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About what's being built, look into the https://identity.foundation https://identity.foundation, there you will find about decentralized identities, where you h

About what's being built, look into the https://identity.foundation https://identity.foundation, there you will find about decentralized identities, where you have a wide amount of use cases, like verifiable credentials, and authentication. Particularly, I'm involved in a similar project involving decentralized identities and verifiable credentials, and we just released an app to showcase how everything works: https://atalaprism.io/ https://atalaprism.io/ Another use case where I know someone working on it relates to auctions for cars being sold by insurance companies, the problem is that external people is bribing employees from the insurance companies to win the auctions, the goal is to remove this possibility by using smart contracts. On the previous case, it's a common problem on public auctions conducted by the government and I would love if they use a system where auctions could be audited by anyone, so that participants trust that no one is cheating.

alexmingoia 6y ago
What about those cases uses a blockchain? Any public/private key pair is a decentralized identity.
- AlexITC 6y ago
  In the case of identities/credentials, the blockchain is mostly used as the decentralized timestamp service, used to know the relative orders of events, like when a credential was issued, which key signed the credential, whether the key was revoked by that time, etc. Any public key could be seen as a decentralized identity but you don't have a way to certify if the key was ever rotated, where you usually go to centralized servers, a hacker may compromise a centralized service to change certain information about the public keys but it's unlikely it will compromise Bitcoin, these decentralized identities I mention are on practical terms, mutable, which is where the decentralized timestamp shines. On the auctions, a trust-less smart contract is what shines, as you can get the participants to bid there, and in case of disputes, everyone is able to audit the smart contract to make sure the outcome wasn't manipulated.

alexmingoia 6y ago

What about those cases uses a blockchain? Any public/private key pair is a decentralized identity.

AlexITC 6y ago
In the case of identities/credentials, the blockchain is mostly used as the decentralized timestamp service, used to know the relative orders of events, like when a credential was issued, which key signed the credential, whether the key was revoked by that time, etc. Any public key could be seen as a decentralized identity but you don't have a way to certify if the key was ever rotated, where you usually go to centralized servers, a hacker may compromise a centralized service to change certain information about the public keys but it's unlikely it will compromise Bitcoin, these decentralized identities I mention are on practical terms, mutable, which is where the decentralized timestamp shines. On the auctions, a trust-less smart contract is what shines, as you can get the participants to bid there, and in case of disputes, everyone is able to audit the smart contract to make sure the outcome wasn't manipulated.