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

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [163], part 3 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 3 of 3
[passage 27](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) 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 a product of liberalism. People from countries with more to fear, or cultures which were ruled by aggressive empires, have quite different norms when it comes to personal disclosure. Although preferring legal protection to technical protection sounds like naïveté, inadmissibility in a court of law is still a very serious problem for data gathered by illicit technical means. Data protection legislation prevents organizations with shorter perspectives or less technical sophistication from simply throwing critical facts about us on a blockchain and then apologizing when it turns out that there’s no way to get it back down again. Actually, it doesn’t prevent such careless behavior, but it at least punishes it. So let’s factor all of this back together, and take a crack at defining identity and speculate about some possible stable equilibria in identity that the blockchain might enable. Part III. Identity we can (all) live with We can’t go on like this, the systems we have just will not work. Identity theft, including complex identity frauds going on for years, are a huge criminal enterprise which keeps wrecking people’s lives. Many people sense huge economic opportunities from straightening out the identity mess and making things work, but we have to be sure the solutions proposed do not simply become the next generation of problems. Finally, as with my work on Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps , we have to be person-centered if we want to find a stable point which will survive the extremely rapid rates of change which are so much a part of our twenty first century. Put the person in the middle of the story, and work out from there, and generally speaking technological change will not break your model: people are, for now at least, people. Ask me about this again in 2050. So what can we do that works? I believe in a simple division of the identity space into two parts. Profiles Actions Profiles are a set of opinions that somebody has about me. These might include things like medical records, which are stories about me. Note that I’m very carefully describing these as stories because I, as an individual, have no idea what is in your profile about me. I cannot validate it. I might not even know it exists, and it might be filled with utter stuff and nonsense. Your profile is your business, even if it is about me. Much of the direction of our society right now is towards merging profiles — credit records and social media to give even more accurate forecasts of loan risk, that sort of thing. The problem is that each profile contains within it a

[passage 28](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) be filled with utter stuff and nonsense. Your profile is your business, even if it is about me. Much of the direction of our society right now is towards merging profiles — credit records and social media to give even more accurate forecasts of loan risk, that sort of thing. The problem is that each profile contains within it a set of assumptions (a hidden frame, a perspective) which is incommensurable with much of the other data in such a combined profile. While these errors are small at first, the inevitable semantic problems of profile combining will always lead to problems which people (in most cases) will never be able to correct, because the profiles about them are largely secret , private , or shared between cartels, but never shown to the people they are about. Public profiles (for example, a university which publically lists student grades) might have quite a bit of utility in some cases — see “privileged profiles” below. Actions started out being called, in my mind, a volitional register — a log of the places where I have made choices. These would typically be key life decisions, like signing an employment contract, where the evidence that the signature was valid and accepted is a visible flow of money ideally across the blockchain itself. Another good example would be a mortgage payment. In all cases actions ideally lead to a stream of payments into or (better still) out of an account, something which shows that the contract was actually performed. Who are you? A complex construct inside of the head of a naked ape that looks at the sky and wonders, or are you (in fact, in the final analysis) the sum total of your mortgage payments. If I’m looking for an identity, the person who’s paid the mortgage for 18 years is a very, very tangible person — a person who’s got £216,000 of evidence over almost two decades as an escrow, a proof of trust. It’s not even about the property, it’s about the sheer historical fact of the payments which, particularly in a blockchain environment, constitute a visible, transparent impact of a decision made. You sign the contracts, you make the payment, and that identity is very solid. Same thing applies to student loans and almost any other major contractual commitment. We should not be surprised that the same foundational pillars which banks have been using for generations turn out to still provide support in this new world. Now, in a pre-blockchain environment, actions and profiles get confused, because more or less the only way I can get to your actions is by asking somebody else (your bank) what you did. This confusion is pervasive. On a blockchain, because my actions are self-certifying, like performative speech acts, I can present you with proof of what I have done without any third party having to vouch for me. This identity is all mine: self-sovereign. So we have to mentally separate it all out: my proof

