The Subject of Online Identity (part 1)

Online Identity Identity Abstraction
Your view:
Their view:
Raw view:

Thesis → An ideal Internet requires a player-first mindset grounded in an anonymous foundation with active participation in the identification and profitability of player data.

The Internet: is the global system of interconnected computer networks using the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP).
Metaverse: The Internet as a Game experience.
Identity (avatar): A character of internet as a game.
Metaverse: The Internet come alive.
The Web: An information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessible via the Internet.
Identity (online): The state of data interactions online.
Identity (corporate): The data associated with an identifier.
Identity (government): Account of a person, document, and story.
KYC: The legal obligation to collect, verify, and store customer records to prevent terrorism and money laundering.
Identity (social): A formed perception of self or other.
Online User: The end-user of being online, an internet explorer.
Verified Identity: A receipt of proof to have sourced original data for recognized data processing.
Account: The record of an individual data collection and associated authorization to act as.
Profile: The accessible individual public record of a collection of data; often associated as part of an account.
Credential: A piece represented in a profile or identity; authorization, achievement, credit, token.
Protocol: A formal system of computer rules.
IP: A protocol for routing and addressing data packets for travel across networks online.
Interface: The place at which unique systems meet.
Operating System: the software that supports a computer's basic functions (scheduling, applications, peripherals).
Online: connected to, served by, or available via a system and especially a computer or telecommunications system.
Interoperable: The synchrony of utility in unique systems for a single sovereign data.
Composable: The ability to create unique combinations of interacting components.

tip: “Identity is a rigid designator; something that designates the same object in all possible worlds in which that object exists and never designates anything else.”

Internet Evolution

The Internet is currently under construction, with it comes shifting dynamics of ownership, authority, and experience.

To simplify, the internet's experience today is finding a destination, a website, and signing up. The user performs operations that add to the sum of data collected for that website account.

Although this form of data ownership has long dominated the internet, a new form of sovereign right has begun emerging due to crypto technologies.

The formidable first example, Bitcoin, is a network, blockchain, and decentralized application for transferring wealth across the internet without permission.

Bitcoin is internet value, an online protocol of wealth, and an accounting ledger of immutable monetary transactions with a verifiable history.

This phase change has enabled a large collective of people to work toward a somewhat common goal of decentralized and permissionless internet; the ideology is known now as web3.

It allows a massive history of transactions recorded and presented as an active global state, a permissionless but now expensive immutable ledger. Although seemingly irrelevant, web3 has the potential to completely renovate the experience of being online, to arrive at a new destination where the starting point is not the beginning but the next stop in a continuous journey.

The Online Game

At length, The Great Online Game is the ability to see the Internet as a massive online game space. That is not to say google search becomes Tetris- that an unknown author is leveling up through writing this piece.

Are you playing? Identity as a representation of self allows for the sum of data that references an individual to be considered an identified object; to the game, this object is a player, avatar, character, or puppet. When removing the notion of this game as VR, 3D, or even graphically relevant, it can be left plainly explained as a text-based MMORPG.

The Internet as a pseudo-MMORPG where our character is an Account, Profile, User, or otherwise identifiable endpoint of newly created actions. In real life, the collection of data processes that comprises your American online/offline identity is known as REAL ID. In Ethereum, the collection of data tied to an individual Account is called the soul, whose endpoint is an Ethereum address.

New web enables a sovereign superpower, the ability not to be erased. That is it.

If your google account is a game character- A game character that the player and host control.

An ideal account as it relates to web3, the online game, or Ethereum- A game character that the player controls.

Dissecting a Connective Software Application

The surface level of app internals can be seen through various lenses-Most recognizable is a separation between the front and backend. Another possible separation is data and service.

A common dependency of service is online and offline. Google Chrome provides an offline game service at chrome://dino/.

The current toggle of data connectivity separates online “cloud data” and offline “local data.”

Further curation of sufficiently decentralized datastates could reduce private database loads, most notably, the currently understood Account and Identity tables.

Losing these tables could have adverse side effects for private companies, such as lost earnings on user data and incomplete identification profiles. Alternatively, a massive potential for new players to reshape the perceivably broken space.

Preloaded Internet Data

What is a datastate? I’m referring to the active state of recognizable and sufficiently-decentralized blockchains: crypto, blockchain, protocol, the current state, transaction history, content, and identity pointers.

Made simple, sharing a Facebook profile with other platforms and services sounds fine; this makes Facebook whatever anyone wants. It is relegating the responsibility of identity repository from a private company to public service.

Preloaded data is what sits behind the unlocking door of interoperability. It is account, inventory, storage, information, history, identity, and anything it could be. The result is new, the app is unique, and the old data can be mined.

Identification Abstraction

Identification is the continuing process of completely assembling all data related to identity.

As the internet exists beyond the borders of individual government, identification of any national citizen cannot be enforced outside of those services like ISP, IP, Account, and History.

Anonymity and non-personalization do not always create an ideal experience. Nor does the absence of regulation and elected governance.

User Identity

Agent

Before web clients and during the time of old age internet, most software application were their own Agent. As it relates to Identity, the user Agent is a connected software interface for online actions.

An identity-bearing agent, an agent of manipulation upon identity, can be viewed at the micro-level (fragment of identity) or macro-level (a holistic identity). In either case, there is a dispute over control and identity management, which might resemble the principal-agent problem.

At this time, the delegation of responsibility is mostly non-optional; the place where identity is registered will most often have the ability to modify or remove said identity completely.

Ethereum is making huge progress toward the delegation of responsibility for an identity; this takes shape in social recovery, multi-party computing wallets, and, most plainly, writing the delegated parties in code.

[ This concludes part 1... ]

Browser

A computer just turned on, and the browser opened.

Maybe a few browsers even serve a specific purpose, like gaming or education.

A wallet browser could become an online explorer and consumer IAM (identity access management) tool.

Super(App)

The super app is not new technology, but it certainly appears to be something that will thrive in the new web ecosystem. Wikipedia calls super apps “a mobile or web application that can provide multiple services.”

These apps essentially act as a WYSIWYG for customizing the individual user application, drag and drop, extend the core app with micro-apps. These micro-apps are probably the result of a developer ecosystem, possibly even an open one.

Such apps that use decentralization might be more resistant or utilize interoperable data.

This phenomenon also exists with protocols, the set of protocols functioning together, an open ecosystem of builders, and possibly hundreds or thousands of resulting end-client apps of high customization. The new “internet” may be a publicly organized super-wide protocol of recognized endpoints and piping. The idea of verse, possibly even multiple connected online versions, could exist based on unique sets of protocols most users choose.

Fin

This paper is an opinionated multi-perspective objectification of Online Identity; the outcome is not a new application; it remaps the original online computing experience with now-future possibilities.

Thanks to dommy.eth, alexanderchopan.eth, lesgreys.eth, duclare.eth, Alex Paden, and other obfuscated contributors for aiding in the creation of this paper. SHONI.eth is a cooperative that aims to publish original content in new places.