On this episode, we have a very exciting guest—Dr. Geoffrey Goodell.
Dr. Goodell is a Senior Research Associate of Computer Science at University College London. Previous to his academic career, he spent roughly a decade in the financial sector, having served most recently as Partner and Chief Investment Officer of a boutique asset management firm based in Boston.
One of Dr. Goodell’s key interests is ‘identity’ and how it affects the ‘always-online’ world we navigate. Every human being on the planet has an identity—or at least should have one. As an exercise in personal autonomy, an identity allows us to establish relationships, build trust, and make financial transactions.
Not all identities are alike—in this episode, Dr. Goodell explains that some identities are given privilege while others are denied. In a world where surveillance capitalism reigns supreme, everything we do is watched, catalogued, and judged.
Who deserves to issue an identity? How does identity affect the world around us? How important is self-sovereignty?
Dr. Goodell explains these complex issues in a way that’s easy to understand. Make sure to listen to this spellbinding episode of The Decentralists.
On this episode, we have a very exciting guest—Dr. Geoffrey Goodell.
Dr. Goodell is a Senior Research Associate of Computer Science at University College London. Previous to his academic career, he spent roughly a decade in the financial sector, having served most recently as Partner and Chief Investment Officer of a boutique asset management firm based in Boston.
One of Dr. Goodell’s key interests is ‘identity’ and how it affects the ‘always-online’ world we navigate. Every human being on the planet has an identity—or at least should have one. As an exercise in personal autonomy, an identity allows us to establish relationships, build trust, and make financial transactions.
Not all identities are alike—in this episode, Dr. Goodell explains that some identities are given privilege while others are denied. In a world where surveillance capitalism reigns supreme, everything we do is watched, catalogued, and judged.
Who deserves to issue an identity? How does identity affect the world around us? How important is self-sovereignty?
Dr. Goodell explains these complex issues in a way that’s easy to understand. Make sure to listen to this spellbinding episode of The Decentralists.
Henry: Hey everyone. It's Henry, Mike and Chris of The Decentralists. We're very excited today. We have a special interview with a subject all the way from London, England, Dr. Dr. Geoffrey Goodell Goodell. He's going to talk to us about identity and autonomy today. But before we start, I'd like to tell you a little bit about him. Dr. Geoffrey Goodell Goodell is a senior research associate in the financial computing and analytics group of the department of computer science at University College, London. He is convener of the ISO working group on foundations of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies and an academic advisor for the Belgium based international association of trusted blockchain applications. Furthermore, he has a decade of experience as a portfolio manager in the financial industry. Having served most recently as partner and chief investment officer of an asset management firm based in Boston, where he led the design implementation and management of investment strategies in systematic macro trading and statistical arbitrage. Man, I love that word arbitrage. It's a great word. Previously. He was an associate in the corporate credit and structured product groups at Goldman Sachs in New York. He is a CFA charter holder and has a doctorate in computer science from Harvard University, an MBA from the University of Oxford and an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from MIT. Since joining UCL, his research has contributed to the knowledge at the nexus of computer science, finance, and public policy. His primary research areas include digital marketplaces, digital payment systems and regulation. Dr. Geoffrey Goodell, welcome to The Decentralists. I got to tell you though after reading such an impressive resume we certainly have one thing in common. We both graduated high school. Anyway, we all have one thing in common with Dr. Geoffrey Goodell Goodell then.
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Thank you so much, Henry. It's a pleasure to be here.
Henry: Okay. Let's jump right in, right off the top. I've got to ask Jeff, how did you get into digital identity? It seems such a long way from investment banking in New York.
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Well, that's a bit of a story and I think that if we think about my history in both academia and industry as having a set of themes attached. I think that it's fair to say that privacy is a major a major theme of the different aspects of work that I've done. Certainly, when I was a fund manager, many of the investors in my fund were very much concerned about their privacy. While I was a researcher at Harvard as a PhD student, I worked closely with the developers of the tour system, which you may have heard of correct which is really about providing anonymity for internet transport. So much of my work was privacy there. Certainly there were considerations of privacy of clients in my work in New York as well. As it turns out digital currencies which is really what brought me to UCL are very much about privacy. I'm hoping that we'll have a chance to talk about that a bit today. But in the process of doing work in digital currencies, the topic of digital identity was never far away from these research areas. Not only because blockchain and distributed ledger technologies are very much interested. The, the people who do work in this space are very much interested in identity and privacy. There are many industry applications of in that space as well. But also because questions about identity and questions about anonymity and privacy are very closely related to some of the factors that are involved in determining whether a digital currency or digital payment system has the properties that we want. This digital identity question is very close to this because it does raise questions of who gets to assign an identity to someone, what is an identity. Right. I would say that really, if we think about what an identity is, it's really just a linked set of attributes or transactions.
