Welcome everyone, I'm Alex Ortiz, Chief Blockchain Evangelist for the LifeID platform.
And I'm here to talk to you about an exciting blockchain use case - self-sovereign identity.
Let's begin by discussing some of the problems of the modern world.
Today, there are three major problems with how we transact online: users have low privacy, fraud prevention efforts cost businesses a lot of money, and password-based authentication leads to frequent data breaches.
A self-sovereign identity platform gives developers a new architecture and new tools to solve these problems.
So, what is a self-sovereign identity?
A self-sovereign identity is an identity made up of data that the user has control over.
Examples of identity data today include: your name, address, date of birth, government identification number, place of employment and many other attributes.
A lot of that data currently originates and lives in centralized databases.
When you need to prove some aspect of your identity today, three things happen: you pass the required information onto others,
you provide some form of proof, and then the recipient checks, usually a centralized database, to see if the information matches.
Now, as we've all seen, identity information in centralized databases reduces user privacy and increases fraud when that data is breached and reused to impersonate users.
Protecting that data and protecting against fraud is also costly to businesses.
Blockchain technology, when combined with cryptography and with self-sovereign identity platforms, will help you solve these problems or remove them altogether.
With self-sovereign identity technologies like LifeIDs, users won't pass along their identity data like they do today, businesses won't need to store identity data like they do today.
Instead of passing on a date of birth, a user will be able to pass along a claim that they are over a certain age.
Instead of passing on an address, a user will be able to provide a claim that they are a resident of a certain country or state.
Instead of passing along a government-issued identification number, a user will be able to pass along a claim that they have a valid ID, and so on.
In other words, instead of sending private information, users will soon be able to send claims that certain information is true.
The claims will be signed by the issuing party using cryptography, the signature will serve as evidence that it is a true and valid claim, and for this reason, they are called verifiable claims.
And user will then be able to choose to show that verifiable claim to a verifying party who will then be able to check that the signature is valid,
that the claim is still valid, and that the claim belongs to the user and to nobody else.
These verifiable claims will stay with the user on their mobile or other device, not stored in centralized databases like identity data is today.
This technology will lead to fewer privacy violations, less identity theft, and fewer data breaches.
But it will be up to developers to build identity applications utilizing self-sovereign identity platforms like LifeIDs.
So now, let's talk about the role of the underlying blockchains.
A self-sovereign identity system is built on top of a blockchain.
The blockchain plays two major roles.
One, the blockchain serves as a cryptographically secured network for verifying signatures on verifiable claims.
And, in our model too, the blockchain will act as a decentralized payment processor for identity transactions.
As a wonderful bonus, self-sovereign identity platforms will work worldwide.
Now, let's talk about some example use cases that are already happening - medical licensing.
Some medical licensing boards have begun to issue medical education certificates and graduate medical examination credential to doctors.
The doctor is able to share their certificate with a hospital and the hospital can verify that the certificates are valid,
speeding up how quickly a newly licensed doctor can begin working and ensuring the medical credentials cannot be tampered with.
The second use case is academic credentials.
Several universities, including MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have begun to offer their students the option of obtaining proof of graduation as a verifiable claim.
And the third use case is being able to prove that your business is in active standing and that you are able to do business in a certain place.
So now, let's discuss where you can learn more.
We're part of an ecosystem of companies and organizations that believe in the future of self-sovereign identity.
You can find out more about this technology by seeing what the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, Credentials Community Group is doing with its decentralized identifier specification.
And what the Verifiable Claims Working Group is doing with the verifiable claims data model.
You can also learn about other components like the Universal Resolver at the Decentralized Identity Foundation.
Finally, you can read more about the LifeID platform by reading the white paper at lifeid.io.
And you can conduct online research on what other self-sovereign identity networks are doing, including Sovrin, Blockstack, uPort and others.
Thank you for your time and I hope you help us change the world by building on a LifeID platform.