# Tell Me Who You Are. Identity, institutional memory, and the… | by ConsenSys | Medium (part 2 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [163], part 2 of 3. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: document (Web page), 2019-05-22 (publication data), https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Identity design principles for systems like Harappa's accounts and refugee ID.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Tell Me Who You Are: Identity, institutional memory, and the persistent illusion of the self (2015): ConsenSys essay on what identity is, and how to build identity people can live with: profiles kept apart,...
  - Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks (2016): Essay drafted live in public: smart contracts as capitalism's calculus, with richer instruments than cash...
  - The Future We Deserve: "Facebook for the Five Billion?" (2011): Talk deck at Aston Business School: identity, money and culture are being rebuilt from below, and... (suggested by machine)
  - Taking a crack at a practical system (introducing the ESCROWNYM) (2012): Blog essay proposing the escrownym: an identity lodged with escrow brokers under a legally binding... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017.
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut...
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: identity / dna / profile (88%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: identity infrastructure (5 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); certificates (3 here; 26 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); IETF (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); Leashless (2 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); id cards (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); open data (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Tell Me Who You Are (1 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2011, 2 undated); accounts (2 here; 51 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); Cyberpunk (1 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); DNS (1 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2006)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): IETF
- Importance: core-text score 0.65 (1.00 is the top), number 34 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [706] [Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin - with Vinay Gupta | Virtual... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/706.md): same career work: Tell Me Who You Are: Identity, institutional memory, and the persistent illusion of the self
  - [690] [FSCONS 2017 - Vinay Gupta - Resilience (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/690.md): same career work: Tell Me Who You Are: Identity, institutional memory, and the persistent illusion of the self
- On the same works, just before: [716] [How do we control the material world with smart... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/716.md); [258] [Mattereum - Decentralized Digital Twins (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/258.md); [197] [PRESS RELEASE: WILLIAM SHATNER TEAMS UP WITH LONDON FIRM... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/197.md)
- On the same works, just after: [761] [Cryptoeconomics Lab: Vinay Gupta (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/761.md); [233] [Quaddome (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/233.md); [738] [The Bitcoin Podcast Roundtable #343--Vinay Gupta of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/738.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Tell Me Who You Are. Identity, institutional memory, and the… | by ConsenSys | Medium, document, 2019-05-22, https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [163], https://guptaoption.com/texts/163.md.

## Passages, part 2 of 3
[passage 14](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) hit scared old people right in their retirement savings. Of course, many of these old people have weak passwords — in general, in fact, people have incredibly weak passwords. So, once again, as with IP addresses leaking huge amounts of personal data, we must remember that existing practice has horrible privacy implications already. The hypothetical flaws I’m discussing with biometrics are certainly matched by equally horrific flaws in our current identity infrastructures, as I’ll discuss further. So with Grandma’s nest egg in play, our unscrupulous gang takes some pictures, makes a fake head, logs into her bank account, and wires the whole amount to a bitcoin ATM in a far away country, never to be seen again. Using a rubber head to hack somebody’s identity may seem utterly bizarre, but these things are already happening at a lesser scale. Consider this stunning story of a group of Brazilian doctors manufacturing fake fingers so they could log each-other in at work. Now, I want you to think about this carefully, relative to the username / password situation. With a username / password, something I (and only I) know is what identifies me. In theory I can keep this information in my head, so short of using FMRI to pull the secret out of my head , there’s no way for a thief to steal my username/password combo. But if there’s some kind of technical attack on my computer, where my password gets copied by some sneaky