Bitcoin Forum

I have an idea to build the following website -- a kind of opposite of anonymity concept. It will list people and verified connections between them. Use cases:

- a person has two email addresses, and he would like to expose that they are owned by the same person.
- same thing, for verifying domain ownership
- a person want to publicly make a statement, for example: I permit blog xyz to quote me.
- person A wants to publicly authorize person B to do something on his behalf. A and B could be in fact the same person, but that is not exposed.

The last case is the most general one. There are really two parts to the site. Part A is creating a profile and verifying ownership.

- I can create a profile identified by openid login. Lets call it A.
- I can list under that profile any emails, phones, domain names, blogs that I own, nicknames on forums, and there will be a verification process for each.
- The verification process is standard for emails, and for domains: it will be by whois contact or the way google analytics does it. For blogs, one would have to post a special message with a code.
- As well, a more advanced user would be able to post his PGP, GPG, SSH public key and verify things by digital signing.

The second part of the website is one person making a statement about another person. For example:

 - Person A says: Person B is authorized to quote me in his blog.

or, just use Twitter to announce something about B. Suppose A has a verified twitter account @A. Then, in his twitter, he can write:

 Tweet: I authorize person B to answer questions about my tour schedule (link to Person-B profile on this verification site)

If you like the idea, add money to the Bounty Jar in order to implement it:

Bounty Jar: https://booster.io/tipjar/0C8KM58

This is interesting, but can you clarify what advantages this would have over existing methods such as personal webpages and social networks?

The use case is standardization and one stop solution to identity management.

It will be a definitive spot to find out who is an author of what. You would be able to look an author of any work. Or who has the right to resell someones work. For example, say you listen to a song and you like it. You could find out on this website who is the owner, and that the distributor of the song has a permission to do so. Same for any intellectual property.  The site will bring together under one roof several technologies that today are used to identify people:

- PGP keys and signing, PGP web-of-trust
- FOAF -- friend-of-a-friend XML protocol in the Semantic Web
- Email -- email verification (click on a verify link in the email)
- Blogs and Forums -- how to prove that a poster in a forum in fact an owner of a website for which he claims so to be.

When the site has sufficient amount of data, it would be possible to click on any user in any forum (say, StackOverflow) and find out more details about him, including a secure contact form.

I think this kind of service will be useful to other websites that need ownership verification. For example, StartCOM.org asks to verify domain ownership by sending email to a registered contact in the DNS. Instead of doing this, they could get that data from the Verification API.

The key idea is that you can have an anonymous identity, but still make a public announcement of some relationship to your real identity.  The most simple relationship is "trust", but there could be other free form text to describe the relatioship.

This can be very powerful if it can be pulled off. But it seems to me that the network effect barrier will be extremely challenging.

I would be very interested in a service like this.