Digital Identity - Onramp to the Info Superhighway - Russell Castagnaro

up next we have uh a special guest of course we're taking you here from denver virtually and we've got russell castanero of uh the colorado governor's office here to talk to us a little bit about uh digital identity as well this guy is uh has been endeavoring into space for some time um and is going to come to us with some well pretty fascinating disclosures today too russell i'll let you take it from here uh thanks a lot david i appreciate it and boy to follow two talks like that that was a pretty awesome let me oh i think i forgot to share my screen that always helps first doesn't it uh let me do that here okay so now we should be all good to go uh i do want to say um that um my my uh my talk should be a little more fun and um although there's some good stuff really the the gist of it is i want everyone to understand who's watching this how important digital identity is for enabling uh what is to come and how we're at the beginning of this amazing thing and it's all comes down to identity so um so i'm talking about how digital identity is the on-ramp to the new information super highway and i think i should as a disclaimer point out that um there are a lot of anachronistic uh concepts in this presentation it's all intentional and if nothing else you'll get this with a history lesson that might help you if you're somehow trapped in the world of ready player one but uh information superhighway and infobond it's what we used to call back in the 90s most notably al gore i used to call the internet and it's a nice metaphor so i'm going to use it to a kind of an embarrassing extent today i also want to point out that most of my slides on the upper left hand corner have a qr code so if you are a colorado id holder or driver's license holder and you have mike colorado you can scan that and see how our digital app digital sharing works already if you don't have it yet but you do have one of those ids it takes about 90 seconds to sign up so i talk a lot so you won't miss that much if you wanted to try it so um before the internet this is what getting online looked like this was a dial up connection to a bulletin board system or bbs and they had these menu driven things that were all over telnet and the way that we got into the internet or to online not really the internet yet was uh was these kinds of uh these modems uh that were just crazy and i can tell you this firsthand because at my high school we had an hp 9000 and you could check out a suitcase sized modem and terminal so you could bring it home and dial it in of course i discovered that you could use the same hardware to call into the other bbs's and even the local credit union or bank because they pretty typically and conveniently left the phone number username and password on the terminals when my mom would go to the bank so i would just walk over and got really good at memorizing those things and i could dial in and do all sorts of fun stuff um and i don't you know now i'd go to jail for that but back then it was just good clean fun uh kind of like playing with knives in australia in the first crocodile dundee movie that's another anachronism for you guys um there were some bigger systems like the source and compuserve that gave a more curated service and then something really weird happened right hopefully you can hear this imagine that on the um and the dj chill section but anyway it was this excruciating process to connect to the internet because of these uh phone lines that we had to deal with and um but of course aol they gave you a free five and a quarter quarter inch floppy it was delivered to your door uh it was a curated email had a cool movie that was made about it so people started using it like crazy um and uh and that was great that really got us started now something that uh andreas antonopoulos likes to remind us is that new infrastructure most often supports old models as well as new ones so in this uh in this picture you see a horse and buggy uh operating on a highway so roads are actually better uh you know paved roads are actually better for horses and buggies they can travel more quickly and stuff so um so we use these 300 600 1200 baud modems on what was then the beginnings of the internet and it supported us just fine as it grew and we grew um so we even though we're using the most optimal way to get in which back then was probably like a t1 uh we could still do it but we have come a long way baby and so gigabit into ethernet or gigabit internet is uh is a reality in in some places in fact in the united states chattanooga tennessee my hometown was the first gig city where the gas utility installed fiber and gave everybody gigabit internet um of course that was after i left but uh frustrating this is not ubiquitous we're getting there most places have between one meg and and 10 megabit uh internet access which is not you know which is a whole lot better than it used to be but not quite enough for us to do everything we want to do but there's no freaky dial tones necessary and as more of us are accessing the internet at faster and faster speeds um and applications grow and everything what was once impossible or seemed impossible in five years became a reality so we said goodbye to blockbuster to mci gaming arcades in malls toys r us borders bookstore flight flea markets and of course um the old standby long distance calling cards and um so i think you've seen from this example that's something that we all know right how important it is to get access to the infrastructure of the internet and this led to our whole economy you know the new economy based on the internet industry and business the key is that this applies to blockchain as well so if we back up a little bit and look at uh at things something like paper wallets um i think we can all agree that paper wallets are super cool and awesome for crypto they're kind of limited and another disclaimer here um you'll note that uh this is a public and private key and if you're smart little hackers like many of you are you'll already have tried to clear these wallets and have discovered a little a little bonus i sent in there for you so uh it'll be interesting to see who uh who did that um paper wallets don't travel well uh water isn't so good for them it's easy to steal you take a picture of it suddenly uh you've been thwarted uh so i i i wonder how many of you did that you can tell in the in the comments uh paper wallets did improve they got a lot better in fact with juan pay my company that i had i used to hand