[passage 29](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) somebody else (your bank) what you did. This confusion is pervasive. On a blockchain, because my actions are self-certifying, like performative speech acts, I can present you with proof of what I have done without any third party having to vouch for me. This identity is all mine: self-sovereign. So we have to mentally separate it all out: my proof of what I did is on the blockchain, and you can see it if I tell you which public key corresponds to my actions. Other people’s profiles of my behavior might even be on blockchains, but if I didn’t sign the transaction, it’s not “me” in the same way as my digital signature is “me.” Note that, for the moment, I’m holding back on things like key management and how we manage lost keys and similar issues. There are approaches to those problems, but let’s get the epistemological basis straight to begin with, then manage the resulting security issues. Now profiles, as noted, are other people’s stories about me and my behavior. They could be riddled with errors, or bound to me by mistake: somebody else uses my health insurance number because of identity fraud, resulting in me having medical records showing I’ve been prescribed drugs which, in fact, I have never taken. Similarly, my actions are not my stories about myself: they are the evidential trail of things I have done, and preferably are bound to a keypair. Not everything is a profile or an action. Let’s deal with some of those cases. My profile about myself is a special case: a set of things I say are true about myself (“I like cold beer”) which (still) may or may not be true. But because they originate with me, and I might well sign those statements with the same keys I used to pay my mortgage, you might be inclined to believe those stories. They’re a special case, particularly if I am an honest dealer. On the other hand, there’s privileged profiles . These might include profiles about me from people you trust more than me: if Harvard says I did a degree there, most people will believe them. My proof-of-payments on a student loan is pretty good evidence too, but most people would prefer to hear about my grades from Harvard itself. Of course, the combination of their privileged profile and my action records is pretty much unbeatable: “they say I got a law degree, and here’s my evidence that I’ve paid for one.” In the more general case, a privileged profile is a profile that I sign, stating that I (as the person this profile information is about) currently consider it to be correct, as far as I can see. Examples of privileged profiles we might see a lot of: medical records, tax records, court transcripts, but also less official documents like my score record as a player of baseball in the local neighborhood team could become privileged profiles. You make a statement about me. I approve

[passage 30](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) about) currently consider it to be correct, as far as I can see. Examples of privileged profiles we might see a lot of: medical records, tax records, court transcripts, but also less official documents like my score record as a player of baseball in the local neighborhood team could become privileged profiles. You make a statement about me. I approve that statement about me. That’s a privileged profile. It’s privileged because I said it’s true, not because it was signed off on by the Supreme Court! Managing the keys Now let’s talk about cryptographic keys. Specifically, about PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) which is a fancy way of saying “address books and cancellation notices.” You use PKI every day. Every time you go to Amazon or Google, a certificate makes the “https” goodness happen — the all-important protection to your privacy over http indicated with a humble single letter. If your credit card goes over the wifi without https, it can be stolen at any point from your computer through to Amazon’s data center. This is highly problematic, and a lot of time and effort were spent in the 1990s making sure that these systems behaved properly. Remember, the web was never built with credit card type security in mind, it was made for slinging physics papers around! So the security in the “https” comes from knowing the encryption key that Google wants you to use to protect your data when you log in. Your browser has a list of people that it trusts to verify other people’s identities, and Google presents a signed document from one of those people saying “This key belongs to Amazon, please encrypt your payment details with it when you go to their web site.” What’s interesting about this is that this is clearly a profile . Amazon has no way of identifying itself to you without using the profile provided by this certificate authority. Your browser auto-trusts the registrar, and that’s how you get to Amazon to do your Christmas shopping. Of course it would be lovely if Amazon had some more direct way of identifying itself to me, particularly when the certificate providers are getting paid when they issue certificate, and are therefore at some risk of simply handing out certificates any time somebody tells them a reasonably plausible story. It’s not like they get sued when something goes wrong, and a certificate registrar lets a fake Microsoft certificate into the wild , for example. But as things stand there’s no way for Amazon to show me credentials to prove it is who it says it is directly. I can’t use, for example, the purchase records (profiles) provided by 80 million of my neighbours to validate that a site purporting to be Amazon really are who they say they are. It all has to go through the certificate registrar system, and if any one of 1500 or more registrars makes a mistake, fake Amazons can spring up, skim your credit cards when you try