piece of software as I type it in, my identity is compromised. And I can change a password. The biggest critical problem with using raw biometrics for identification is that I cannot change my biometrics. If the vital data leaks, I’m compromised for the rest of my life! DNA: The identity you cannot hide DNA is, at least on the current scientific knowledge, a seductively perfect biometric: a unique sequence of digital data, one CD worth per human, accessible from a swab (you don’t even need a blood sample). Unchanging through a lifetime, with the ability to read the DNA sequence from a sample getting cheaper, easier and more reliable every year. We can even tell the difference between “identical” twins now. And you get lots of additional information from DNA about useful things like family structure — who parents, siblings, cousins, grandparents and all the rest are, pretty much 100% reliably baked into the deal. DNA is great. If it was only private, it would be perfect. The rub with DNA is that it gets everywhere that cat hair gets, and further. If you’ve ever owned a fluffy white cat, or a golden retriever with a tendency to shed, you know what I’m talking about. You’re at a friend’s house, and you see their nice black jacket, and there’s one of your cat/dog hairs stuck on the arm. They’ve never even worn the jacket to your house (they aren’t daft!) — and yet there’s no limit to the reach of your dog hair. DNA

[passage 15](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) with a tendency to shed, you know what I’m talking about. You’re at a friend’s house, and you see their nice black jacket, and there’s one of your cat/dog hairs stuck on the arm. They’ve never even worn the jacket to your house (they aren’t daft!) — and yet there’s no limit to the reach of your dog hair. DNA from shed skin cells is even worse. Such tiny quantities of DNA tend to get mixed in with everything else, but the techniques continue to improve. Sequencing is faster and faster, and techniques for rejecting environmental contaminants grow ever more sophisticated. In the limit, perhaps in twenty or thirty years (as far forwards as the internet is looking back) it might be possible to discover everybody who had set foot inside of a shopping center by sweeping-and-sequencing the dust on the floors. You might well get next of kin and coworker data for a lot of them too. If there is a DNA database to turn such incidental biological traces into identity information then privacy as we currently know it is a thing of the past. Obviously political use could be made of such technology too — unless people are going to start attending riots in drysuits! Over and over, with biometric information, we are going to discover that the data itself is harmless, but the ability to compare the data with data from other sources is dangerous. Imagine that I am a small shopkeeper with a smart camera that I use for keeping people who have behaved inappropriately out of my shop. There’s not much that can go wrong here: I have 5, 10, maybe 20 people a year on my camera’s memory of miscreants, and if they come into my shop again, it beeps. I could remember the faces myself, but how do I teach my staff to recognize the people I’ve banned? Probably easier to have a machine do it. If instead that was a futuristic DNA system, it is no more or less dangerous than a recognition camera. These things, in and of themselves, are not dangerous. Something that aids my memory is not, in itself, bad. But networked it is a whole different story. If my “shoplifter memory” system analyzes the DNA data of everybody coming into my shop, I could well know more about people’s familial relationships than they do. “That’s not your brother!” Likewise if I correlate the DNA samples from my shop floor with medical databases: now I know your genetic predispositions to a range of diseases. If science continues to make strong advances in mapping genes to risks this information could be quite valuable — mapping out insurable risks for a health insurer, say. Again, it’s not the data which is dangerous, but the correlation of the data. Finally, what if I as the shopkeeper network my shop’s DNA scanner output with everybody elses? Now we can track shoplifters, sure. But we also have to contend with cantankerous shopkeepers who put

[passage 16](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) be quite valuable — mapping out insurable risks for a health insurer, say. Again, it’s not the data which is dangerous, but the correlation of the data. Finally, what if I as the shopkeeper network my shop’s DNA scanner output with everybody elses? Now we can track shoplifters, sure. But we also have to contend with cantankerous shopkeepers who put their former employees into the database as thieves by accident, or otherwise contaminate the “reputation” database associated with each piece of DNA that the network has stored with false information of some other kind. Suddenly we have an enormous capability to identify people, far exceeding our ability to justly and prudently profile them based on their previous behaviour. We cannot actually manage the reputation databases all that well — scandal, hearsay and gossip penetrate into people’s record far too easily — and if these systems have something resembling the weight of law (at least common law) in everyday life, there are