Our own decentralized Identity Network

• What does that mean?
• Why would we want it?
• How do we do it?

But first.. quickly..

In case someone you know invited you to show support, here's how

What happened?

It's important. Identity, reputation, and trust online is missing or broken.

As you explore this offering, keep in mind

1. Trusted society grounded by our existing human identities, reputations, and relationships
2. Decentralized organization

Not hard to do; They can't do it for us.
Ours means everybody's, anybody's.
Decentralized means yours.

Crypto

Allows us to do it without a service, silo, or central authority.

• ONE-OF-US.NET phone app - builds network, sufficient (for starters;)
• Nerdster web app - leverages the identity layer puny and weak (not the killer app)

FYI on both apps

• Trust Tom again
• Like another movie

• content, because we know Tom
• Check recommended movies
• Check Andrew's and Tom's ratings
• Click Andrew
• Check Andrew, see vouch chain

Identity Layer

• You cryptographically sign a statement referencing the other person's public key using your own private key.
• That signed statement is published to a location where everything your key has signed can be found.

Delegate Layer

• Create a new, disposable public/private key pair
• Sign and publish that this key represents you on that service
• Securely transmit that key pair to the service

• from your identity key to all the whitelisted content you see.

• Statements
• Keys
• Raw / interpreted, QR / text
• Link to published statements
  That's where both apps load data from (and only)

• Verifiable by anyone or anything.
• portable, not trusted because of where you found it, but because of who signed it.

Heterogeneous

Silos own your content, validate it - don't play nice with each other.
They own your account, which is your reputation and identity.

They're not getting better, more useful.
They're getting more entrenched, ramping up their monopoly power.

Invest in your account on one of the Twitters (there's 4)? One of the Airbnbs (vs. VRBO)?. The eBays, ...
Or just be you with your life's worth of contacts and reputation

Anyone can make different, better services leveraging the existing signed, trusted, content, but better...

... and that can fragment even further with competing services playing off each other's improvements.
Can't do that with our Facebook, X, Insta content, ... It's siloed.

Your identity is your crypto key. That's the paradigm. That's all. We state (sign and publish) whose key is whose in a decentralized way.

• You can use any tech to sign with it, issue delegates, claim and revoke old keys, vouch for others
• Folks can be their own identities on any service, not an account at a particular service
• Folks can follow or otherwise reference identities of actual people instead of accounts at a particular service

Nerdster sample features

• Demo phone not in network
• names change, decentralized
• content changes
• Anyone can use these PoVs

• leverage identity layer
• Any service can leverage the identity layer
• Demo phone isn't following Andrew's Nerdster account; it's used its Nerdster delegate key (which represents it) to follow Andrew the person.
• Any service can find, validate, and honor that. (Ditto on blocking Tom)
• WSJ, NYT, Reddit, ...

Heterogeneous... Play nice with others..

Submit movie from IMBD, book from GoodReads using paste

• Sign in
• Like and Snooze (swipe right)
• Dismiss (swipe left)

What we didn't do

• Pick a username. But we did name Tom

• Pick a password or sign in traditionally

Close account

• No accounts. The demo phone sort of gave the Nerdster an account, not the other way around. And then it removed that account.

• Demo phone never had an identity account (and it never will, as neither I nor anyone in my network will vouch for its humanity)

• I don't have an identity account with ONE-OF-US.NET or any other service. If anything, I have an account with the folks who've vouched for me.

Show Nerdster homepage.

• Nerdy!
• Lisa's view: clean, horses, baking
• Milhouse's view: clown news!
• Decentralized... Trust Milhouse (confused), get clown news (spammers, bad actors). Trust Lisa (capable) and clean it up.
• Open in bigger screen, show Milhouse to Marge using "permissive", "standard", "strict".
  • Tough problem... So is fighting spam, disinformation, and manipulation online. How can we expect them to solve this for us if we don't help them different ourselves from the bots, spammers, and bad actors?
  • Also notice.. Were you to come in and scan Milhouse's identity key, you'd have a pretty good idea who's one of us, not too revealing, but maybe enough to be convincing.

Decentralized

It can look like the app is the Nerdster and that the ONE-OF-US.NET phone app is how you sign into it, but that isn't the point

Puny, awkward, barely any content..

So why do it?

1. It's decentralized. It's ours. What else is these days? Are we losing the plot?
2. Get a crypto key, get recognized.. Just in case..
• Make yourself seen (do something on the Nerdster, loop someone else in, etc..)
• Check back..

Bottom line: You gotta believe