[passage 31](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) purchase records (profiles) provided by 80 million of my neighbours to validate that a site purporting to be Amazon really are who they say they are. It all has to go through the certificate registrar system, and if any one of 1500 or more registrars makes a mistake, fake Amazons can spring up, skim your credit cards when you try to order, and you may never be any the wiser. Certificate Authority is an antipattern, unless perhaps they are also financially liable with very solid insurance you can claim against if they issue a bad certificate which causes people to be defrauded when they try to reach your business. I can’t say exactly how we will do PKI in future, but I am confident of at least two things... People will continue to lose their keys, and there will have to be schemes which allow recovery (i.e. key split 90 ways among your social circle, with 70 pieces required to reassemble it.) People will continue to leak their keys, and there will have to be schemes to kill the key and replace it with a new key while maintaining the old identity. These schemes are typically called “key revocation certificates” and can be managed much like a backup copy of your private key. Once your revocation certificate is published to the blockchain, your key is dead. Hardware which just manages keys — not being a web browser, not playing Angry Avians, not making phone calls — is likely to be necessary because operating system security sucks and is not likely to get better soon unless we go back to Object Capabilities or equivalent distrust-based systems. There is an enormous amount of room for innovation in public key infrastructure now that we have blockchains to work with. In particular, Simple Public Key Infrastructure is a very good fit for the kinds of social interaction we do in social networks (spanning friends-of-friends for key distribution), and the blockchain itself is more or less the perfect medium for distribution of key revocation certificates. I’m all ears if anybody wants to innovate in these areas. Taking the short way home If we do not find a compelling alternative to profile-based identities, we are going to live in a world in which we exchange constant surveillance for services, from Facebook through to our own governments. The convergence of interests between national security and advertising is one of the most unholy pacts made in our time. To get out of this hole we have to find: 1. New way of paying for services, and 2. New ways of identifying ourselves Blockchains provide every possibility of efficient payments for small services — a dollar here and there — which might be more profitable for many services in the long run than advertising. I think I’ve made a good case that action-based rather than profile-based identities are possible for at least a large subset of adults. Minors, particularly those too young to even have much profile, still represent

[passage 32](https://medium.com/@Consensys/tell-me-who-you-are-258268bf3180) payments for small services — a dollar here and there — which might be more profitable for many services in the long run than advertising. I think I’ve made a good case that action-based rather than profile-based identities are possible for at least a large subset of adults. Minors, particularly those too young to even have much profile, still represent a very hard problem in the identity space, not least because of extremely strict data protection laws. But action-based identities are very, very rigid things, and represent (for a good number of people) a credential nearly as hard as a State ID, and with considerably better privacy implications in many cases. The temptation is always going to be to nail people to the meat. Leaving aside the history of putting serial numbers on human beings with tattoo guns — which should be enough to kill this idea forever — the Office of Personnel Management hack breached the IDs of 22 million US government personnel . It’s absolutely clear that there is no way to protect biometric data in the real world, at least not with current levels of data security technology. It’s possible we’ll continue to see this issue fudged and hedged with biometric hashing of limited biometrics (“left pinkie only!”) but, in the long run, biometrics probably shouldn’t wind up in databases, or they should wind up in blockchains where everybody knows exactly what has been exposed, and what has not. I think in particular there’s a good case to be made for facial biometrics (already exposed for most Facebook users, or anybody who walks around in cities with CCTV cameras.) What this leaves us with is a tentative path forwards. Put some things into blockchains, particularly things like the public keys of major organizations, and certificate revocations for people whose keys have been stolen or whatever. Use additional cryptography to provide things like zero knowledge proofs of age without revealing identity. Compartmentalize information about our various roles in ways which make it hard to join profiles without our consent. The result of this “wise as a serpent” approach might be a mixed ecology of identity solutions, which serves us well enough to navigate around our world, without opening up some of the scary terrain which surrounds us on all sides as these various technologies change, evolve, mutate, mature, and form a continuous surface on which the next phase of human history will be played out. We clearly need new identity infrastructure, but we also need time to experiment, scale experiments, and understand where we are in the ever-changing terrain of the new which so much marks our current lives. What is not disclosed can be disclosed in future, but what is published now is published forever, encrypted or not. by Vinay Gupta @leashless (and thank you to everybody on Twitter who commented on early drafts!) Vinay is an infrastructure theorist, software engineer and inventor at ConsenSys http://re.silience.com

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End of [163] Tell Me Who You Are. Identity, institutional memory, and the… | by ConsenSys | Medium, part 3 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [761](https://guptaoption.com/texts/761.md) Cryptoeconomics Lab: Vinay Gupta (2020); the most closely related, [706](https://guptaoption.com/texts/706.md) Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin - with Vinay Gupta | Virtual... (2018); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.