clearly huge consequences to even the occasional accidental false report, or intentional and malicious contamination of the history data. The better able we are able to identify people, the more certain we must be that the identity databases which back up those conclusions are flawless. I don’t think that’s going to be an easy job at all. DNA as a Template for our Being While DNA gives us perhaps the best imaginable way to distinguish two individuals from each-other in the normal course of day-to-day business, but in the process it reveals the exact genetic composition of their body — essentially the “source code” to their biology! We know that an awful lot of very private, very sensitive data is revealed in this template: propensity to cancer, diabetes, depression, resistance (or not) to HIV and many other medical factors are encoded. There is reason to believe that temperament may also have at least some genetic factors: heritability of temperament is still an open question (nature, nurture, epigentics and more have to be weighed) but, because we do not know what we do not know, it is probably safer to assume that there might be huge insights into human personality and general cognitive function from the genetic level and plan accordingly: to defend our genetic privacy against all attempts to turn our DNA into a casual identity validation mechanism. But, of course, we are still faced with the problem of leaking our DNA in every physical environment we set foot in. I strongly suspect that the paradoxical nature of DNA — as an identifier, but also as deep insight into the biology and possibly psychology of the person identified — is going to be a defining quandary of the 21st century. As our tools rapidly evolve to allow us to use DNA, can business, government and society keep up and create countervailing protections and indirections, keeping us safe from the transparent nature of at least some of our genes? Into this gap steps cryptography. The first, easy-to-imagine measure is biometric

[passage 17](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) is going to be a defining quandary of the 21st century. As our tools rapidly evolve to allow us to use DNA, can business, government and society keep up and create countervailing protections and indirections, keeping us safe from the transparent nature of at least some of our genes? Into this gap steps cryptography. The first, easy-to-imagine measure is biometric hashing of DNA data. An arithmetic formula is applied to 750mb of DNA data, reducing it to a few dozen lines. If the formula is run in reverse, those few dozen lines could decode to one of a trillion trillion or so possible DNA sequences. This is just how hashes work in general — those long strings of “hex” (8511b2ee59142cf1ced7e70ff6fca103 for example) can be derived from any digital data source. If one bit changes in the input, roughly half of the output changes, so hashes are (generally speaking) very secure. Indeed, Bitcoin’s security rests on the security of hashes, and the computational difficulty of finding two texts which have similar (not even identical!) hashes. Of course, biometrics are (generally speaking) a bit squishy and analogue — they are, after all, measurements of a body. Even DNA sequence matching is usually probabilistic, because even if the data is dry and digital in the abstract, in practice an awful lot of error-prone wet chemistry is performed to get to the matches and sequences. Most of our current generation of biometric hashing schemes mash the data, so that when it goes into the hash, if there is an analogue measurement error on the body the impact of the error is reduced. For example, if a fingerprint line is obscured by a paper cut, the impact of the error compared to accurate measurement of the lines on your fingerprint is reduced by the algorithms so that the underlying facts (fingerprint A is the same person as fingerprint B) are not obscured. In theory, a biometric hash of your DNA ought to be a pretty reliable artefact: your DNA sequence does not (for the most part) change very much, although within muscle groups, organs, the brain etc. the parts of the DNA which are active and inactive are changed by diet, exercise, heredity, stress, use, and many other external factors. Changes in the active and inactive sections of DNA do not alter the underlying code, so while these factors are medically interesting, they do not affect our gene sequences for biometric purposes. The same kind of biometric hashing can be applied to fingerprints, iris scans and various other kinds of measurements of the body, with differing degrees of success, confidence and precision. The problem is that to prepare a biometric hash, I require a complete biometric: I need to have a sample of your DNA, which I sequence, to check your DNA against a biometric hash in a database or in a block chain. In theory I might delete that data immediately, but in practice the temptation of people to filch biometric data (or even

