The troubled history of identification.

Why Nuggets represents a new beginning for online ID.

There is identity, and there is identification. Your name. Your signature. Your fingerprints. These things can’t be divorced from who you are. We all have these essential elements of our identity — notwithstanding a few figures in entertainment like the late Prince. They are as inseparable from our experience as the relationship between the Mona Lisa and her smile.

Online identification, however, is another thing entirely — and it’s core to the problem Nuggets solves.

The problem with online IDs

It’s an age-old problem. It’s odd, if you think about it, to consider these things — your fingerprint, your face — in isolation from you, the person. In the service of business, social, and culture, we break down our identities into unique elements. We create IDs.

There are many forms of identification, and the history of some of these forms begins in the earliest days of civilization. The science of fingerprinting, to give one example, traces back to the 3rd century BCE when Chinese authorities used handprints to investigate burglaries.

There are also pockets of innovation in each of these forms — technologies, really — of identification. A layer of skin — the Malpighi layer — is named after the eponymous 17th-century Italian scientist. His efforts to define the loops, ridges, spirals, and whorls that make up our very own fingerprints, each one as unique as a snowflake, furthered forensic science more in ten years than the previous ten thousand.

That inconvenient truth over your head — getting hacked

In the last thirty years, digitalization has truly transformed how we live, how businesses operate, and how societies function. But there has always been a fundamental flaw in how the benefits of the digital world are accessed — and it starts with identification.

Think of any website or app that houses your unique, personal history of interaction. Nowadays, if you’re like most, the list is probably pretty long. Bank accounts. News apps. Shopping sites. CandyCrush. If you’re online — and, especially, if you’re on your smartphone much — you use digital IDs all day long.

The problem is online IDs aren’t safe.

They’ve never been safe. And they’re not safe for two primary reasons:

People often use exceptionally easy-to-hack passwords. (Doh! The most popular password in 2017 was 1234567.)

People are not very good at minimizing breaches; in fact, hackers are surprisingly successful — almost a third of all phishing messages were opened.*

These are existential matters. The threat of identity theft (and worse) hangs over each one of us. Some numbers:

In 2017, hackers stole 143 million customer records from Equifax.

The Yahoo breach affected three billion customers.

More than nine billion (!) records have been lost, stolen, or compromised since 2013.

More than 1.9 billion records were compromised in the first half of 2017 alone.

See all the latest data breaches.

Sometimes it seems like the trouble with online IDs is we have them. But we do have them. We just need to make them work better for us.

Your biometrics are the key

The through line here is technology. From Marcello Magphi to Satoshi Nakamoto, innovators have looked to solve our most fundamental problems by building on old technologies.

In this digital age, blockchain and its related technologies are the new catalysts. As we discussed in our blog about the opportunity for Nuggets, the e-commerce market is USD 4 trillion. In this market, the application of the blockchain and biometrics — the solution that Nuggets will provide — will be the catalyst for a new model of e-commerce payments.

How? To put it simply, imagine this. The blockchain is your database. Your biometrics are the key.

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*Source: 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report. Verizon.