2023 March 3
View All WritingWeb3 allows you to have direct ownership over your digital identity.
The world we live in today is two-fold, comprising both the real world and the virtual world. The real world is where we live and breathe, it is constrained by the laws of physics and is made up of molecules and atoms. Alternatively, the virtual world is where an increasing amount of our time resides, and it is constrained only by our computational power, imagination, and will; the virtual world is made up of bits.
In both worlds we represent ourselves through our identity. As defined by Oxford Languages, your identity, “is the fact of being who or what you or thing is.” Between the real and virtual worlds our identities slightly differ, and I highlight this idea below:
Identity is a complex topic, and these definitions are an oversimplification, but for the purpose of this article they help you understand the difference between your identity in the real and virtual worlds. One key idea to understand the difference between your physical and digital identity is on the idea of how it is contained. In the real world our identities are constrained by our bodies, yet this is not the case with our identities in the virtual world. In the virtual world, our identities are scatted all throughout the internet, I explain this below.
Our digital identities are currently scattered throughout the internet, encompassing various aspects of our lives. We have social identities on platforms like Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, and Snapchat. Our professional identities are established on platforms like LinkedIn, Slack, and Salesforce, while our creative identities are expressed on platforms like YouTube, Etsy, and Medium. Additionally, our financial identities are tied to platforms like Robinhood, Fidelity, and Coinbase. Despite the diversity of platforms, we do not own any part of our identity that resides on the internet, which presents a significant problem. If we were to apply this concept to the real world, it would mean that Instagram owns our sight, LinkedIn controls who we can network with, YouTube dictates our creative expression, and Fidelity governs our financial transactions. These ideas are inherently absurd, and the more we contemplate them, the more we realize the importance of taking ownership of our digital identity.
As we increasingly spend more of our lives in the virtual world than in the real world, it becomes crucial to ensure that we have the same control and rights over our identity. This is the purpose of Web3, to grant individual direct ownership over their digital identity. By allowing individuals to take control over their identity, Web3 aims to create a more secure and decentralized internet that is more conducive to trust, privacy, and autonomy.