Re: [Din] WSJ article on Identity and Blockchains

[David Mazieres <[e-mail]>]

Thomas Hardjono <[e-mail]> writes:

>>>>   2. We need some notion of a "symbolic link", so that I can name not
>>>>        just someone else's key, but someone else's name, as that's very
>>>>        powerful.
>
> Yes the symbolic link is needed, but more importantly (and more
> difficult) is the binding to the owners person.  How do I know that
> the person Alice for pubkey X is the same Alice who owns pub key Y.

This doesn't seem hard conceptually--just have pubkey Y sign some
statement about Alice and pubkey X.

The more interesting question in my mind is tying together non-pubkey
identities.  How do I know this person submitting pull requests to my
project is also the former Stanford student I've been chatting with
online?  I think Keybase in particular has made some pretty good headway
in addressing the problem, but that is a centralized system to some
extent, and could definitely benefit from some decentralized internet
infrastructure...

>>>> What it provides, that we couldn't do before, is the ability to
>>>> voluntarily restrict what you do with your own namespace.  E.g., maybe
>>>> you want to delegate a name and then restrict yourself from revoking it
>>>> without seven days notice.
>
> Could we use DNSSEC for this? 

I don't see how to do this without some new kind of system for encoding
such update rules and a consensus mechanism for enforcing it.  And
obviously I believe the SCP draft is a step in the right direction for
the enforcement side of this problem...

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mazieres-dinrg-scp/

David