Henry: You know, that's fascinating. Can you dive a little deeper into that? How do you define, or what is identity? I've never thought of it before, but I'm sure you have.
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Yeah, so, I think that this is a very good question. I don't think that there is a lot of agreement about it. For something that seems so trivial, it's always surprised me that we have such a hard time agreeing on what identity is, right. But I'm going to take a stab at it and I would say that identity is a linked set of attributes or transactions. The reason that I say this is that identity is really about revealing some properties of some kind of entity. That's what an identity is. Basically, if we just have a property that exists in isolation that really doesn't say anything about any particular entity. It's just the property. It's only when we start to link these properties together that we build an identity. So, for example, a trip on the tube is not an identity. But a set of a hundred trips on the tube is. Precisely because we've linked them together in such a way that we're able to build a profile of that person. We know something about that same person. We know that these 100 trips are linked to each other.
Henry: Do you mean that those individual trips are the transactions that you mentioned?
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Yes. I would say that they are examples of transactions. I mean, we can think of them as attributes as well, like that person who, who took that trip on or that person who took it trip from Houston square to Richmond on Thursday, the18th this kind of question, you know, I think whether it's attribute or a transaction, it, it, it could be looked at either way, but essentially this, this, this combination of activities and characteristics really is what builds a profile, what a profile is of someone is made of and that I would say is really the essence of identity.
Mike: So, I want to jump in here if I can. Because one of the interesting things I want to pick out about what you were talking about in your definition, Dr. Geoffrey Goodell is the fact that you, in there nowhere were you mentioning something like an issuer, right. Which is, I think if you were to ask the average person on the street, what is an identity, they would respond with something like a passport, a driver's license, a fishing license, right. They would respond with this this idea that identity really, is something that potentially, I could only really define myself. Right. I mean, I'm the one that's behind my eyeballs. I'm the one that knows who I am, I kind of think of identity as almost like an ethereal quality, like a soul. Okay and it's funny that. The idea is that typically, you know, if you look at kind of the history of identity I've talked about this before. It goes back to the days when the Medici started this whole idea of banking. Prior to organized banking, if you wanted to move a chest, or you wanted to move a thousand gold coins from Italy to France, you needed to hire a hundred soldiers and a big cart, and all this other stuff to physically transport this. Then it got to the point where what would happen is one of the Medicis in say, Milan would vouch for you, take your hundred gold coins or thousand gold coins, give you a piece of paper that you would take to France, give to his brother, and he'd give you a thousand gold coins, right. Making it much safer and that's where you get into this idea of identity coming from an issuer. Rather than from the person. So, I guess what I'm trying to figure out is it sounds like when you're looking at combining attributes, you're starting to move into a realm of a digital identity.
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Well, it doesn't necessarily need to be digital to refer to a combination of attributes.
Mike: Okay. It seems like as part of the, when you look at identity, what you're looking at is a bunch of different, let's say it is transactions or attributes. But what it also is, one of the other key components that you talked about when we were prepping for this podcast was this idea of autonomy. So how do you relate autonomy and identity?
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Well, I really think that this comes back to the question. I think that it's a complicated answer, so I'd like to take this in parts. Sure. I think you mentioned the Medici and I think that this is a very interesting place to start. Because this notion of someone vouching for someone else and really being the kind of gatekeeper or curator of a reference. A reference to a person is really, I think the start of where this question of autonomy comes from. Because once we have this notion of a gatekeeper who is able to keep tabs on our activities and be able to make assertions such as the idea that I don't have any particular outstanding loans in any particular jurisdiction of the world. Or that I don't have any black marks on my record, or that I have never done anything to sully the good name of the kingdom. Then that gatekeeper can actually exercise quite a bit of power over me by virtue of me not being able to do certain things if I have not served at the interest of that party. So, when I refer to autonomy, I'm really referring to the ability for people to engage in activity without some notion of sort of, how do I say forced compliance with the interest of some issuer. Simply by virtue of the possibility that their activities might be connected into something that could be used to build a profile of them. I think we don't have to go too far to imagine what the landscape of possible abuses of this power might be. I think that we're familiar with the Streisand effect. I think that in which basically celebrities want to live in privacy, but someone effectively doxxes’s them. I think that we are familiar with the behaviour of credit bureaus and credit agencies. Certainly the social credit system in China, which is public or government issued, if you will. Whereas the social credit process in the Western world is typically run by private sector corporations but ultimately serves a similar job. These questions of making loans to people in certain parts of the world, including some of the developing world, whether investors need to feel some comfort about lending to people that they can't control. Whether that comfort can be delivered a sort of strong binding kind of surveillance mechanism which forces them to submit to the control of potential lenders. Might allow those lenders to reduce the interest rates at which they might lend. These are these are all examples of what we might see in terms of the practice of making use of this kind of this kind of ability to monitor and vouch for someone else's history.
