by intelligence agencies that uses three (or four, depending on how you count) factors to verify identity. These boil down to "something you know, something you are, and something you have." So, you might know a passphrase, for example, you might be your fingerprint or retinal scan, and might have some kind of tamper-proof dongle. We can add the blockchain into that in order to prove presence (i.e. that the verification is interactive and not stale or pre-recorded). There is no "fire-and-forget" method that will substitute for this, however, so this is not the kind of ID that you use for buying alcohol and cigarettes, it's the kind a CEO uses to remotely validate a business decision or which a President uses to remotely authorize a politically sensitive air-strike.

3) This is also easy, what with the blockchain.

Beyond DNA not being unique, how do you even know the DNA you're seeing is actually that of a living person? It could be the DNA of someone who died 50 years ago, or it could be completely made up DNA that never belonged to any individual. What then?

Im agreeing to all the people here. Thumbprints would do. Even identical twins have different set of finger prints in them but a high chance of DNA match. DNAs use is much better for connecting people and thumbprints for identifying people. DNA requires labs, resources, time, thumbprints doesnt. Just a couple of computer i guess.

Your points contradict the anonymity of bitcoins. And why one hash for one person? In the end, a large number of wallets do not interfere with the system.

Any biometric would probably be good enough, but to satisfy the second point, it would probably have to be a combination of more. The problems would would really be the opposite, not how to create a unique hash for a person, but how to recreate it, because scanners are not precise enough etc and you'd be locked out. The real problem of course  is 3, there  could be a decentralized system that would recognize your biometric data as that datatype, but you could always (in principle imo) spoof it with similar data. At best you could make a system that would employ many different solutions against spoofing and get a high probability of a unique person. For this person to have a fixed identity would again be impossible to solve with certainty and a whole other set of solutions against swaping/trading accounts would have to be developed. 

It doesn't seem possible for it to be decentralized.

If you were to go the DNA route you could do sha 256(DNA+password)
That would prevent problems with twins/DNA thieves

Biometrics are not a secure identification method, they change and can be faked relatively easily. Digitizing human identity is a big challenge when it comes to making it foolproof and accessible but still secure. We've had private key encryption for decades but it's difficult to get people to use it, so phone's etc use biometrics because they are easy for people to implement.

I'm not sure if you already have seen this or if it will be of use to you, but here is a whitepaper on a decentralized secure identification system.  I haven't read the whitepaper thoroughly, so my apologies if it doesn't apply to your post.

https://github.com/the-laughing-monkey/cicada-platform/blob/master/Identity-Without-Authority-2017.21.3.BETA.pdf

You need a ZK-SNARK to make this happen.

That means, you need some sequence of bytes that gets generated (because i assume you'd want to store it on a blockchain) which would need some information that a human has that a computer doesn't.

Consider this.
Assume a human does generate some byte sequence that a computer cannot produce. The human also needs to prove that he/she has provided the correct sequence.
This proof will be an algorithm that a computer can run on the byte sequence.

We have been able to device SNARKs in math because we understand the fundamentals of modulo operations (In case of public private key encryption), because we invented both math and computers.

I am not sure if we have an understanding at that level for any property associated with humans.
What is the underlying logic that creates a fingerprint/DNA? Can that logic be exploited to produce ZK-SNARKs?


PS : I add "ZK" because i'd assume you want to maintain privacy of the human :)

It's done now, it's called a faucet and currently the best tech is captchas.  You could have a captcha use an algorithm to analyze fingerprints, and each unique fingerprint gets 1 coin per day.  captcha's can be done multiple times and theoretically you could use fake fingerprints but still it is pretty good proof you aren't a bot.  However the fingerprint reading algorithm would need to be cryptographic in the sense that it is easy to verify a print but impossible to create a print digitally to fool the algorithm.

As of now mate I think every physical recognition can be faked for instance finger prints and facial recognition.

And what might be this biometric locks, its the same as the others they could only develop algorithms to match up every person's identity?

That's technology for you.

In the end, everything that have mentioned by the author is possible except for being decentralized, its quite impossible - at the moment.

There is a problem easily solved by humans and hard for a computer: recognition of another human.
Consider this solution:
One is initially identified by a picture or a short introductory video. Then while using the network one has to undergo an identification procedure which includes three 1 minute interviews with strangers via some kind of a videochat.
Mining = working as one of the strangers that identifies that someone who is trying to make a transaction is a real person and he is the same person as on the identification introductory video. You can make sure that identification is done thoroughly by consensus procedures (3 interviewers have to agree on the identity of the person, and if one disagrees with majority he gets penalty).
You can eliminate those who try to create more then one account via simple face recognition software (plus some extra mining-interviewing). But I believe that this is unnecessary. Blockchain is about having as many identities as you want.

Maybe if you build and DNA reader in your computer, you just have to lick a stick and put it into the devise, so there is the one possibility, but, of course anyone can steal your DNA information from a cup of coffee , for example…

But the point should be… Why? In the world of control and lack of privacy building a new system of recognition… is there any point in doing so? And… as for crypto, it is not supposed to be anonymity the whole point of its existence? (even since they are not).

I am not judging here, I´m just really curious about the idea behind this.