4 ms·

You can already transfer your identity to someone else in your public/private key example. If you accidentally expose your private key it's no longer your ident

by tsujp 5y ago

You can already transfer your identity to someone else in your public/private key example. If you accidentally expose your private key it's no longer your identity. You can "transfer" this identity to your new machine by copying it across etc. NFTs are just a standard, there's no rule requiring you monetise and trade them. Say your wallet seed (which is used to derive your private keys) gets compromised, you'd want to transfer your NFT to yourself in a new wallet. A typical use-case for burning (irrevocably destroying) tokens is to send them to specific burner contracts or addresses. MakerDAO does this with fees burned in MKR. You could "burn" your identity NFT by sending it to the burner contract if you need it changes or re-issued.

rspeele 5y ago
Oh, I understand that accidentally exposing my private key is a problem in my system, too. It's definitely not an advantage of my public/private key example, over NFTs. What I don't get is what the advantage is in the other direction: what does the NFT ecosystem give me, that a centralized database of public keys for identities doesn't? > Say your wallet seed (which is used to derive your private keys) gets compromised, you'd want to transfer your NFT to yourself in a new wallet. Unless the person who compromised my wallet seed does exactly that, before I find out about the compromise. At that point, there must be some way for me to get my identity back, because no system of identity can function when the answer to "my identity was lost" is "you have no identity now sorry" and the answer to "my identity was stolen" is "they're legally you now sorry". So there must be some authority I can contact and show real-world proof that... I'm still me. And that authority's word must be treated by the ecosystem as more meaningful than the now-irrecoverable NFT-identity that's held in my attacker's new wallet. The question is, if this authority exists, what point is there to the blockchain or NFT-standard part of it? Since this authority is trusted more highly than the blockchain anyway, what do we lose by just trusting the authority to maintain a basic-bitch database of public key : identity pairs? It can still be publicly mirrored and distributed, as long as it has $trusted_authority's signature and a recent timestamp it's assumed good.

by tsujp 5y ago

rspeele 5y ago

Oh, I understand that accidentally exposing my private key is a problem in my system, too. It's definitely not an advantage of my public/private key example, over NFTs. What I don't get is what the advantage is in the other direction: what does the NFT ecosystem give me, that a centralized database of public keys for identities doesn't? > Say your wallet seed (which is used to derive your private keys) gets compromised, you'd want to transfer your NFT to yourself in a new wallet. Unless the person who compromised my wallet seed does exactly that, before I find out about the compromise. At that point, there must be some way for me to get my identity back, because no system of identity can function when the answer to "my identity was lost" is "you have no identity now sorry" and the answer to "my identity was stolen" is "they're legally you now sorry". So there must be some authority I can contact and show real-world proof that... I'm still me. And that authority's word must be treated by the ecosystem as more meaningful than the now-irrecoverable NFT-identity that's held in my attacker's new wallet. The question is, if this authority exists, what point is there to the blockchain or NFT-standard part of it? Since this authority is trusted more highly than the blockchain anyway, what do we lose by just trusting the authority to maintain a basic-bitch database of public key : identity pairs? It can still be publicly mirrored and distributed, as long as it has $trusted_authority's signature and a recent timestamp it's assumed good.