 Initiatives seeking to secure people's identity and personal information using the blockchain. These will allow users to only reveal an individual piece of information to different providers. Will that solve anything? Won't banks still require people to provide all the same information to open a checking account? Are there any digital ID solutions using blockchain, which someone living in a village without a passport or utility bill can use to fulfill... know your customer or identity requirements? What are your thoughts on the use of blockchain for peer-to-peer energy trading, such as microgrids? Let's take the first two and address them. Digital identity is a very hot topic in the blockchain space. I am extremely skeptical that you can solve problems of digital identity simply by throwing magic blockchain at it. The problem here is not the identity itself, it is the fact that centralized institutions that are regulated... require identity to do things that don't really need identity to do. We are using identity as a way to control fraud and risk in ways that don't actually control fraud and risk. The fact that you have ID doesn't mean that you are trustworthy or that your behavior is good. The fact that you behaved well in the past doesn't mean that you will behave well in the future. Most of the world's worst criminals were completely innocent before they committed their first crimes. All of the historical information that we could have had on heinous criminals would show us that they were great people up... until the point that they were no longer great people, people change. Bad people have ID, you don't have to be good to get ID. ID doesn't give you goodness. The controllers and purveyors of ID, state governments, banks, etc., don't really have great insight into whether people are good or bad. We have associated in our society this idea that if you are identified, then you are good. Or if you are identified, then if you are not good, we can chase you down and impose punishments on you. Both of those have resulted in excluding several billion people from the financial system, because they don't have ID, including several hundreds of thousands of criminals into the banking system that do have ID and banking licenses, but are in fact criminals. If you create a system like that, it ends up that those who can give ID become criminals because of corruption, and eventually those who have control over other people's ID become the biggest criminals of them all. Do we need ID to transact? For thousands of years, we have transacted with cash without any form of identification. The original peer-to-peer cash lasted thousands of years and didn't require any ID to transact. In fact, the idea that everybody needs to be identified before they transact is a relatively recent idea. It's a toxic idea, a fascist idea, and it's resulted in poverty and economic exclusion for billions of people. It hasn't actually reduced fraud or allowed governments to stop crime and terrorism and all of the other things. It just means that the only people who can do massive crimes against millions of people are those who are funded and supported by governments. That's all it is. Blockchain ID is very skeptical. I don't think it's necessary for most things. I don't think it helps people. I don't think it solves crime or reduces crime in any meaningful way. I think the side-effect and the massive poverty the requiring ID creates is much, much bigger than the small benefit you might have in fraud prevention in some areas. Massive human suffering for very, very little results. Every time you have this conversation with anyone in government who is a fan of IDs, they will tell you that if only we had more control over people, then finally, with the next law that gets passed and the next layer of controls and more power, crime will finally be eradicated. It's always just a bit more power, just a bit more ID, just a bit more control, biometrics, iris scans, etc. If you believe that, that way lies fascism. I don't want to do blockchain ID. I want to do anonymous currency. I think transacting with peer-to-peer anonymous currency is better. For many of the services we have today, the world would be a better place if we recognized that it's much better to give people the freedom to transact, the freedom to interact with each other without having to use intermediaries like banks and regulated intermediaries that impose these controls and policies, which gives them enormous power for very little benefit for humanity. And on that political rant, I think we're done.