out free paper wallets just to get people up to date and let them know how to how to actually use them and um the the one thing out of all this though that continues to really be limiting us is identity right and i look back um back when i was in hawaii we were um evaluating doing a blockchain based land title system um i know it's kind of crazy right and uh the problem was is to implement that system everything needed to be what they call a type 2 document a type 2 document is one that's generated electronically but it needs to be called papered out like printed and signed and then scanned back in and the reason is is that they didn't have any way to authenticate someone's identity completely electronically right so it would have been um actually wasted effort to go through all this to do electronically from from the standpoint of the registrar's understand not from me i would have loved it uh but uh um but so it had to be signed and then recorded it was crazy and um and you know it should have told me a lesson at that point but i was so excited about the technology anyway that i didn't learn my lesson i got into the blockchain business after that uh with wampai um and the whole idea was you could do um you could do custody lists and and exchangeless payments um with uh with bitcoin at the time and i um tried to do that for a while and it's limited we can do a limited number of things but i realized that what we really are missing was identity and um and without identity there's only so much this technology will allow us to do um i think this is probably going to be a really familiar image to many of you uh the error message may not be but it all looks the same this is the uh coinbase um error that says they couldn't scan your image from your driver's license it's also the same page that they display if there's some other sort of problem when they onboard you uh you know exchanges crypto exchanges they spend a whole lot of money for kyc and ams that know your customer any money laundering compliance sometimes there's two to three weeks waiting when it's a really busy trading time i don't know what it is now uh but it must be crazy to get onboarded to like uphold and all these other ones um but it is excruciating and um and i can tell you that myself i still can't get a gdax account because i was a hawaii resident and and hawaii residents and crypto exchanges are like um oil and water for some reason anyway um i also remember signing up for an estonian digital id when that first came out i first became available i went online paid 100 bucks then got an email to eat i got an email from them requesting me to reply to the email with a picture of my passport and driver's license i lost that hundred dollars and i do not have a digital id because i did not send them my information via email so let me just say it right now digital identity is not your access card or your store or loyalty program in a phone based wallet i'm not talking about presenting a physical version of an id when i talk about a real digital id and i'm also not talking about pictures of an of the front and back of an id that's just dumb for purposes of really confirming identity so that's not it a lot of you may have be maybe familiar with this kind of a scheme where they ask you to hold up your credit card or driver's license or some other documents um next to your face scanning both you and the document they look at that to make sure that you are who you say you are there's loads and loads of websites that do that um interestingly this picture is not taken from one of those sites this picture is taken from a scam site one of many that are out there where you can download a template of any state or country's driver's license put your photo in so you can get through this kind of security all the time so um that physical document there is in the real world a a measure of security it's got security features when you take a picture of it and use that it becomes a weakness and in my colorado we experience this ourselves uh and uh you know it's very embarrassing to me i have to admit but when we first set this up in september 2019 we used to have this big all these steps to be able to on-ramp someone to have their digital identity we scan the front and the back of the driver's license and the snapshot of your face now the standard approach here is you compare the person's face to the picture on their driver's license and the information that's on there with the barcode well big surprise that's really really easy to fake and really really difficult to detect fraud and there's a lot of money that you can spend per transaction on getting that kind of security on there but it's always fallible uh so we learned a lot about um about how to do uh facial recognition and facial comparison with documents we removed that so that's no longer part of my colorado um because we much rather depend on the selfie than comparing that to the document that is actually stored at the dmv than going the other route and um you know i know i'm talking to a blockchain group of folks and and i i'm really happy and everybody really thinks we want to be at a place where sovereign identity is what's really acceptable i think we all do i mean i sir isaac's last talk was totally awesome about that but what we have to remember is people have to be comfortable with a digital id first before we can even broach the subject of sovereign identity being acceptable in a really big-scale way and that's really the the focus of what was the focus of my colorado and colorado digital id since we launched in october of 2019. so we spent the better part of a year socializing the concept of accepting digital id and this was in the in the real world right irl um this is for going up and buying liquor liquor store going into a cannabis dispensary talking to a police officer we had to make sure that agencies that merchants people law enforcement all knew it was okay to accept digital id um before it could broadly be accepted and so that took a whole lot of work so for a year you could pop out your my colorado app and show your real-time updated colorado digital id with all the cool security features but a digital id if you're looking at it with your eyes can be faked just like a physical id can be faked but people started getting it intellectually and we have over 500 businesses that are accepting it as their preferred method there's many more that are accepting it that haven't said it's their preferred and that includes a whole lot of cannabis dispensaries and liquor stores in november we added the