[passage 18](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) that to prepare a biometric hash, I require a complete biometric: I need to have a sample of your DNA, which I sequence, to check your DNA against a biometric hash in a database or in a block chain. In theory I might delete that data immediately, but in practice the temptation of people to filch biometric data (or even biometric samples) to pry deeply into people’s bodies and potentially minds will likely be too strong to be reliably resisted. It’s hard to imagine being in a world where somebody steals some cells you left on the arm of a chair in your doctor’s office, and the resulting data set doubles your life insurance premiums because of a family risk of some expensive disease or other, but this is exactly the kind of world that cheap DNA sequencing and interpretation of results takes us into. To get back out of this world (probably best visualized in the movie GATTACA) we have to visualize a comprehensive effort to control DNA sequencing equipment so that it doesn’t simply wind up lying around to be used by anybody who can swab some DNA off a pair of shoes you once handled in a store. Perhaps we could envisage a future in which a canonical copy of your DNA sits with some kind of highly secure agent who protects it on your behalf, and allows medical personnel with the correct consent forms and identification to access your most private DNA records. We can be sure that handling personal DNA records is going to be at the core of the hardest problems in future privacy systems. It’s also likely to be at the nexus of interests who want to be able to uniquely identify humans. Such a future is likely to be highly dependent on cryptography for holding the records unreadable to the people storing them (a simple single blind system), and perhaps for authorizing and logging access by whatever legitimate users might need to access your DNA records. This is not a scenario to be modeled in detail now, in this discussion, but some of my earlier work touches on a less cryptographically heavyweight solution to these problems. Biometrics and blockchains: oil and water, or oil and vinegar? So where this puts us is staring at two areas of incredibly rapid and sophisticated technology development, both of which have a school of thought which views them as keys to solving the problem of doing business with people we don’t know. On the blockchain side we get objective permanent record storage without creating an intermediary like VISA. Plus we get things like anonymity, pseudonymity, public key infrastructure for figuring out who we’re talking to without having to meet them in person and various other useful properties from the cryptographic systems which typically go right alongside or within blockchain technology. This is a near-ideal scenario for many kinds of identity, but it ties quite poorly to the legacy identity infrastructure provided by the nation state. Here’s

[passage 19](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) key infrastructure for figuring out who we’re talking to without having to meet them in person and various other useful properties from the cryptographic systems which typically go right alongside or within blockchain technology. This is a near-ideal scenario for many kinds of identity, but it ties quite poorly to the legacy identity infrastructure provided by the nation state. Here’s the why. The model of identity encoded in Bitcoin is cryptographic keypairs: you have a secret (key) which you can prove to other people without ever revealing it. So we can prove (mathematically) that a person who knows a secret (X) is the person who (for example) signed both document A and document B. We cannot tell anything about this person — not a name, not an age, not a face — without additional information. One method by which that information is traditionally attached to a keypair is called a “keysigning party” in which people come with their passports, and a computer, and they take the name on the passport and sign a statement that a given cryptographic key is under the control of the person who matches that passport. While a single attestation of this kind may be considered quite weak, a few dozen attestations of this sort including some from either people you know or well known honest public figures turns out to be quite a comprehensive validation that a passport matching this person’s face exists. However, in this paradigm, most uses of this secret key and the associated identity are private — personal email, say. In the blockchain paradigm, at least at present, the vast majority of actions undertaken with a key are public: attestations do not become “real” (socially agreed as admissible in an argument, say) until they have been lodged in a block chain. So if we link your real name to a secret key, and then put all the actions taken with this secret key into a blockchain, you have essentially zero privacy. The Bitcoin model is that people’s privacy was preserved specifically by not linking their passport name to their secret key, so you could only tell how much Bitcoin a key owned, not who owned the key. When these two models collide, what’s left is a kind of panopticon: a permanent record, tied to your real name, in a medium which cannot be erased. The “web of trust” model (the old name for the passport-and-secret-key type activities described previously) and the blockchain model are fundamentally different models of privacy, each one of which works reasonably well within its parameters. But when they are combined, at least in an unsophisticated way, the whole is less than the sum of its parts: nobody (except maybe David Brin) wants a world in which everybody can see everybody else’s financial transactions all the time, right down to kids inspecting their parent’s Amazon purchases around Christmas. So if we aren’t going to enjoy a naive tie to the passport name infrastructure provided by the government, what about

