Category: identity

How unlike cash will CBDCs be?

~ antonylewis2015 ~ Leave a comment

In this post I discuss several differences between physical cash, and what I imagine retail Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) might end up looking like. The main differences between CBDCs and cash are accessibility, anonymity, and interest.

Accessibility means “who can use it?”. Pretty much anyone can use cash.

Anonymity describes how much information about the payer and recipient’s identity is needed to make a transaction. Cash doesn’t require the payer or recipient to provide any identity information.

Interest describes how much the number goes up if you leave it sitting in its natural state without lending it to anyone. Physical cash does not have interest.

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KYC in Stablecoins

~ antonylewis2015 ~ Leave a comment

Summary: Issuers of today’s fiat-backed stablecoins (such as PAX, USDC and TUSD) need to identify (or KYC) only those users who convert between bank account money and stablecoin, not all holders.

Some people might be surprised that intermediate users of stablecoin may transact without needing to being identified by the issuers. Yet few people know that there are kill-switches built in that can hinder bad actors. This arrangement can be described as permissioned pseudonymity. Stablecoin issuers have permission by their regulators to have pseudonymous users in their network.

Permissioned pseudonymity is positive for innovation while the industry explores the most productive uses for stablecoins.

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Can Blockchains Reduce the Impact of Data Breaches?

~ antonylewis2015 ~ Leave a comment

Another day, another catastrophic data breach.  This time it’s medical records in Singapore, where I live.  At this stage we’re almost immune to this kind of headline:

Cyberattack on Singapore health database steals details of 1.5 million, including Prime Minister (Reuters)

But this is quite bad.  Eileen Yu noted in her piece for ZDNet (my emphasis):

Singapore has suffered its “most serious” data breach, compromising personal data of 1.5 million healthcare patients including that of its Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

The affected users are patients of SingHealth, which is the country’s largest group of healthcare institutions comprising 42 clinical specialties, four public hospitals, five speciality centres, nine polyclinics, as well as three community hospitals.

Non-medical personal details of 1.5 million patients who visited SingHealth’s specialist outpatient clinics and polyclinics between May 1, 2015, and July 4, 2018, had been accessed and copied. The stolen data included patients’ name, national identification number, address, gender, race, and date of birth.

In addition, outpatient medical data of some 160,000 patients were compromised, though, the records were not modified or deleted, said the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI), in a joint statement late-Friday.

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A gentle introduction to self-sovereign identity

~ antonylewis2015 ~ 5 Comments

In May 2017, the Indian Centre for Internet and Society think tank published a report detailing the ways in which India’s national identity database (Aadhaar) is leaking potentially compromising personal information. The information relates to over 130 million Indian nationals.  The leaks create a great opportunity for financial fraud, and cause irreversible harm to the privacy of the individuals concerned.

It is clear that the central identity repository model has deficiencies.  This post describes a new paradigm for managing our digital identities: se
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