Chris: So, Dr. Geoffrey Goodell, I just want to follow up this whole question of identity with something that an old philosopher said a few hundred years ago. You know, I think therefore I am. Who you are is really the only thing that anybody can be sure of in the world. Right. So, with that in mind, first off, how important is sentient to identity and how do you know there is somebody else on the other end of a transaction that is actually sentient and operating as a thinking human being?
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Yeah, I think that that's a very difficult question really. Precisely for the reason that you mentioned when. When René Descartes went in to say that I think therefore I am. I think really we are interested in this sort of question of, well, what constitutes sentience and what constitutes this notion of me being able to know something with certainty. I think that is the right question to ask in as much as this, we don't necessarily know whether someone on the other end the pipe is sentient or not. At some level we cannot know. But if we believe that that someone on the other end of the pipe is sentient, then I think that we have the question of whether they need to be afforded human rights and human autonomy. This is a question that I think was recognized as really significant by Emmanuel con and some other, and some other philosophers that followed. Precisely because of this notion of agency and who gets to decide. Who gets to make these kinds of decisions on behalf of another. I think this links to the identity question here. Basically, the identity issue is who gets to define who someone is if someone is sentient, then we might want to believe that, that someone should be able to define their own identity and define their own context in which this identity means something. I like to suggest that at some level, this means that we need individual people to have the inalienable, right to alienable identities. That's what I mean, we need this person, we need people to be able to create identities that are unlinked. That operate at their own control and that are not just a matter of having everything that they do be tied up to a single permanent record of their activities. That's I think the core of this of this question and I think something that differentiates identity in a human context from identity in the context of assets or corporations or things. That I think is really important because humans have human rights, whereas perhaps corporations do not. When we raise the question of whether something can be able to create a new identity. Well, maybe we don't need to afford those kinds of rights to certain kinds of entities, but to humans, I think we do.
Chris: That leads to another question I have. So, for the past 30 years, identity has been tied to IP addresses and devices, did we go wrong? And if so, where did we go wrong?
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Yeah. So, I think that we went wrong at a number of different places there. So, you mentioned IP addresses first, so you might want to refer to a technical report that I wrote with Paul Cyberson, who is one of the original authors of the onion routing protocol upon which Tor is based back in 2006. About precisely that, this idea that people are being identified by their IP addresses and in particular, how they're connected to the network. This is problematic for a lot of reasons, not least of which is the fact that people are being judged, not on the basis of what they want to reveal to the world. But also specifically on the basis of who their gatekeepers are, how they're connected to the system. There are other problems with this as well, which is that they can't perhaps even more importantly, which is that they can't escape from that kind of identification that kind of binding. They're bound to their IP address and everything that they do is bound to that IP address. The IP address has reputation and that IP address has their history and anyone who sees their IP address, including everybody who happens to run an internet service that they happen to visit, gets to learn who they are at that level and gets to draw potentially conclusions about where else they've been. This has given rise to the world of browser cookies, I think follows on this idea. Not only because people can reasonably move from place to place, think the mobility of your laptop. But also this idea that people can basically leverage, this kind of de facto browser platform of third party cookies to create histories of observations that allow them to draw conclusions of where you've been. By pooling their knowledge of who is visiting what, for example. So, I think that's part of the story but I think that it's deeper than that. You also mentioned devices and this idea that there are certain kinds of devices that people only have one of. So this idea of every restaurant asking you for a mobile phone number when you make a booking or everybody on the other end of the line, or every other service that you're filling out asks you for a phone number, not because they want to call you. But because they want to know that you're giving them something that can ultimately be tied back to you through some kind of legitimate system that is hard for you to have more than one of. This idea of a unitary identity and that's very dangerous quite frankly, because it prevents people from being able to actually have different context in which they operate that are not linkable to each other. Which I think is really central to the human experience. When I walk into a shop, I should be able to make a purchase without having to deliver an ID. But here in London, there are many different shops that do exactly that. They require an ID simply because they've decided that they don't want to take cash. This idea of devices as also being objects that serve the interests of other bidders, serve multiple masters rather. I think is really another pernicious aspect of that. This idea of trusted