THE CONCEPT OF VIRTUAL YOU — [BLOCKCHAIN REVOLUTION]
Throughout history, each new form of media has enabled mankind to transcend time, space, and mortality. That dare we say divine ability and inevitably raises a new the existential question of identity: Who are we? What does it mean to be human? How do we conceptualize ourselves?
As Marshall McLuhan observed, the medium becomes the message over time. People shape and are shaped by media. Our brains adapt. Our institutions adapt. Society adapts.
“Today you need an organization with endowed rights to provide you with an identity, like a bank card, a frequent used cards, or a credit card. Your parents gave you a name, the licensed obstetrician or midwife who delivered you took your footprint and confirmed for your weight and length, and both parties attested to the time, date, and place of your arrival by signing your birth certificate. Now they can record this certificate on the blockchain and link birth announcements and a college fund to it. Friends and family can contribute bitcoin to your higher education. There, your data flow begins.
In the early days of the Internet, Tom Peters wrote, “You are your projects.” He meant that our corporate affiliations and job titles no longer defined us. What is equally true now “You are your data.” Trouble is, “That identity is now yours, but the data that comes from its interaction in the world is owned by someone else.” That’s how most corporations and institutions view you, by your data contrail across the Internet. They aggregate your data into a virtual representation of you, and they provide this “virtual you” with extraordinary new benefits beyond your parents happiest dreams.But convenience comes with a price : privacy. Those who say “privacy is dead — get over it” are wrong. Privacy is the foundation of free societies.
“People have a very simplistic view of identity,” We use the word identity to describe the self, the projection of that self to the world, and all these attributes that we associate with that self or one of its projections. These may come from nature, from the state, from private organizations. We may have one or more roles and a series of metrics attached to those roles, and the roles may change. Consider your last job. Did your role change organically because of changes in the work that needed to be done or because of revisions to your job description?
What if “the virtual you” was in fact owned by you, your personal avatar and lived in the personal box of your identity so that you could monetize your data stream and reveal only what you needed to, when asserting a particular right. Why does your driver’s license contain more information than the fact that you have passed your driving test and demonstrated your ability to drive? Imagine a new era of the Internet where your personal avatar manages and protects the contents of your personal box. This trusty software servant could release only the required detail or amount for each situation and at the same time whisk up your data crumbs as you navigate the digital world.
This may sound like the stuff of science fiction as portrayed in films like The Matrix or Avatar. But today blockchain technologies make it possible.
Joe Lubin, CEO of Consensus Systems, refers to this concept as a “persistent digital ID and persona” on a blockchain. Chicago Fed ,said. “In the online digital economy, I will represent my various aspects and interact in that world from the platform of different personas.” Lubin expects to have a “canonical persona,” the version of him that pays taxes, obtains loans, and gets insurance. “I will have perhaps a business persona and a family persona to separate the concerns that I choose to link to my canonical persona. I may have a gamer persona that I don’t want linked to my business persona. I might even have a dark web persona that is never linkable to the others.”
Your personal box may include information such as a government-issued ID, Social Security number, medical information, service accounts, financial accounts, diplomas, practice licenses, birth certificate, various other credentials, and information so personal you don’t want to reveal it but do want to monetize its value, such as sexual preference or medical condition, for a poll or a research study. You could license these data for specific purposes to specific entities for specific periods of time. You could send a subset of your attributes to your eye doctor and a different subset to the mutual funds that you would like to invest in. Your avatar could answer yes-no questions without disclosing who you are: “Are you twenty-one years or older? Did you earn more than $100,000 in each of the last three years?
In the physical world, your reputation is local. your local shopkeeper, your employer, your friends at a party all have a certain opinion about you. In the digital economy, the reputations of various personas in your avatar will be portable. Portability will help bring people everywhere into the digital economy. People with a digital wallet and avatar in any country could establish the reputation required to, like , borrow money to start a business.
we believe that the economy works best when it works for everyone, and this new platform is an engine of inclusion.
— Don Tapscott
Identity is only a small part of it. The rest is a cloud , an identity cloud of particulates loosely or tightly linked to your identity. If we try to record all these into the Blockchain an immutable ledger, we lose not only the nuance of social interaction but also the gift of forgetting. People ought never be defined by their worst day.