[passage 20](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) is less than the sum of its parts: nobody (except maybe David Brin) wants a world in which everybody can see everybody else’s financial transactions all the time, right down to kids inspecting their parent’s Amazon purchases around Christmas. So if we aren’t going to enjoy a naive tie to the passport name infrastructure provided by the government, what about biometrics? Let’s consider that case from the beginning, taking the worse possible case first. I put my DNA on to a blockchain — not a hash, the whole thing. I then link it to my secret key. We will examine some of the mechanisms for linking a DNA record to a secret key later on, but for now, just assume we do that part in some convenient way. Now we are in a position where anybody in the world can estimate my risk of heart attack by taking my genetic profile and matching it to my purchase history. If 100% of what I buy goes through the blockchain (a scenario many “Bitcoin maximalists” would predict) it’s not at all unreasonable to think that random third parties could make an educated guess, from genetic and lifestyle factors, what my heart attack risk might be. In a less extreme example, what if I tie a keypair to my fingerprint hash — so the blockchain doesn’t record my fingerprint directly, but stores information which can be extracted from my fingerprint. Again, we have the permanence problem: future science figures out how to reverse from a fingerprint hash to a fingerprint, and we are back at people 3D printing rubber fingers to open my doors. Or people can take casual fingerprints I leave behind when, say, examining goods in a store and recover my identity from the blockchain and use my purchase history (again, all on the blockchain) to send me devastatingly personal targeted advertising. The “public profile on a blockchain” model just does not seem to have the kinds of properties we want our societies to have: it’s the wrong kind of transparency. There’s an essay at least this length on different kinds of transparency. It’s probably already been written by somebody who sees the world mainly through that lens: if you know what it is, please put it in the comments! So if we can’t do the naive thing, what might work? What do you have to do to get blockchains and biometrics to mix? The First Option: Total transparency So what if we simply put all of our biometric information on the blockchain, accept that friends and family will hector us about eating dessert based on what they know about our risk of heart disease based on our genes, and life goes on. This is another “path not taken” situation. There were early proposals for containing the HIV epidemic with compulsory testing — extreme proposals, proposals that might well have destroyed quite a few people’s lives. Over the course of the epidemic, over half a million people are thought to have

[passage 21](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) risk of heart disease based on our genes, and life goes on. This is another “path not taken” situation. There were early proposals for containing the HIV epidemic with compulsory testing — extreme proposals, proposals that might well have destroyed quite a few people’s lives. Over the course of the epidemic, over half a million people are thought to have died of AIDS. Suppose a compulsory testing approach had been adopted: would life have gone on? Yes: it would be a different world, but it would not be the first time that society has taken a dramatic wrong turn with a critical situation, and the world muddles through. Just look at how badly we screwed up on breaking the atom! So there are clearly historical precedents for this kind of radicalism. The Personal Genome Project at Harvard has (anonymous) individuals publishing their genomes for public use, and it is not at all unlikely that a keen interest is taken in the datasets of groups like 23andMe who see an awful lot of genetic data. We are, in a sense, quite a long way down this path already. Genomes have not been hacked, stolen and published yet (at least not as far as I know) but it’s only a matter of time until raiding celebrity medical records results in genetic data being leaked, or simply sold on the open market. For our older readers: yes, this is the cyberpunk future you were promised. So what kinds of things might change if we accepted that, over time, most of us were likely to be identified by our genomes: brave volunteers first, then a few leaked celebrities, then (as nothing particularly bad happens) life goes on. I think we would see three broad kinds of change. 1. Genetic Screening People would start to screen people in their life based on genetic factors. Some of this analysis would be backed by science (“if we have kids, they’ll have doubled heart disease risk and the breast cancer numbers are equally bad.”) Some would be superstition (“you have an allele which makes you diligent, honest and hard working.”) Genetic counseling might replace astrology as a popular profession. But as time passes, the line between science and superstition will be pushed back over time. If only the hashes of our DNA wind up on the blockchain, of course, there’s less of a tendency to do this kind of oracular inspection of other people’s genetic material — but the issue of leaks, and of being ID’d from samples continue full force. If somebody has a sample, they can match it to the blockchain to identify who I am, then publish the entire genome: this is, perhaps, the most extreme form of doxing (releasing personal information online) yet imagined, at least this side of the singularity. (After the singularity, at least in principle, it appears possible to leak whole people: let’s not go there.) 2. Genetic Identification Another thing that would change is that we would get used to

