How Midnight Network Could Make Private Digital Identity Possible on Blockchain

Majority of the population does not consider the repercussions of disclosing their ID on the internet. You post a passport, type in your date of birth, verify your address, and in no time, a site has all that it wants to know about you. Not only what it requested, but everything that was attached to that document. The query that no one ever presented is: how come that verifying something about yourself involves giving in the first place your whole identity? It is among the unresolved issues of digital infrastructure that are old. Confirmation has never been a business - you pay with information to have a ticket. Banks, applications, governments, exchanges, and all of them are resting on the heaps of personal data since there was never a more effective method to establish trust. And in the long run, such data is a liability. It gets leaked or sold or used wrongly or stored permanently on servers that you will never access. The system did not have protection in place to protect you. It was designed to work. @MidnightNetwork is structured based on an alternate assumption. It was built around a fundamental architecture with zero-knowledge proof technology, which implies that it is technically feasible to demonstrate that something is true without demonstrating what the information was. You do not have to show your birthday since you can confirm that you are over 18. You do not have to reveal your address to prove that you are a resident of a country. It is the evidence that goes; the information does not. That is the essential change that Midnight is attempting to bring to blockchain infrastructure. What is even more than a fascinating cryptographic experiment, is the fact that Midnight is meant to be used in the real-world - not merely in the financial privacy, but identity itself. The transparency of data is considered as an attribute in the majority of blockchain systems. By default everything becomes visible. That is fine with the books of account, but is no laughing matter when you begin to require blockchains to deal with the sort of sensitive information real world institutions are handling on a daily basis. The default is altered by the shielded computation model of midnight. Delicate information remains confidential. It is only what should be shared which is shared. The node in the middle of this network is $NIGHT , and it is what drives the transaction and fee layer of Midnight ecosystem. However, the value is more than payment and is more so what the infrastructure makes possible. Midnight developers are able to develop identity applications in which users can carry their own credentials, demonstrate what they should demonstrate and revoke access any time. No common store of your KYC records. No third party with your verification history. The user turns out to be the owner of his/her own identity information. This is more important today than ever before. Identity fraud is growing. Data breaches are routine. In virtually all major markets, regulatory pressure on the data privacy is tightening. The conventional system of collect, store and verify is beginning to give way to its own weight. The digital economy is in need of a mechanism of building trust without exposing additional vulnerabilities each time a person is required to authenticate themselves. Midnight is not even promising to overturn every identity system in just one night. And yet it is creating something that might quietly form the basis that such systems are based upon. A place where being able to prove who you are does not imply giving it up. That is not a minor concept - this is one of the most critical infrastructure issues to resolve yet, and Midnight is among the very few projects which actually address it at the protocol level. #night