Identification

Table of Contents

• Identification
  • The problem
  • The solution

Identification

Crypto-currencies like bitcoin are fully pseudonymous, some others like Zcash are even anonymous. Also with ThankToken you can do pseudonymous payments.

The problem

However, as we support universal income there is a new challenge:

How can we ensure that each natural person only has one single digital identity permitted to create value?

This problem requires some balance between data privacy and strong authentication.

If we did not care about authentication we could let every virtual identity create universal income. However, then the same natural person could create as many virtual identities to gain as much person income as desired. This will immediatly lead to fraud and there will be no trust in the value created.

On the other hand, if we did not care about data privacy we could let everyone publish a signed high-quality scan of his id card or passport in order to be allowed to create universal income. Exposing such senitive data to the public is absoutely insane, would be illegal and also open the door for criminals to missuse the collected data.

The solution

Instead to participate you need to register your public key for universal income in the identity service office of your region. They will use the global identity service that is only based on hashes of personal data. Only such hashes are stored digitally but no sensitive personal data. At the end of the certification process your public key is signed by the identity service officers and published to the identity directory. Everyone can validate ThankTokens created as universal income by checking the public key used for creation against the identity directory.