[passage 22](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) then publish the entire genome: this is, perhaps, the most extreme form of doxing (releasing personal information online) yet imagined, at least this side of the singularity. (After the singularity, at least in principle, it appears possible to leak whole people: let’s not go there.) 2. Genetic Identification Another thing that would change is that we would get used to being 100% identifiable if we had been in a place. Crimes would become ever-easier to prosecute because, unless the villains went raiding in dry suits, they’re going to scatter tiny little monogrammed packets of their DNA over everything. Quickly consult the public blockchain, and now you have no doubt at all who you are dealing with. With all the possibility of scrying into a person based on their DNA. This is somewhat like CCTV cameras, deployed in incredible densities, tied to a database that does facial recognition based on large identity databases. The actual degree of coverage that a genetic solution would provide is probably not that much greater than, say, London’s “Ring of Steel” facial recognition system. Of course, a genetic solution might allow for inspection of who had been in a space for quite a while after an event happens, but there has been very little direct disruption as a result of adoption of these technologies. 3. Genetic Research Finally, people would find interesting things to do with the open data. Some of those interesting things might have more impact on the world than open source software or WikiPedia have had: vast open genetic datasets tightly tied to biographical records on a blockchain might allow unbelievable accuracy in prospecting for the genetic origins of disease — and human behavior. I think, in particular, that medicine would benefit, but there might be unexpected side-effects like social networks which specialized in grouping people by compatible genetic traits, in the areas where genetics effected personal compatibility. To a very superficial degree we do this already: tall people only dating sites, perhaps, or matrimonial services which aim to match people from the same specific cultural groups (which also, in many cases, implies genetic closeness at a tribal level.) Getting used to the unthinkable I have no doubt at all that after a few generations, this would all seem as completely and perfectly natural — with all of its utopian and dystopian features — as having every click we make on the internet used to target advertising to us from semi-visible corporations whose models of our behavior focus on which buttons they should push to make us buy stuff, or the knowledge we now all have post-Snowden about the likely fate of our electronic data with respect to various aspects of the US state. We just get used to things. We did it with the Cold War. We are currently doing it with climate change. It’s just what we do. We’re going to do a lot of adapting to technology in the next few years. I’ve lived my entire life without driving (neurological

[passage 23](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) electronic data with respect to various aspects of the US state. We just get used to things. We did it with the Cold War. We are currently doing it with climate change. It’s just what we do. We’re going to do a lot of adapting to technology in the next few years. I’ve lived my entire life without driving (neurological glitch affects my ability to judge distances) and pretty soon I expect self-driving cars will be an option. Odds are I’d never own one, either — on demand use. And the delivery drones won’t take that long to arrive, and so on. You think we might balance out this whole identity mess, but it won’t last, not longer than a generation or two. Then it’ll be cloning or personality uploading or people taking illegal genetic modification agents and turning themselves into big lizards. So try thinking of this as a continual attempt to fit “the social good” or “progress” or whatever your chosen set of virtues (“Liberté, égalité, fraternité”) happens to be. This is the role of critical technologists — to understand that we have choices, that each technology or set of technologies comes with a set of options, a set of decisions, about how we will integrate it into our lives, our societies, and our culture. We aren’t particularly good at this steering process. In fact, it’s very nearly cost us the world a few times already in the last two centuries. So as we examine some slightly less radical solutions than “let’s just dump all of our genetic and biometric data into the public domain and figure it out” think about this