In this video, we'll talk about the importance of identity and the difference between identity on the one hand and identification or identifiers on the other. First of all, we believe people you and I have the inalienable right to establish our own identities. We also have the right to capture and control our own data that constitute these identities. That's not the case right now. Most of us are generating data, the new asset class for big companies like, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Banks, Credit card companies, Governments, the big internet landowners. We're doing this like, we're serfs growing vegetables for medieval landlords. They may call them money and if they're feeling generous they let us keep a couple of cabbages. Call it Digital Feudalism, a near mark of the first era of the internet. Mind you during feudalism, the landlords nobility did provide a valuable service as do the big technology companies today. But in hindsight there was a better economic system to be had. The issue facing today's landlords is, whether to embrace change and become the equivalent of the British nobility, or to fight change and face the fate of Marie-Antoinette and the French rulers. The second era of the internet based on Blockchain, will bring about a new economy for data. This new asset class of the digital age. Largely, because Blockchain technology enables us to establish and own identities. It also enables us to enforce these identities in any context, and once we can do that, we can create a virtual Black Box for storing our own personal data. Now, that's a revolutionary idea, and I mean that literally. Like any revolution it up ends the balance of power. By creating the virtual you and safeguarding this virtual youth through Blockchain technologies. You can take back control over your own identity. The data you create and all the related rights of privacy, publicity, and property. We can recapture our identities and manage them for ourselves. To help use this data to plan our lives, to monetize it if we want and to protect our rights to privacy. Self sovereign means that it's under your individual control. It's also inalienable, meaning it can't be separated from you. No one can steal it, and since it's not assigned by a central authority, no authority can take it away. It must be recognized and enforceable in any context. Whether that's doing business online, or identifying yourself in a real-world situation like boarding a plane, and when it comes to capturing our own data, some of us are already doing that with personal devices like, FitBits. We're sort of citizen scientists. We're quantifying our physical activity through FitBits and we're quantifying our online activity through Internet Browsers. We're learning a lot more about ourselves. More people are becoming interested enough in their own data to be interested in taking control of it and to using it for ourselves and for the greater good. We make what we think is an important distinction between identifiers and identity. Identifiers are simply what we use to participate in large centralized systems like, Gmail or the Veterans Benefits Administration. They identify who we are, and we collect a lot of identifiers in our lifetime. Some of them are enduring like a social security number. Others are more transitory and employee ID, Student ID, and some are inherent to us like our fingerprint. Others we select like username or a password and still others are assigned to us, and as we use them, they all generate personal data. These are not our identities. However, our identities are the whole of us. They're something we experience and reveal to others selectively over time. Your identity exists before anybody registers your birth on a ledger. Identity is not simply endowed at birth. It is endowed by birth. But until now, we haven't had a means to assert this authority.
