Identity
In the context of cryptocurrencies an identity is a key pair consisting of a private and a public key (see public key cryptography). The private key has to be kept secret while the public key is exposed to others. Therefore the public key is the official reference to an identity. The private key belongs to the public key via some mathematical correlation. As the private key can not be derived from the public key (except with immense computing power) the owner of a public key is only the person owning the private key. He can prove this to the public by a digital signature. This principle is used by any crypto-currency.
For ThankToken there are different types of such identities. These are described in the following sections. All except the first one have to be published to the identity directory.
For regular daily and private payments you can use any generated identity. By default you stay pseudonymous with such transactions. Therefore an identity not published on the identity directory is called pseudonymous identity. Like in other cryptocurrencies you can not tell which natural person is behind which identity. Of course if you buy something from a person you know or that knows you, this knowledge could be revealed and associated with the identity (public key). So you can only stay anonymous if you take according care.
A person identity is an identity of a natural person. Each participating natural person has exactly one unique person identity at a time. This is required to support universal income as described by the identification. The natural person is still not publically known. However, everybody can read the region of that person so this only applies if the participants in that region are not known or there are many of them. Further, the corresponding identity service office could identify the natural person. As you only use it to generate universal income and can disguise private payments this is not a problem.
A business identity is an identity of a company or organization for any kind of business. It has to have a name and homepage associated in the identity directory. The size of the company does not matter. It may be operated by a single person or employ hundreds of thousands staff. Like with current bank accounts a business may have many business identities. There are laws that specific business transactions have to be public such that transactions have to be made via official business identities. E.g. this always applies to community income. Any ThankTransaction transferring Thanks in form of a ThankToken from these sources directly to a pseudonymous identity is invalid by design and will immediately be rejected. This way anybody can observe business transactions from the public ledger and associate them with the according company. You can observe where the government is spending how much money and to some degree what the receiving companies are using it for.
No more black money!
There are several forms of identities for governmental purposes. These are described in the following sub-sections.
The identitiy service officers have to publish their identities used for identification accordingly. These identities are associated to their region and signed by the community government.
The community government identity exists per location and each has an identity published on the identity directory at a time. These identities receive community income.
This documentation is licensed under the Creative Commons License (Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International).
