Managing identities of people and other private or legal entities has historically been job of states. Typically for the purpose of taxation and military service. In the last twenty years this has increasingly became an interest of private sector, namely banks, tech giants and major retail brands. In the Internet age, maintaining identity for larger parts of population gives an edge in understanding and navigating the society, because identities are the best handles for associating all kinds of actions and data that are possible to record. Having such capacity is so powerful that it is comparable to the power of issuing money. Such a level of power is currently out of range for nearly all human minds. This article is not a philosophical thesis about ethical aspects of this subject nor an economic analysis of who benefits and who gets harmed in this game of identity management. This article provides a comparison of three technologies pioneering a decentralized management of usernames on public blockchain along with explanation of their main mechanisms and features.
The technologies in the scope are:
The main motivation for all three technologies is to make cryptocurrency transactions easy for everyone. Namely, the focus is on replacing complex wallet addresses with human-readable names. Take the complex management away from the user entirely and move it under the hood of the technology. The end users then can organize their contact lists of human readable names that correspond to what they know from their day-to-day life.
to be continued ...
