Digital Identity: a personal anecdote

         Here's a screenshot of the wallet transfers of the account @orinoco. It's an exchange. A small one, that is. It reminded me of the conversations I've seen in various Hive-related Discord servers. The ones about "someone helping me sell the Hive tokens". Sometimes, people don't believe in that kind of story, and for good reasons.

         Digital identity is something we take for granted. This is especially true for those who live in a more developed country. Emails, phone numbers, etc. are so easy to come by that they can't fathom a society working without them.

         When Ethiopia chose Cardano for that purpose, it was underwhelming news. The market reaction is most likely going to be the same for the El Salvador news. Unless, you are maxi, I guess. After all, a lot of people don't care about progress and adoption. They see those countries filled with poor folks who can't bring money to the table.

         And they would be right. There's no money, for now. The point is to set the stage to unlock those potential.

         And what is so important about digital identity? Well, it is one of the means which people can participate in the global economy. Some of the more hardcore crypto believers would think identity is unnecessary. But, ask yourself when was the last time you decided to invest in a completely anon project that is not Bitcoin? Or, partnered with some anon entity for your business? For every "Bitcoin", there is at least 99+ scams/rug pulls that came along with it.

         As anecdote, I remember in the early 2000s, I faced a similar situation, but at a much less grandiose scale. Some of you may remember Runescape from way back in the MMORPG days. What I used to play is what they call Runescape 2 now.

         One of the frustrating part of account security back then was the lack of email accounts for me and my brother. Where would two kids gonna get their own email accounts if our parents weren't going to help us get one? To be frank, we never asked them. The answer was strangers on the internet.

         This was back in the days when some people could send out Gmail invites left and right. Lucky for us, some "friends" in the game helped to hook us up with Gmail accounts. From there, we were able to add more layers of security to our game accounts. This then allowed us to obtain membership subscriptions. Granted, we purchased the said subscriptions through the said friends. So, they were, in essence, backroom deals.

         We were pretty lucky to not have been dealing with online predators. In fact, my brother and I met those friends we played with online later in life. They were chill folks and we still maintain contact over Facebook today. They were even our age!

What's the point of this story?

         I'm saying having a digital identity, an email account in this case, opened up a whole new world for me and my brother. It allowed us to explore other games and register on community forums. We didn't become completely autonomous, but it was a huge leap forward. Yet, we still needed middlemen for certain things like subscriptions. I mean, it's not like we had our own credit cards.

         I could understand why middlemen exist. They are there usually because people don't, or cannot, have the means to do things themselves. As blockchain technology spreads, it will empower and enable people like never before.

         Of course, this doesn't mean custodial services won't exist. Look at how most of you choose to join curation trails and autovote like machines. That's human nature. We don't want to micromanage every little action when we could automate or let someone else do it for us.

         Sure, some may say that's a convoluted way for centralized entities to control you. It could. But, it falls on the protocol to make sure that each person is in control of their own data. As long as we can control what and when we can share our information, it's good enough for me. It's not much different than how you give your posting authority and whatnot on Hive to certain dapps.

         In short, embrace the opportunities and privileges you have now. It should get better from here as time goes on.

Posted with STEMGeeks