Re: Verifiable Credentials use case questions

Brian,

This is very much the issue we're discussing around the VC-HTTP
authorization protocol. You may want to join that group.

Holding people accountable for their use of NFTs or VCs is, unfortunately,
a human rights problem that can look like coerced consent. Here's how
Philip Sheldrake explains it:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/lists/arc/projectvrm/2021-09/msg00103.html

*4 Easy Steps to Dystopia*
>
>
>    1. Recognise that legal identity may be useful in a teeny-tiny
>    fraction of contexts
>    2. Enable full KYC for legal identity irrespective of context
>    3. Put a big tick against all profiles that have completed KYC so
>    everyone without the tick thinks they’re missing some sort of social
>    validation
>    4. Extend the capability as Zoom-ID-as-a-service so you can pollute
>    more of the interwebs and societal structures in your unthinking grab for
>    dollars.
>
>
> There needs to be laws against this. We know "consumer choice” doesn’t cut
> it because self-interest and system-interest are not aligned.
>
> Philip.
>

- Adrian


On Mon, Sep 27, 2021 at 10:23 AM Brian <brianmartinez78@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Thanks for your time and the provided replies.
>
> Following the message from Eric above, we would like to understand in a
> more technical or detailed way, the transfer capability that appears in the
> aforementioned standard. Although a specification is not defined there, we
> guessed that "transfer" could potentially mean that person A could
> send/move a VC from his wallet to person B, making B the new owner of that
> VC.
>
> If our guess is right, this would be a very powerful feature to be used in
> our use case as no need for a 3rd issuer would be required and an exchange
> of a VC peer-to-peer could be used. However, we might be wrong on how we
> think that works. Is there any documentation we could use to study how this
> transfer capability works?
>
> In contrast to NFT, VCs are linked with an issuer and a subject (name and
> surname) which makes it easier when verifying the owner (as a human being)
> of a unique item.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Best regards,
> Brian
>
> El lun, 27 sept 2021 a las 14:31, Adrian Gropper (<agropper@healthurl.com>)
> escribió:
>
>> 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
>>>
>>>