computing. If I'm buying a device on the open market that has trusted computing hardware in it, basically that hardware is going to make assertions that in principle, I wouldn't be able to impact or affect. This is often implemented for the purpose of digital rights management or DRM or also potentially some notions of trusted computing. I mean, there are distributed ledger platforms such as Intel Sawtooth lake, which is based around this idea that there's trusted hardware that will do things that the manufacturer wanted it to do, rather than the owner. I think this raises the question of really whether this device is serving our interests or the interests of someone else. I think that all of these areas are part of this larger story about controlling us and our devices or internet connections are part of that story. But I think it's really deeper because people don't really have the latitude in many cases to actually take themselves out of the restrictions that these kinds of technologies and these platforms have basically surrounded them to force them into. Like, they cannot say, I'm not going to use the internet, or I'm not going to receive phone calls or I'm not going to give my mobile phone number to the border control police, when I cross an international border. These are the kinds of things that I think we should worry about. Precisely because we are using these kinds of devices and these kinds of capabilities in so many intimate aspects of our everyday lives.
Mike: Wow. So Dr. Geoffrey Goodell, what you're starting to do is you're starting to move into a topic. A part of identity that I find almost made our digital identities kind of exposed them to the world, right? So, I have this analogy of a Frankenstein's monster. We've talked a little bit about it in the answer to your last question, where you're talking about things like TPM chips and other, you know, hardware and software devices where basically we're using these things or relying on them to kind of I guess, provide access to things which is then related to identity, right? If you look at kind of the internet before social media, we still had things like metadata and stuff like this, where, you know, people could theoretically track purchasing patterns, movement with GPS and things like this in the devices and all of that. But the thing that they lacked at that point was a clear linkage to what I would say is a real person. Okay. So, you could have a bunch of data points on any one of us in a metadata aspect, but if you don't really know how to relate that to a specific individual, it is potentially less invasive, right. But, I kind of liken it to, you know, if somebody pre-social media, they may know what I purchased when I purchased it, where I went, what I did. But once social media got into this game and became kind of the basis for the web 2.0 or the new internet, they added a personality and a name and an address and friends and pictures and followers, likes, and all of this. Basically turned all of this metadata into digital identities for all of us. But they are digital identities that we have no access or control or anything at all. So, I guess this is to me evidence of the rub where one of the main risks of identity of having a centralized authority issue your identity is that you have no control over it. So, how do we change this dynamic? How do we change this dynamic, where we rely on somebody else to tell us who we are?
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Yeah, well, this is complicated because we're going to need to sacrifice some convenience. Because first of all, it is extremely convenient for us just to derive our identity from a trusted third party. Precisely because trusted third parties are positioned to facilitate all sorts of introductions on our behalf. If we all just agree that Mark Zuckerberg is the ruler of the world then you and I don't need to worry about anything other than whether Mark Zuckerberg tells us that the other person is legitimate. The one who is who he says he is. I think that was really the essence of Zuckerberg's comment in 2009 to David Kirkpatrick. When he said that you have one identity anyone who has two identities is evidencing a lack of integrity. This is patently false. But nonetheless this is exactly what motivates the interest of these so-called identity platform providers of which Facebook and Google are just two examples. These kinds of patterns of basically standing in between two different parties who might be able to establish direct relationships because one can vouch for the other, this is actually precisely I think the main challenge. When it comes to developing approaches to getting around this world, because of this issue, it's messy, quite frankly to be able to walk into a store and have the merchant, not necessarily know who I am. I mean, this is a messy world at some level. If someone is accustomed to knowing everything about me, then suddenly knows nothing. There's quite a bit of scary. There's quite a bit of a, I think, a concern, that some people might have. That they don't have that certainty that comes with knowing that they've been vouched for. So, I think we need to live in that perhaps more dangerous, but yet more free world. If we value human autonomy, unfortunately it comes at a cost and certainly one of my students is working on an interesting project to assess the impact of mobile banking on the economy vis-à-vis loans in certain countries in Asia. The idea is that if mobile banking companies and platform operators get to see all of what you're doing, then maybe they can facilitate lending to certain individual clients at a lower yield precisely because their behaviour is more consistent with what they want. Certainly, this idea of comfort and comfort for lenders and comfort for providers of services I think is a really serious question and it raises questions about the balance of power among individuals. Between individuals and businesses, between individuals and governments and so on.
