For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?
So the actual tech behind could lead to some interesting ways to utilize it, but it’s admittedly squandered on cryptocurrencies and shitty NFT “art”.
Like, you could probably get rid of identity theft being an issue if you had unique tokens that would have your personal info like your legal name, birthdate, SSN, etc to ensure that it’s you and not somebody pretending to be you. Instead of entering in this info, you could just share the necessary tokens with the other party - so if a bank needed your info, for example, you could just give them the tokens containing the different info they need into their wallet. No idea how feasible that would be, but I do think there’s more actually creative and useful ways to utilize the blockchain tech versus just relegating it to shitcoins and ape art.
What you’re describing kinda just sounds like ID cards or passwords… I mean, these can be stolen, falsified ot lost, but even assuming the “falsified” part is and remains impossible, couldn’t it be possible to obtain or duplicate someone’s token? The crudest example I could think of would be someone just stealing a computer on which someone else’s crypto keys are saved, but through hacking there’d probably be more ways to do it…
From my understanding (and it could be wrong tbh, this is a bit out of my wheelhouse), you cannot duplicate NFTs - it’s already recorded on the blockchain, so it’ll be the only unique one on the chain. Even if somebody were to create another token with your info, you can still say that the duplicated token is not your token because you can prove when the duplicated one was created after your token was, and can even prove each transaction done with your specific token. Plus, to even hack the blockchain, iirc it would require one party to have over 50% of the processes running it - which is reportedly hard to do, so take that for what you will.
I think what they’re asking is how do you protect your token?
You have to have some way of storing and presenting that token so what would stop somebody from stealing or replicating the method of presenting said token? The way it is done now with cryptocurrency is far, far from ideal and can easily lead to permanent loss of access.
Ohhh, I see. Yeah, that would be probably one of the major obstacles that would need to be sorted before something like that would be feasible, because you are right - right now you’d be just as screwed if you lost access to that token as you would be if you lost your SSN card or something.
Sam Altman’s Worldcoin is addressing this issue in a way. Your proof of humanity is tied to a unique eye scan. Similarly, a wallet whose private key is tied to biometric verification could greatly, but completely, secure one’s digital identity held in that wallet.
What if you lose your eye in an accident? What if you lose your finger or hand?
no longer human then.
I advocate for using a dick pic for dudes and a booby pic for the ladies to verify your identity in those extreme cases.