I woke up in the middle of the night (too many exciting and scary thoughts bouncing around in my skull apparently) and was silly enough to see a tweet roll by where Naval Ravikant was engaging with MalwareJake.
Censorship-resistant, permanent social media.
Distributed solar power grid, no monopoly in center.
Distributed wifi bandwidth grid, planetary scale, no monopoly.
Censorship resistant DNS.
Scalable TOR.
Uncensorable prediction market.
Swiss Bank as a service.
…— Naval (@naval) December 31, 2017
Naval’s answers provide a hint of what the future of decentralization provides. Some of the use cases are intriguing but not ones that will create multi-billion dollar industries. But I like where Naval is taking this.
His further response got me thinking even more – because I agree 100% with “Personal Identity Ownership” as a multi-billion dollar (or larger) ecosystem.
Routers auctioning routes
Servers charging clients to stop DDoS & spam
Self driving cars auction right of way
Cross-border micro-financial contracts
Financing w/out Wall Street & Sand Hill road.
Personal identity ownership
Permissionless file storage grid
Evolving autonomous apps— Naval (@naval) December 31, 2017
So I chipped in with an idea – one that I’ve committed to for the next 5-10 years.
Decentralized/self sovereign identity. Until blockchain companies had to own Our digital identity. Now we can control much of it and focus on the relationships I have with people, orgs, things. It builds an ecosystem/market that is enormous.
— Darrell O'Donnell 🇨🇦🆔 (@darrello) January 2, 2018
You see, Digital Identity underpins everything that we do online and a lot of what we do offline. Pretty much each of Naval’s use cases benefit from an effective digital identity. To me that means a self-sovereign/decentralized identity that I control. In the case of an organization (e.g. corporation) it may have its own digital identity – along with relationships with employees, customers, shareholders, regulators, etc.
We’ve invested heavily in Evernym and Sovrin because of our belief that the ecosystem that is created for digital identity is enormously powerful and it will shake many industries. I call it ecosystems – Andreas Klinger calls it markets. Naval agrees.
Genius.
— Naval (@naval) December 31, 2017
Also published on Medium.