BLOCKCHAIN GIRL JANINA LOWISZ ON THE BLOCKCHAIN ID & CITIZENSHIP

What is a BlockchainID?
The blockchain ID was invented by Chris Ellis from World Crypto Network and Bitnation founder Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof, and makes use of the Bitcoin blockchain and available cryptographic tools to provide IDs that are not issued by nation-states but privately. It is one of the pilot projects Bitnation did so far to show how governance services can be done in a private, voluntary and decentralised way. Today, the blockchainID could be used for online verification, as part of a reputation system to facilitate transactions, for voting, or it could be used by stateless people or in war zones. The blockchainID will be available on http://www.bitnation.co in Q1.
What makes the BlockchainID secure?
PGP encryption and the blockchain make it a secure, decentralized system that makes it nearly impossible for people to fake your identity, unlike with emails or social network logins.
People create a PGP key and witness each other`s existence at a certain place and time, validate and prove their existence by signing each other`s IDs with their PGP key. The content of the ID is bound to the owner`s key, so he has full control and no one can change it.
The blockchainID includes the merkle root of the latest block to prove the person must have existed at least in that certain time. To prove that it was that block`s specific time, the blockchainID document gets timestamped.
It also includes the venue`s public IP address to prove where it took place.
What do you know about Estonia’s e-citizenship, and does this tie into the project?
The blockchainID is a separate project, but certainly the e-citizenship is a fascinating project, too, providing people all over the world with governance services in a voluntary way, enabling them to facilitate their business or make use services like digital identification. It is a step in the right direction and shows that the past version of the nation state is challenged in different ways, which I see as useful promotion also for other alternatives like the blockchainID. However, as the blockchain is worldwide, a blockchain based system could offer worldwide services and would not only be voluntary, too, but also decentralised, making the system more secure. The e-citizenship would still be centralised and therefore its existence is dependent on benevolent policy, whereas the blockchain cannot be stopped.