Re: Verifiable Credentials use case questions

Hi Leah,

I discuss some of this in
https://cyber.harvard.edu/lists/arc/projectvrm/2021-09/msg00101.html

Online identity matching equivalent to in-person biometric matching is a
difficult problem tied to reputation. NFTs and VCs are not, in themselves,
a solution to the extent that they do not introduce live human matching
like a notary into the transaction.

- Adrian

On Mon, Sep 27, 2021 at 4:55 AM Leah Houston, MD <leah@hpec.io> wrote:

>
> Hi there, not sure if you got any valuable responses to this question, and
> I might not be the best person to answer, i’m working on a credentialing
> and identity solution for doctors… And whenever people start talking about
> NFT’s I say… “Well yeah… A doctors credential is an NFNTT - Nonfungible and
> nontransferable token:)”
>
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 27, 2021 at 4:36 AM Eric <e.garcia.ribera@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I would like to quickly explain the use case we are working on at the
>> moment and ask a question we'll need to solve in order to start pushing the
>> use case forward. Appreciate your time in advance.
>>
>> Our main goal was to use NFTs as a proof of ownership for physical
>> objects. The real world object would be linked to NFTs, and the owners of
>> those could sell or buy other NFTs in demand. Once we started developing
>> the idea and a PoC, we quickly identified an issue with NFTs that could
>> stop our progress. The issue was that the owner of a physical object
>> (linked to an NFT) had no straightforward way of proving him/herself as the
>> real owner.
>> Imagine the scenario where person A just wants to prove person B is the
>> owner of an NFT. Since the NFT owner is identified by an address, the owner
>> would need to prove ownership by opening the wallet and show that the NFT
>> owner's address it's him/hers. Doing this in the real world when you are in
>> front of the verifier (person that wants to check you own a specific NFT)
>> can be done by showing your wallet owns that address. However, doing this
>> online, doesn't seem to be straightforward. Maybe I'm mistaken and there is
>> an easy way of proving ownership. If this exists, I would really appreciate
>> an explanation on that since I'm not aware of any.
>>
>> At this point, we discovered DIDs and Verifiable Credentials. When we
>> read the standards we came to the conclusion that VCs could be used as
>> NFTs, since these provide similar features (a DID could identify the
>> creator of an object, and another DID, signed by the creator, could
>> identify the created object. Later on, the creator could issue a VC to the
>> first buyer, giving the buyer the ownership of the DID of the object). More
>> importantly, we discovered that with VC, an owner of it can show very
>> easily that he/she is actually the owner of it, making life easier for our
>> use case. However, we had a question regarding this:
>>
>> - In the standard, we can see the possibility of transferring VCs. Based
>> on the diagram of the standard (Figure 10 in
>> https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/), it looks like the holder of a VC
>> can transfer it to another holder without involving the issuer. Would this
>> be possible somehow? This is crucial for our use case, since we want to
>> decentralise as much as possible our solution. We wouldn't like any 3rd
>> party or intermediary stopping the holder of a VC from selling it to
>> another holder. Remember at this point that we see VCs as NFTs (maybe our
>> assumption is wrong), that's why we would like to decentralise this.
>>
>> If transferring a VC from holder A to holder B is not possible without
>> involving the issuer, do you think this could be done with a Smart
>> Contract? I know this may not be the best forum to ask this, but we somehow
>> visualise the idea of using a smart contract as the issuer of DIDs so that
>> everybody could trust the issuer at any point.
>>
>> Thank you very much in advance. I would really appreciate your input on
>> this :)
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Eric
>>
> --
> Leah Houston M.D.
> President and Founding Partner
> www.hpec.io
> Humanitarian Physicians Empowerment Community
> Humanitarian Physicians Empowerment Coin
>
>