Mike: Right. So, I have a question for you then Dr. Geoffrey Goodell. Let's dig a little bit deeper on that one. So, in this world now where, you know, we basically are kind of all being cataloged, right, monitored, tracked, vouched for. Whatever we, you know, all of these different words where we're basically carrying around all of these different attestations to our identity, how difficult does it become for us to establish a single, consistent identity for ourselves? I mean, I understand, the idea is I am who I am, and in the view, depending on who you ask in my circle of friends, I will be a different person. Okay. Like some people may be people that I work with, my family, that type of thing. So, in a digital world where my identity is determined in a certain extent by my Facebook or by Gmail or my YouTube and all of these things would be different kind of identities for me. Is a true digital identity now becoming something that only the rich can afford to have?
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Yeah. This is I think a very good question. There are a few different parts to that. The first is this question about identity? I think, therefore I am, Descartes’s view of identity at the end of the day, that's part of what makes us human is precisely is that characteristic. That my identity is only for me and me alone. Only I get to know who my identity is. Only I get to see everything. I can't show anyone else everything about who I am at some level that's not possible, right and it's not desirable either. Because at the end of the day, this essence of me is only possible because I have that private space. I have that perhaps sanctuary as Shoshana Zuboff might say. For being able to develop and decide who I am, that kind of moral decision making. I think that if people are really beholden to their Facebook pages or their social media profiles or their credit histories as being their defining characteristics, I think they lose that humanity, precisely because they lose that ability to have internal private space. That internal sanctuary and to be clear, it's not just an issue of the powerful people in the world being able to aggregate data and analyze data more than average persons. It's simply the issue of average persons having all of their actions be exposed in this way. I think that this is something that we haven't really come to grips with yet as a society, but is essential to humanity. If we are transforming humans into programmable entities, then I think that the idea that of mid-20th century science fiction that humans and computers would become more alike is true, not so much because computers would become more like humans. But because humans would become more like computers and effectively are subject to the control of whoever happens to be in charge and able to manipulate their activities. That's something that we've seen through some of the mechanisms that we've just discussed. This question of whether identity in this kind of sanctuary sense is something that can only truly be available to the wealthy. I think that's absolutely true. I think that there is an interesting anecdote that Mark Zuckerberg himself is surrounded by empty lots. I understand his house is actually surrounded by a number of lots that he has actually bought for the purpose of isolating his residence from others. That's just one example and perhaps not the best of them. But what's important about it is this idea that wealthy people will pay for privacy. They will pay for this ability to sit in first class on an airplane. They will pay for this ability to not need to have their transactions recorded. They will pay for other people to do their everyday tasks on their behalf. They'll do this precisely because they value this sanctuary as they ought to. The idea that the rest of us will need to submit our histories to analysis simply because we don't have the means to do so is I think is a really important social issue of the century.
Mike: Right, and so now we're starting to dig into something that I find very fascinating. So, Dr. Geoffrey Goodell, let's pause at this. So, I have a theory about digital identity to me, the concept of digital identity, and more importantly, if we extend digital identity into the realm of self-sovereign digital identity, okay. So, a true digital identity that I own or control, because, you know, for me, if you look at this idea of identity and kind of the concept that we started with way back where we're walking down the street, asking people what identity is. Okay. So, you know, most people in their heads are looking at things, like I said, driver's licenses, bank accounts, passports, okay. Those are all issued by somebody else. They are, you know, valid identity kind of documents. They are things that our societies have set up to be valid representations of our identity. But to me, the primary difference of the digital realm and a digital identity is that it precisely does not require an issuer to a certain extent, right? Because if I want to define digital identity as something, I define digital identity as the full extent of my digital interactions online. Okay. So, if I was to say, who's Mike Charlotte online, I would, theoretically in an ideal world, be able to point to every email I've ever sent. Every search I've ever done any documents I've ever created, all of this type of stuff, this digital thing, because they're related to me. Or at least they, I created them and then if I could provide a link to say, you know, these documents are for sure mine and these search results are sure mine. Then my digital identity is truly something that I create just by virtue of being online, right. Somebody who's never been online would not have a digital identity to a certain extent. So, are we not now entering this realm where potentially through the concept of a true self sovereign identity, we could offer everybody the ability to have a digital identity and now empower them to make decisions on their own?
