Anarchists claim the individual is self-sovereign. Nation states vary conditions and terms for the sovereignty they allow or assign. For example, some nation states define men as more sovereign than women. Most states define children as not sovereign until they reach a prescribed age. Religious communities also assign degrees of sovereignty to people with roles in the community. Some make the rules and others obey the rules. What are we to do in the age of the blockchain where the very identity of the person is obscured? Does the blockchain represent an opportunity to achieve the anarchist's dream for those who have access to it and participate in it? After all, neither status, nor race, nor enthnicity, nor gender, nor any other attribute holds sway when a contract is implemented by a technology that does not consider anything but the terms of smart contract. An exception might be if a contract requires an externally verifiable confirmation of an attribute and removes the anonymity of the party agreeing to the contract; but that too would be a voluntary surrender of an existing personal sovereignty.
The blockchain poses a significant threat to existing hierarchies and states and communities. All affiliation becomes voluntary. Those with racist values, with misoginistic views, class biases, and others can form ad hoc communities and networks. Those who currently hold the reins of power lose access to the means for locating the individuals they would normally force or induce to comply with their requirements. Tax collection becomes very difficult. When there is no intermediary, how does the State determine who exchanged what or who owns what?
A solution I would suggest is to include an agreement in any smart contract that includes a trade in an asset to automate identification of the location of the originating device and assign a location address to the device and embed a tracking component into the electronic signature of the device so it can be tracked as its location changes. In effect, the devices that participate in smart contracts become citizens of their location and engage voluntarily in a class of transactions we could call "registered" transactions. All other transactions would remain cloaked through encryption keys.
However, there is one area that even this solution can't properly address. If I want to accumulate and package and sell data associated with my digital identity, such as my medical records or my shopping choices, that data can be tracked back to me if my device's identity is also included in the transfer. We would need to enable a user to turn off the device signature based on the type of data. But then the user of this feature could bypass the device registration process to avoid taxation or other "registered" transactions.
My suggestion to the Ethereum development and other blockchain enabling developers is to build a smart contract auditing component into the platform that classes transactions into "registered", "blind," and "obscured." An obscured transaction would be categorized upon a scan of a data packet for information that identifies the person engaging in the smart contract and the platform itself would then encrypt the identity of the transmitting device, and the transaction would proceed. The problem again is that the state or the taxing entity would not be able to identify or locate personal data for purposes of taxation of the transaction exchange. This poses the same conundrum we started with. Who owns us? I would hope we do and that legislators across the board would affirm that we do.
Those who want to build this kind of infrastructure for blockchain platforms are welcome to explore the use of the DADE as outlined in another post of mine to get this done.
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