Replacing Traditional Identification Cards With NFTs

Some Background Info 👀:

Just like every other fad or craze, NFTs are becoming a part of a huge fad that is taking over the world. An example of this is The Bored Ape Yacht Club, which sells NFT images of bored monkeys, and the NFTs grant you access to the club. Though the idea of buying monkey jpegs sounds weird at first, NFTs might actually have a greater use.

The idea is that NFTs can replace traditional identification cards such as driving licenses and passports, allowing for identity theft as well as fake identification cards becoming nearly non-existent. Another advantage to using NFTs is not having to carry as much identification around. This means that you won’t have to carry around, a drivers license + a passport for every country you are a citizen of, instead all you would need is your phone.

So what exactly is an NFT? 🤨

The word “NFT” stands for Non Fungible Token. Non fungible means that each token is unique, and it has no set value to it. For example, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, and Solana all have a set value to them, which is whatever the price of the currency is at the time (1 BTC is at 50984.50 USD as of right now). An NFT is similar to art, in that the value that it is based on its sentiment. Your painting may be valued at 1 million dollars to someone, but it also may seem like garbage to another. The same logic applies to NFTs.

So how exactly is it going to work? 🤔

Now “art” wont be used for government identification and passports anytime soon. So how exactly will we pull this off? Well, we would use something called a token URI (Said “you”,”are” “eye”). This sounds complicated, but it basically a sequence of characters, which when de-encrypted, can be an image, video file, etc. In this case, a token URI is a JSON file that contains the NFT metadata, which is stored on-chain. The JSON looks something like this:

The description is the description of the NFT (for example in a passport it may say something on the lines of “The Canadian Passport of Megh Mistry (Valid 2016–2021)”. The name is the name of the NFT, in our case it would be something like “Megh Mistry Passport”. The image is the link to the image, it can be stored somewhere like google drive, or even on a decentralized storage similar to IPFS. If we want the image to stay permanent and never disappear we can convert the image into its own URI and put that into the JSON. All of this is not as important to us right now as the attributes. These can contain the passport number, country visas, expiration date, etc. At airports or any other place that requires identification, the readers can only read the attributes that they need (for example passport number and visas), and not have to go through all of the persons information.

Problems that Need To Be Solved and Possible Errors 👾

As Marian Wright Edelman has said: “In every seed of good there is always a piece of bad”. In our case there area lot of improvements to be made, and lots of places where this could go wrong. Lets see what we can do about them.

So the first possible problem that has arose in you head if you know a thing or two about blockchain is “How will this prevent identity theft? Since the blockchain is basically a public ledger that everyone can see and add to but not edit or delete. Won’t this just make a bunch of fake NFTs arise that are like fake passports?”. Well, in order to solve this problem, we would need something called a “private blockchain”, which the government only has access to. A private blockchain allows the government to only allow some people to view the blockchain, and only some others to add to the blockchain. So the only people that could add to the blockchain would be the government, but every citizen of the country would have access to view the blockchain, and would have wallets in the blockchain. We would need to create a blockchain system where some wallets would have certain permissions, while others wouldn’t.

The second problem is attached to the first. If only some people are allowed to add to the blockchain, that doesn't mean the system is truly non-trust-based and decentralized. We can solve this by only allowing the government to add identification to the blockchain in order to update and edit the blockchain or its software, they would host a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) like system where the citizens can vote for the changes.

Final Words

Currently, we have the needed infrastructure and capacity to switch identification to a blockchain. This shows we are not far away from world where identification is decentralized, and doesn't require you to give more information than needed.