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Yeah. So, this interesting question about self-sovereign identity and issuers. So, first of all, I'd like to say that that issuer of identity documents are generally not complete. I mean, an interesting property of these identity documents, you mentioned passports and driver's licenses and such is that they are not necessarily complete pictures of who we are. They are used in a limited context. My national insurance number is different from my taxpayer ID. My taxpayer ID is different from my phone number or my street address. All of these kinds of identifiers are really just the glue that brings together these different attributes. Importantly, the value of me being able to be autonomous is related to my ability to unlink these different attributes and transactions from each other and bringing everything together under one identifier or linking all the transactions together by chaining them somehow, is precisely what undermines that ability that I might have to keep these activities unlinked. So, it's important that if I want to prove these different characteristics or attributes are mine, that only I can do it, if someone else can do it, then that someone else has power over me. I think that that property is really the salient one here. The idea of being able to unlink have multiple identities, or have as many identities as we want, or being able to link together different attributes or aspects of our history as we want to. That's the property that we want. Now, how is this useful in the context of vouching for someone else? Well, I think when we think about issuers, we're really thinking about someone who's vouching for us. In general, there are certain contexts in life in which we want someone else to vouch for us and that's not bad. The issue is I think the issue really arises when we want that same someone or someone who has access to the same identifier to be able to vouch for us in so many different contexts that they know everything about us. That they know more about us than we know about ourselves, that's where the problem arises. So, the issue of individual autonomy is not necessarily one of who the issuer of the identity is, whether it's self-sovereign or not. The issue is really about whether an individual can keep these different identities, meaning these different sets of attributes or transactions entirely separate from each other. The ability for me to use a system for which I cannot prove a link between two attribute is a really important property, because if I can prove something, then it can be forcibly discovered. So, if I can prove that my passport and my mobile phone number were linked to each other, because one entity says that they're linked. Then that means that everyone in the future is effectively going to be able to ask me for proof of that link. Once we're in that situation, then that means that my mobile phone number is just as dangerous as my passport number, because it's linked to this number in a way that allows my everyday activities be bound to anything that someone is wanting to prove about me. That's a real risk that I think we're we haven't fully explored.
Mike: Wow. What's the solution, you know, I mean, if you were to be able to create the ideal digital identity solution, what would it look like?
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Well, I think that it would have the characteristic first and foremost that every user of the system would be able to create as many unlinked identities as he or she wants. That's the salient, number one, most essential property of this.
Mike: That's just kind of a natural thing, right? Dr. Geoffrey Goodell, like that's, what you're talking about there is this idea that different people and different entities view you differently.
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Exactly. So, and that's not to say that we shouldn't have relationships. Because I think that relationships are predicated upon building up a history with some other party, whether it's an individual or a company or a government. These relationships are limited in scope and they are not everything that we are, and we can have relationships in one context, but that are not linked to relationships in another context. I can have a taxpayer ID that I use to pay my taxes that is completely unlinked from a social media ID that I might use. That's precisely the way it should be, because if we link them then that means that the power of aggregating and combining these transactions and attributes is basically not in my control anymore. So, I think that we would have systems that would allow us to use a different identifier for every relationship we have. We might even imagine having multiple relationships with the same other person or other party that's entirely possible. I mean there are people that I might know on the internet and also know in real life and have a relationship with the same person but actually in two different contexts. Such that these are really two different relationships. That other person might not even know that it's the same person and that's the way it should be. I think that identity system that really empowers us would respect that degree of freedom that we have in forging new identities for ourselves anytime and linking together attributes only as we choose. We can imagine that if the government wants us to present some kind of information when we're going to cross a border or apply for a security clearance then it's up to us to prove whatever it is that the government wants us to prove. But it's not intrinsically a property of this system that everything would be discoverable simply by virtue of us having used the system. Does that make sense?
