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Sphere · Whitepaper

Identity

An Identity Service provides a 1-to-1 identity — one account maps to exactly one person.

Creating a global Identity Service would be most useful, as you could authenticate a person definitively. However, this would require an unreasonable amount of authority to unify one identity across all domains.

How do we tell a person is real and identify them except by meeting in person? Maybe that’s the only real way.

The Identity Problem

Section titled “The Identity Problem”

Most services can only establish an n-to-m identity, meaning a user can own as many accounts as they want (m), and an account can be used by any number of users (n). Some services try to restrict this (Netflix monitors activity to limit account sharing), but this usually requires impairment of individual freedom.

1-to-1 identity is technically very hard to create in a decentralized manner, as a large enough attack group could always circumvent network-based measures. It may be a legitimate consideration to question the necessity of 1-to-1 identity, instead of trying to force it into a limited system that could face corruption at scale.

Identity Recovery

Section titled “Identity Recovery”

In traditional web services, account recovery relies on external sources of identity (email, phone number) assumed to be more stable. This becomes hard with blockchains, since they operate with mathematical keys. While it would be possible to allow a blockchain account to change its key, this would either require the original key or a central authority.

Traditional accounts: Offer flexibility and security but require a central authority for identity management.

Blockchain identity: Very secure and decentralized, but relies heavily on individual responsibility and is inflexible. If a key is compromised, the user usually loses the account.

The network’s identity recovery process places the responsibility of account safety into the hands of the users and their networks — a better solution than central authority, though not perfect.

Pseudonymity

Section titled “Pseudonymity”

Given the challenges of 1-to-1 identity, pseudonymity may be a more realistic and desirable model for many use cases, with optional layers of verification through Social Tokens (Checked and Judged tokens).

Section titled “Related Concepts”