as a critical technologist. We must negotiate with each incoming set of possibilities, each possible future, and individually or collectively we adopt or ignore the offers that these futures make us. And this is fundamental: if hotheads in the American government had forced compulsory HIV testing as their front line response to the AIDS crisis, the human rights crisis created might be running to this very day. So put on your critical technologist hat, and come with me through the next two options. The second option: blockchains, biometrics, encryption Let’s reframe what we are talking about: there are two amazing technologies marching rapidly into our culture — blockchains and biometrics. Apple Touch ID meets Bitcoin. The simple version of that story isn’t so scary at all: the Bitcoin wallet on your iPhone is protected by your fingerprint. That all seems very good. But it’s also tied to the same architecture at wider and wider scales: Touch ID and your fingerprint becomes Total ID, pulling everything from all biometric sources into a single ID package. Bitcoin becomes Statecoin as your permanent record from High School becomes a fixed, permanent object as solid as the repositories that store the source code for the space shuttle. Now we’ve gone from a real convenience — simple passwordless protection for your digital cash accounts — through to an all-encompassing, all-embracing solution

[passage 24](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) all biometric sources into a single ID package. Bitcoin becomes Statecoin as your permanent record from High School becomes a fixed, permanent object as solid as the repositories that store the source code for the space shuttle. Now we’ve gone from a real convenience — simple passwordless protection for your digital cash accounts — through to an all-encompassing, all-embracing solution to matching identity to actions. Each technology independently matures, and the intersection between the technologies becomes huge, intrusive, massive. And that’s how simple, fast and painless this could all be: incremental adoption of technologies following one on another much as we did with the internet and wound up with continent-spanning robot warehouses which will deliver ice cream and red wine to a dinner party if you order them half an hour before your guests arrive, at least in major cities. So keep your eyes open for those weird little weak signals which indicate the shape of things to come. To expand, our second option is to work with biometrics and lots of other personal information (like spending records) on a blockchain, but this time to encrypt as much as possible as we go. For example, a naive blockchain implementation of identity might sign your real name into the blockchain, but encrypted with keys which are closely held so only financial institutions and the state can use them. However, keys being keys, they leak: consider DeCSS, in which a single prime number enables one to play DVDs on devices which the industry considers improper. But with the right kinds of key management schemes — information compartmentalization — a public register can still provide useful kinds of truth, but reflected as in a multi-faceted crystal: I give my bank a key which reveals another aspect of my identity, and they can know for sure that this key reveals a past which actually happened, because all that information is on the blockchain. This seems, in principle, quite stable. But the information contained in these documents should last at least a human lifetime, and 100 years from 2015 is a very, very long time indeed. While I’ve generally been pretty shy about the Singularity and its friends it is worth considering that most of our current generation of crypto will be long, long obsolete by 2115 — a century (not an unusually long lifespan these days) will give us computers a thousand trillion times faster than today’s computers , if speeds keep doubling every two years. Quantum computers, new mathematics (particularly number theory effecting prime numbers) and so on accelerate the pace with which the code making up blockchains gets broken down, albeit that it will still work nicely — it just will no longer be remotely secure! People will be able to rewrite anything, perhaps even the past, if they have a big enough computer. And this is not something we can patch, this is inherent to the nature of all of our public key / private key (“asymmetric”) cryptosystems. In this model

[passage 25](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) it will still work nicely — it just will no longer be remotely secure! People will be able to rewrite anything, perhaps even the past, if they have a big enough computer. And this is not something we can patch, this is inherent to the nature of all of our public key / private key (“asymmetric”) cryptosystems. In this model where there’s a blockchain with material encrypted to various special-purpose keys on the blockchain, allowing certifications like “this person is over 18” without having to out their full identity, there has to be technological migration as algorithms become obsolete. You have to pull the data out of one format, decrypt it, reencrypt with a cipher expected to last for at least another few decades, and this dance becomes a standard, static part of how we move our identities into the future across several