There is another view - identity is your right to own things. You identity is your title document. It is a right that we only grant to living humans. This is the sense in which the term is used when one talks about identity theft. If I steal your identity, I take possession of your possessions. Your house, you bank account, your credit,..

This is the sense in which the state has an interest, because you can't have a capitalist society without state recognized ownership, and you can't own something without an identity...

The group can provide mutual liability or dispute insurance to all members. In case of a dispute, the group comes to a consensus about whether to pay the claim on behalf of their member, or to dispute the claim in arbitration.

These groups will operate in a way similar to the small groups in solidarity lending, or similar to the way groups operate in "Reinventing Organizations" by Frederic Laloux.

http://www.reinventingorganizations.com

The blockchain can be permissioned with permission requiring a bond posted or insurance. One can get insurance by joining a group, or by posting a bond if one doesn't want to join a group.

Hi Vincent,
yes, this is where we are heading in the Identity Cycle which is now out at https://docs.google.com/document/d/18Q25ou4WrVbAFjO32306WWLugbekzyBY9HQfOqOBuK8/edit
iang!

I think you are conflating identity and trust. While true that psychological identity and reputation in a group are about trust, for the purpose of governance, identity is, or should be, about identifying a person's physical body with biometrics. If you rely on small groups to vouch for a person's identity, a person may have as many identities as groups they belong to. That may be fine for many purposes, but it also allows a lot of weasel room for criminals. A criminal can easily build and burn trust in a never ending succession of small groups. If he is identified globally by his biometrics, the criminal gets stopped after the first time he does this. Orherwise he could serially creat a 100 different ifentities in 100 different small groups, and get away with betrayal of trust types of crime 100 times.

Trust is easily measured with insurance. Identity is easily measured with biometrics. These are two separate things. If a group expresses trust for somebody with insurance, then has to pay a claim, they need to be able to communicate to the rest of the world who it was that burned their trust, for the benefit of the system as a whole. If however, the group also vouched for the person's identity, and the group used something other than biometrics to identify the criminal, then the criminal could have deceived the group about their identity in the first place. Anything other than biometrics can be forged.

My preferred solution would be to just publish biometrics of anybody willing to publish. I see no major security problem with publishing biometrics. However, many people don't want to to do that. So biometrics could be stored privately by the insurance provider, or the small group vouching for a person's identity, and published only in the event of betrayal of trust. That way, most people's biometrics could remain private, but criminals' biometrics would get published.

I also would prefer to limit participation in governance to those who have published their biometrics. There can be lots of ways to function anonymously in the system, but when it comes to making a decision which creates any change in the system protocol or the constitution, all participants in the decision process should be unambiguously identified with published biometrics.

Also, while most people could keep their biometrics private, anybody who vouches for the identity of others should have published their own biometrics.

I know this viewpoint of mine has a lot of resistance. However, there are plenty of people willing to publish their biometrics. Even if it is a minority, there are enough people willing to do that to provide a transparent foundation of governance, upon which the rest of the structure can be built which would let most people keep their biometrics private.