Sweet, genuinely thank you, my question came from a place of genuine curiosity and honest skepticism, so I appreciate the detail. I have a follow up question though. Most of those use cases seem like they’d require linking a specific identity to a given blockchain transaction. How does one go about doing that?
Blockchain itself is just, at its core, a method of cryptographically proving the authenticity of a ledger history. That’s it. What you DO with that technology is fairly boundless. You can embed anything in a block on the chain. We have lots of existing ways to handle proof of identity that can be inserted into a block (imagine if blocks contained the public key of block’s creator and then the entire block (including the public key) is signed with the private key)
Sure, you could do that, but all that would prove is that a block was signed with the private key associated with the included public key. That doesn’t necessarily say anything about someone’s identity though does it? It just says they know how to generate a public/private key pair and a digital signature. Maybe I’m misunderstanding your example?
I don’t mean to be rude but it sounds like you aren’t very familiar with digital identity management paradigms in the first place?
Proving who you are is always a relative operation. It’s always about the relationship between two things. “I am the person who generated this other message” or “I am the person whose face looks like this”.
Key/certificate issuance follows a variety of different models depending on the use case. Sometimes “this object was generated/signed by the person who controls this key” is enough, as is the case with things like secure emails (think gpg/pgp). Other times you need an authority to give relative meaning to a key/certificate (think SSL).
Sweet, genuinely thank you, my question came from a place of genuine curiosity and honest skepticism, so I appreciate the detail. I have a follow up question though. Most of those use cases seem like they’d require linking a specific identity to a given blockchain transaction. How does one go about doing that?
Blockchain itself is just, at its core, a method of cryptographically proving the authenticity of a ledger history. That’s it. What you DO with that technology is fairly boundless. You can embed anything in a block on the chain. We have lots of existing ways to handle proof of identity that can be inserted into a block (imagine if blocks contained the public key of block’s creator and then the entire block (including the public key) is signed with the private key)
Sure, you could do that, but all that would prove is that a block was signed with the private key associated with the included public key. That doesn’t necessarily say anything about someone’s identity though does it? It just says they know how to generate a public/private key pair and a digital signature. Maybe I’m misunderstanding your example?
I don’t mean to be rude but it sounds like you aren’t very familiar with digital identity management paradigms in the first place?
Proving who you are is always a relative operation. It’s always about the relationship between two things. “I am the person who generated this other message” or “I am the person whose face looks like this”.
Key/certificate issuance follows a variety of different models depending on the use case. Sometimes “this object was generated/signed by the person who controls this key” is enough, as is the case with things like secure emails (think gpg/pgp). Other times you need an authority to give relative meaning to a key/certificate (think SSL).