rounds of profound technological change. Quantum computers , anybody? The strategy of using encryption to protect facts on the blockchain can only work if there’s some way to get rid of the old data, or if the old algorithms last long enough that we are dead. And there’s the catch: in all probability there will be no meaningful content to delete (finally, really, no copies remain) data which is being migrated to new cryptographic algorithms. That implies there is no reasonable way to keep information on blockchains which is encrypted and likely to remain sensitive for a 30 or 50 year period. Information disclosed in near-absolute security now is likely to be broken into in future. At the 100 year horizon, one popular key strength estimation website suggests that a 10,000 bit key would be required for security. Today even the most paranoid only use a 4,096 bit key. So this suggests that keeping our private data private, well enough to protect young children today — or those born in 20 years — requires standards which extremely aggressively model and map technological change, and deploy algorithms with the best possible chance of being secure well over the farthest horizon that we can imagine. Most of our record systems were never designed to last forever. Some civilizations used clay tablets which lasted essentially indefinitely, others used palm leaves which have fared a little less well than baked clay. The Third Option: As wise as serpents Given how fraught everything to do with identity has been in the 20th century, from genocides run on reading people’s government issued ID cards (more than once) through to the current ongoing debate about how much of our personal life only exists because Facebook curates it for us, perhaps what we need to consider is: What does the world really need to know about us? What do specific agencies really need to know about us? Can we get through life revealing less about ourselves, using these technologies? It seems unlikely that the NSA will have held medical records sacrosanct. It seems unlikely that they will look past any large repositories of genetic information,

[passage 26](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) consider is: What does the world really need to know about us? What do specific agencies really need to know about us? Can we get through life revealing less about ourselves, using these technologies? It seems unlikely that the NSA will have held medical records sacrosanct. It seems unlikely that they will look past any large repositories of genetic information, particularly if it turns out that there are some genetic sequences which can be identified as behaviorally-linked to (for example) terrorism. Perhaps, then, what is needed is a rather different approach to blockchains, trust, and the public sphere. Blockchains are great for pointing out things that we want to prove to other people: “look, it is right here, in the blockchain.” This is great for things like property registers, but perhaps not quite so great when it comes to all the things we want to selectively disclose. So what if the architecture is a little different: what goes in the blockchain isn’t the data — or, in many cases, even the hash of the data. Instead, we store a signed statement from a seriously credible source, or the necessary information required for a zero knowledge proof. A thing we might often store would be a public key, or a set of statements-and-signatures on a public key. It might be a script to perform some function, but without tons of personal information on it. This is a transactional vision of the blockchain: something that’s a little less about storing the entirety of our being on a permanent record, but more focussed on disclosing the minimum required for people to be able to do business (or other critical functions) together. Maybe information is partitioned: your school grades, but not your name, all separated with a zero knowledge proof. If you have to prove that those are, in fact, your grades — well, that’s what that public key is for. You demonstrate possession of the relevant private key — you know the secret — without revealing the key. Every piece of personal information about you is stored with a different public key: you have a big fat keyring, and each key reveals only a single fact. And maybe those keys have blind signatures or proxies or similar arrangements which prevent somebody noticing that Applicant for Job 1 has the same “see my proven grades” key as Applicant for Job 2. We are not helpless in this mess: a certain perspicacity and awareness of how long time is, how fast things pass, and the sheer complexity of the upcoming 21st century leads to a sagacious approach to information partitioning, database translucency, use of temporary credentials for passing needs, being economic with disclosures, even guarded. These trends are very different to what has become normative in the social media age in the liberal democracies which are still, just barely, the majority of the internet. But this kind of blind trust that the data you publish will never, ever be used against you is very much

---
Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/163-3.md (part 3 of 3).
End of [163] Tell Me Who You Are. Identity, institutional memory, and the… | by ConsenSys | Medium, part 2 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.