On Tuesday, a friend and I attended a blockchain meet up in Toronto, Ontario hosted by Linux Foundation. It consisted of a slide deck intro into blockchain development in Java, followed by a demo. This example and slide deck focused around Cardano which led me to a bit of confusion. It's not a cryptocurrency that comes to mind when I think of ones to make demos with (there are more popular ones like DOGE, SHIB, BTC, ETH, that makes more sense to me), but I've not really looked into crypto for a better part of a decade.
For a bit of background for the audience, I've discussed and have resources related to some open source private blockchain tech called Hyperledger Indy. But what is "blockchain"? If there's private blockchain, is there "public blockchain"?
The definitions are right here from me:
- Blockchain - an immutable datastore that that is cryptographically secure to prevent tampering with the data.
- Private Blockchain - an immutable datastore owned and controlled by one entity (government, private business, etc.). Can be used for business to business, points systems or other private means.
- Public Blockchain - an immutable datastore with little to no governance (free to join by all) and protected by consensus (democratic votes). More people who join the network, the more secure it becomes implicitly. This is what cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are based on.
I'd like to break down some important security postures as it pertains to these different implementations of blockchain, and most notably as it relates to decentralized identity with a cryto backer, like Cardano. I see blockchain as being a trusted datastore because of it's immutable nature, if the records are re-written then it's pretty obvious unlike some other traditional databases. This gives a paper trail that we can look at and audit to ensure the data is staying consistent for our lifetime, or even for generations. But with the choice of public or private chains, what makes sense for identity?
Decentralized identity has some issues with either type of blockchain, it's why I think researching contemporary blockchain with crypto like Cardano could yield some interesting discoveries. Crypto has largely solved the trust problem, but what sort of issues crop up if we don't have financial incentive to play by the rules?
These are some issues I see with picking either of the flavours of blockchain:
- Private Blockchain - a centralized body is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure, which means if they go belly up or bring someone to power who does not want to support a decentralized identity product, then it's game over. It's out of the control of the people, and it would need to be a token of gesture to release the blockchain to the masses if this identity provider did not want to issue identity anymore.
- Public Blockchain - In theory this looks very trusting on the surface. The bigger the network, the more secure and useful it becomes. The issue comes as there is little to no incentive to play by the rules. Nation states or other bad actors could poison a public blockchain to make it useless. Cryptocurrency has solved this by having financial incentives but I don't see any incentives to play by the rules for ID. Given enough eyes on it it's only a matter of time before it's useless as well.
Basically, I see an end date for either of these implementations. It doesn't make sense to try and reinvent the wheel every few years, I'm looking for a silver bullet that will be used for generations or until something better comes along. From discussing with one of the hosts of the session in Toronto, he mentioned the programmability of Cardano and it gave me a bit of insight that maybe it could lead to a path to discovering this "silver bullet". It's still early in research, but I see some interesting products in the Cardano space that could help me to "stand on the shoulders of giants", to help bring my voice and concern to develop real solutions to the problem I see with global online discourse, aka. speaking to bots.
In looking into decentralized identity around Cardano, I found two interesting projects by Cardano Foundation
I'll do further research into these products and others on competing cryptocurrencies to see how they try and solve distributed identity. This is just the beginning still, I'm just dropping this note here as I do daily to bring up some materials to read and help understand what this movement is about. We don't have a plan quite yet, but some leaders start with merely concepts of a plan and that's more than enough to start the conversation, if not even lead the free world.
Isaac