Re: Use case

This scenario seems more like it could be implemented with proofs. You are proving you are not something or do not belong to a particular group like terrorists. This is similar to how no fly lists work. I could see the reason for a credential that you didn’t go to MIT but who would issue it and you would have to get many of these types of credentials. So I think sounds like a solution for proofs. I can think of various proof types: exact match like a name, predicates like income or age greater than or less than, and set memberships like not revoked, board certified, white list black list.

________________________________
From: Moses Ma <moses.ma@futurelabconsulting.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 6, 2018 10:02:43 AM
To: Credentials Community Group
Subject: Use case

I have an additional use case, which is a sort of funny and entertaining, but may reveal a deeper utility.

I have an “evil twin”, a fellow who shares my name - Moses H. Ma, whereas I’m Moses T. Ma. He is roughly my age and even looks a bit like me. The difference is that he went to MIT and I went to Caltech. Also, this Moses plays bridge and I don’t, and he was caught cheating on video at an international bridge tournament. I found out in senior year of college, when friends started ribbing me about playing bridge... I asked a friend, “Why the hell are people asking about playing bridge?” And he showed me a newspaper where this was the headline story, including a grainy video image of a guy that sort of looked like me, and you know... us Chinese guys, we all look alike to white people, haha.

Anyway, our name may seem rare, but because there are only 100 Chinese surnames (one name for China is “land of a hundred surnames”), there are actually lots of Moses Ma’s. Joan Rivers used to joke about the Queen of England, “She has more chins than the Hong Kong phone book.”

Once, a friend of mine heard my name being paged at the airport, and he went to the courtesy phone to say hi, and ran into the other Moses. Later, they were on the same flight, and he reported that he was one of the most foul-mouthed, venomous and bitter men he’d ever seen. He yelled on the phone at a subordinate for over an hour on an overseas flight, ruining the flight for everyone in the cabin. I then explained how this one negative event soured his life, and he replied “I’m so glad I got the good one for a friend.”

Anyway, all my life, rumors about my evil twin have silently followed me. One time, this fellow I was doing a deal with suddenly got cold feet. He was associated with MIT, so I asked, “Is it the bridge thing?” When I explained about my evil twin, he was soooooo apologetic about participating in gossip and closed the deal immediately. I joked that it was God’s experiment: you put two equivalent Moses Ma’s into MIT and Caltech, and what happens... thus, scientific proof that Caltech is better than MIT.

So here’s the use case: I’d like a DID that includes a verifiable claim that I did NOT go to MIT, do not play bridge, and am different from a guy with the same name that cheated at an international tournament and was exposed on video.

However, realistically, we need to start with simpler use cases. But maybe this lifelong annoyance can lead to some thing useful. Perhaps including an indicator that the user’s identity has been stolen and offering special functionality for removing the negative impact of the identity thieves or data errors is an interesting possibility to consider for resilient decentralized identity.

Moses