Financial cryptography is that space between crypto and finance which by nature of its inclusiveness of all economic activities, is pretty close to most of life as we know it. We bring human needs together with the net marketplace in a secure fashion. It痴 all interconnected, and I知 not talking about IP.
Today I知 trying to solve my messaging problem. In short, tweak my messaging design to better supports the use case or community I have in mind, from the old client-server days into a p2p world. But to solve this I need to solve the institutional concept of persons, i.e. those who send messages. To solve that I need an identity framework. To solve the identity question, I need to understand how to hold assets, as an asset not held by an identity is not an asset, and an identity without an asset is not an identity. To resolve that, I need an authorising mechanism by which one identity accepts another for asset holding, that which banks would call "onboarding" but it needs to work for people not numbers, and to solve that I need a voting solution. To create a voting solution I need a resolution to the smart contracts problem, which needs consensus over data into facts, and to handle that I need to solve the messaging problem.
Bugger.
A solution cannot therefore be described in objective terms - it is circular, like life, recursive, dependent on itself. Which then leads me to thinking of an evolutionary argument, which, assuming an argument based on a higher power is not really on the table, makes the whole thing rather probabilistic. Hopefully, the solution is more probabilistically likely than human evolution, because I need a solution faster than 100,000 years.
This could take a while. Bugger.
Posted by iang at February 27, 2017 01:13 PMOne solution to the identity question is to publish biometric data in a blockchain. There currently is a fear that biometric data needs to be kept pivate, but if people are willing to make biometric data public, the identity problem is easily solved. Any questions or disputes about identity can be resolved by an in person examination of a person's biometric features to see if they match what was published on the blockchain. This also can prevent sybil attacks because published biometric data in the blockchain can be scanned for duplicates.
Posted by: Vincent Youngs at April 18, 2017 10:10 PM