Bitcoin Forum

In our identity system, governments and banks become attestation providers, rather than guardians of identity, by issuing verifiable claims about an individual, that the individual can then store and manage for themselves – says Alex Edelstein, marketing manager at uPort.com i Bithub.pl’s #SundayInterview

What is sovereign identity and what’s the use of it?

Alex Edelstein: In its most basic sense, self-sovereign identity puts the user in control of their identity and the personal data associated with it, without relying on centralized service providers.

The current identity models treat user data as a product, with every digital service requiring the user to create an account, verify their identity, and store their data with the business rather than the user.

Businesses then monetize and exchange this data for their own gain. Time and again we have witnessed the consequences of this system, with the Equifax breach just the most recent instance of user data being compromised.

Self-sovereign identity aims to solve these problems by putting the user at the center of the identity system and giving the individual control over their identity and which third parties get to access it.

Full interview available on https://bithub.pl/english/sundayinterview-sovereign-identity-or-how-reclaim-control-over-your-personal-data/ (https://bithub.pl/english/sundayinterview-sovereign-identity-or-how-reclaim-control-over-your-personal-data/)

"Attestation Provider" - I have to admit this was a rather new concept for me, but after learning more I've understood what this means like this:

In order to replace an organisation like Equifax, what if we could individually provide credit information to a bank, employer or hospital ourselves?  In this credit reporting scenario, imagine a system where your credit history is securely transferred to your own secure software and the veracity of that data can not be tampered with or questioned.

Such a system for immutable transfer of value exists, is in widespread use and it’s called Bitcoin. A Bitcoin transaction is indisputable — using consensus among multiple distributed nodes, all agree on the source, the payload and the destination — and irrevocably write that data to a public ledger.

This same method of value transfer can be employed to transmit attestations from the Attestation Provider (in this example a credit card issuer), replacing the need for Equifax.

At Selfkey Foundation, we're working on this in conjunction with a market place, meaning you can see how this works full circle.   SelfKey market place will provide services like getting a second passport or offshore company registration, thru the SSID.

@aer0, do you have any link and/or whitepaper one can check?