No, Blockchain Is Not Solving The ID Problem Anytime Soon
Renewing your ID card or driving license can be a time-consuming and painfully boring process. Just thinking of lining up in queues filling up tens of useless documents makes me wanna burst into tears. I mean, come on, we live in the 21st century, they promised us e-government and flying cars. Where are they? Can blockchain solve the identity problem? Do we really have to carry IDs everywhere we go in order to prove it’s really us? The blockchain advocates claim we can store our identity on the ledger. They say we would access it through biometrics and share the data with trusted individuals only. For instance, Accenture and Microsoft envision a future where handling personal information would happen all on the blockchain. Since specialists insist blockchain networks are secure enough it is safe to assume that identity thefts would happen very rarely. Distributed ledgers sound like the cure to everything that is horribly wrong in the modern world but is it possible they work as well in reality as they do in theory? At the moment, we are way too far from the day we migrate to blockchain technologies. There are several problems that need to be solved before we live in a blockchain world. First of all, there should be a global ID network, otherwise, it is pointless to think of adopting distributed ledgers at all. A global ID network means that businesses, individuals, and governments all have access to the data stored. This leads us to the second problem – governments don’t do well with technology. Just go to your local administration to see what I am talking about. Here comes problem Number 3 – since governments have access to the ledger, they would like to have control over it. What I am trying to say is, no “self-sovereign” ID management is not coming. It’s just a utopia. Even the head of blockchain ID startup Civic admits there is a long way to go. In an interview with Fortune, Vinny Lingham notes that governments and businesses will have a hard time agreeing on the terms and standards, which the global blockchain network should follow. True, e-voting was successfully tested in Switzerland and Estonia but implementing blockchain on a larger scale is a whole different story. Lingham clarified: “We looked at blockchain voting, and realized it will take any government of a reasonable size years to implement it. We won’t see elections on the blockchain in the U.S. for at least two more cycles.” He further adds that DLTs first have to make it to everyday apps before being put in charge of ID management, “It’s a grind, to be honest. Every week we’re signing up dozens of users. Hopefully, it’ll soon be hundreds or thousands a week.” Read the full article