Mike: It totally does. I guess, like my final question, let's say, is there a way to have a digital identity for any of us okay. Like a true digital identity that we can use in this in the internet and the digital realm of metadata tracking and all this. Is there an acceptable solution that is not say self-sovereign, right? Because, to me the issues that you're talking about, most of them are related to us binding ourselves to an entity, right? So, whether it's my bank may use one digital format, my government may use another digital format, you know, this type of thing, and we end up getting bound to these. So, is there any way that we can kind of have this true portable, multiple persona identity in a non-self-sovereign manner? Like, I have to be the one that creates my identity. Right. I mean, truly if I am going to be represented by multiple personas in different scenarios. The only way I can see to do it is if I'm the one that kind of issues a certain level of identity to somebody else, you know. Like I kind of have my own little identity document and I give it to you Dr. Geoffrey Goodell and it says that I am this person, and I give Chris a different one and I give Henry a different one. Right. Whereas if I need to go through somebody else to issue those to Henry, Chris, and you, it's now not me in multiple personas, you know what I mean?
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Yeah, I do. So, I think that there are two questions here. One is the question about sort of a general purpose, what a general-purpose ability to establish relationships and how I'm going to refer to myself in the context of these relationships needs to be. I agree with you that establishing relationships with a new person would require implicitly our ability to have what you're referring to as self-sovereignty. Meaning that I should be able to have a mechanism for creating my own identifier that I know is not linked to any other identifier unless I want it to be and then using that and saying, you can reach me of this identifier. So, if you want to be reachable by something you need that something to be self-sovereign. We see this with these kinds of internet protocols that allow us to be contactable anonymously, but yet in a way that we've revealed a particular way in which we can be contacted. So, we have instructions for how me effectively that don't reveal anything about who I am. So, at that level, I think we do need something that is, as you say, self-sovereign. But honestly, I think that much of the debate about self-sovereignty is perhaps not framing the problem in the right way. Because self sovereignty is really about the issuance of an identifier and determining what the identifier is and who gets to determine what binds to what and I think that this is important, but really identifiers are about relationships. If I'm going to start a new relationship with some entity and at some level, I'm only revealing information to this entity that isn't going to be linked, then I don't necessarily even care that the identifier has been created by that identity. Right. I mean, if the government assigns me a taxpayer ID for the purpose of paying taxes, and then I go use that ID number to pay my taxes, and I give it to no one else ever, then there is nothing wrong with that ID. There is nothing wrong with that identifier. That's just an identifier for the relationship of me with the tax authority. Right, and as long as I don't ever give this identifier to anybody else it's just between me and the tax authority. So, I don't have a problem with that identifier, even though it's not self-sovereign. On the other hand, I could imagine having a self-sovereign identifier that I've created myself and everything that the world of verifiers is demanding that I prove some linkage between this particular self-sovereign identifier that I've created for myself and some other authorities’ signature or some other authorities vouching for this for this identifier. It doesn't matter that my identifier is self-sovereign. If everyone is asking for proof signed by the motor vehicle authority, for example, that this is Jeff's driver's license number, for example that is actually a possible formula for undermining a self-sovereign identity system. Simply by having everyone ask for proof that this identifier that I'm using is one of which I only have one. This is one of the greatest fears that I have about some of the anonymous credential systems such as the Lisia signature scheme proposed in 2001 and related schemes that have been taken up recently by a number of identity organizations who are claiming to deliver a self-sovereign identity solution. The issuance in many of those solutions is self-sovereign. But the expectation is that because I can prove that I have only one practical identity that everyone will basically ask me to prove that this is the only one that I've got. If that's the case, then the fact that the issuance of that identifier was self-sovereign is insufficient. For me to have the ability to have multiple un-linkable identities. So in that sense, self-sovereignty is neither necessary nor sufficient property of identifiers really. It's something that we need to be really careful about. Self-sovereignty, I think is really important in the context of me being able to say, this is how you can reach me without revealing anything else about me. I agree with you that we need that ability, but we need something more than that as well. That's and I think the architectures that we build need to respect that, right.
Henry: Wow, that's fascinating. Dr. Goodell and we certainly covered an awful lot more than I expected, and I have a feeling that this is something that we're going to have to revisit in the future. There's just so many tentacles and, sort of dimensions to go and explore. Thank you very much, Dr. Geoffrey Goodell. Mike and Chris that was wonderful.
Mike: Thank you, Henry. Thank you, Dr. Goodell. It was a great chat.
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Chris. It was a pleasure to be here and thanks again.