electronic sharing of identity attributes uh and you have to grant those acts those attribute that sharing by the holder and so it got really interesting starting in november hi i'm officer elder broomfield police department reason i pulled you over is you're going too fast do you have your driver's license registration and insurance with you yeah do you um accept the digital id yes okay [Music] [Applause] [Music] basically what happened here was the police stopped um the driver she said oh i've got digital id can you accept that and he said yes and so she scanned the qr code from the police officer that opened up a dialogue to ask to share the information and you can see here that she could choose the information that she wanted to share or she could just not do it and give the give the regular id to it but this concept of having required information to share and then optional information to share is something that we built into my colorado so we could do that so let's uh let's look at the rest so so she goes ahead and confirms all this [Music] the interwebs are invoked and then the police officer goes back to his vehicle and um and he can see everything on his screen so um so what's important about this right is is that you know i realize i'm showing a video of digital id being shared to law enforcement in a super libertarian leading event right and it's a lot easier to do when i'm not in front of all of you so i i get that but here's the thing that you have to understand is that the the the ability to selectively share attributes can now be done electronically and directly with the entity that is requesting it and that's what digital id will allow it gives you this isn't really sovereign identity but it gives the user a lot more control over things and and it's true that we implemented this using what's called the mdl standard mod the mobile drivers license standard so we act as the verifying entity for all this information we're getting the request pulling it from the dmv and sending it to the to the police officer's client right so that's happening but once this sort of behavior becomes normalized of this electronic sharing of information there's zero doubt of anyone that blockchain tech is going to be the fastest safest easiest way to share the information and you know i like to explain to people if nothing else you can think of the blockchain as a secure content delivery network for private information for the ability to confirm that the information that you have is actually authentic um our approach is really that that sort of 56k modem equivalent of the information superhighway but all of you um as developers here you're the ones who are going to make the um make the difference and be able to deploy these new technologies um this is going to nearly eliminate our dependence on third parties um to facilitate information exchange uh and you know if you have to ask the question have you been pwned you sure as hell have your ass has been pwned many many times and this is because all these different companies are holding and sharing your data and act as intermediaries and dagger aggregators being able to hold your own identity share things and authenticate in an independent way without these third parties is what will enable us to take back information and to really lend a lot more security to take facebook and lexisnexis and google and linkedin and you name it out of the picture because there are better cheaper safer ways to get that information directly and a whole lot less fraud remember one of those sites i told you about this is a screen grab from one of those sites you can go and download an a a template from any of those uh any of those states that you want um credit card fraud and payment fraud costs us over 20 billion in the united states alone um as we add more and more to it adding an identity layer to that makes all the difference so let's get really quick into these applications for digital state because i think i'm pretty close to my time law enforcement is what you've already seen that use case where we're sharing information another one is proof of age right and and police i mean the the bouncers and uh and liquor stores they don't need to prove that they've checked it but if they do they can lower their insurance a lot so there's an incentive there for them digital consent is handled poorly across the board in many industries we can provide revocable digital consent where you can agree to participate in the program and then revoke that percent of that participation electronically try doing that with a paper waiver we'll actually be storing license information in my colorado in late spring um the next step will be independent verification of those licenses and credentials on the blockchain the same um you go to a business this is one of our bounties actually you can actually show your customers that you actually care about them and don't want them to have to productize themselves and get more accurate information when you use something like direct sharing with a digital identity like my colorado transcripts and credentials from higher ed or training that means no more fake harvard grads on linkedin i read that there are more harvard grads on linkedin than there have been harvard diplomas issued on the uh in the history of harvard cannabis dispensaries they have to actually prove that you're that you are that they've actually checked your id that means that they scan your pick your id and they put it up on google drive or dropbox somewhere lots of lots of horrible horrible things can happen with that we're going to give them a solution where they can do it and also exchanges insurance companies financial companies will be able to do real-time kyc at extremely low cost wow um messaging the last last thing i'll be all done is tsa everybody talks about wanting to be able to board a plane that is coming very soon so the in closing thank you very much go out there and build the next new economy and remember that digital identity plus blockchain equals a whole new world without disney wow russell that was a fantastic presentation i've got to tell you that aol loading screen brought i think many of us back as although i will say some of the commenters were a little bit uh afraid of handing over identity uh to the police officers that way one commenter uh quipped i should say i wonder if the police officer's identity was shared with that driver it's good to know that a cryptic crypto native uh person is helping uh steer the ship over there in colorado thanks so much for this presentation thank you