(trace online accounts across various kinds of contiunity)
## Use Cases/Motivations
Why do we care about identity anyway?
- ability to control access to private data and over an account (ie need to identify myself, this is me, this is my account)
- ability to communicate with a person across platforms, ie 'send this message to X on whatever platform he is on' (ie need to find another person by their identity as a person)
- ability to track reputation and credibility of a user across platforms
- ability to identify things other than humans, ie accounts, corporations, organizations, documents
## Decentralized identity
- [DIDs or Decentralized Identifiers are a W3C standard](https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/)
Simple example: `did:example:123456789abcdefghi`
^^ scheme identifier
^^ did method
^^ method-specific identifier
## Pseudonymity
- reputation requires a long term handle of some sort
## Key management
## Key verification
## Key backup
## Reputation, Trust
## Social graph proof
- Handshake problem and collusion protection (see IRIS)
## Account recovery
## Privacy
## Links
[What are Decentralized Identifiers](https://www.evernym.com/blog/what-are-decentralized-identifiers-dids/)
