Tykn | A superior substitute to the conventional Identity Management System
It is difficult to admit that we do not know certain things sometimes and it is even more difficult to admit the level of frustration we face each time ignorance makes fun of us. If we can be so frustrated about our ignorance regarding the things around us, how bad would it be then if we are ignorant about the most important component of our inner beings? Our identities. Approximately 235 million of the people (children included) walking on this planet does not know where to call home or how to find it.
Imagine the trauma of living in a land where you know you are a total stranger; your skin colour, your tongue, your hair and many other things indicates that you’re not from there. However, deep inside you is a knowledge that something is missing and the question of “who am I?” is still unanswered. Maybe you’re reading this and don’t really understand what it means each time you hear someone use the term “lost identities”. This is because it is literally possible to lose one’s identity forever. There are individuals from all over the world that have been in this place before.
There are children snatched by the violence of war from the caring hands of their families just before they grew old enough to know their parents. A few days ago, I wrote about a Syrian seven-year-old who was taken from her home and everything she ever cared about. She has a memory because she was seven, she probably doesn’t have all the details at age seven, yet there are kids that have barely started crawling when the violence of war came knocking at their territories. Some of them in this process lost every means of identification forever. Imagine living in a world where you don’t even know your own name. I am not talking about amnesia; I’m talking about not knowing where you’re from, not because you’re sick but because somehow every means of accessing this information has been wiped out.
One of my best movies since the history of the movie industry is the famous “who am I?” by Jackie Chan. This movie expresses the misery of an adult with no identity and how he struggled just to get it back. That was amnesia as a result of some physical shock, but how would you handle a case that you can’t recover from because they never existed?
The problem
The only challenge leading to this ordeal is because the world to a great extent still depends on the conventional means of storing identity information. The flaws of our conventional identity management system weren’t obvious until recently; when wars and natural disasters shook the foundations of our nations leaving the majority of the citizens of those regions in great despair. Multi-million enterprises were sent back to the dust and priceless information was also lost. Some of the lost information includes the identity of citizens in those regions.
How the conventional identity management system works
The conventional identity management system before now is still as it was during the ancient times. When children are born, they are registered from birth with rigorous paper work. The hospital or clinic gets to hold a copy of this birth certificate and the parents of these children also get to hold a copy of the birth certificates. The invention of the computer and internet caused an improvement to this for a while. However, the internet has also proven to be an ineffective means of storing information if they must be kept intact and far from the reach of third-parties (users of social media will understand this better). The use of blockchain technology would be the only cure to this ordeal and that’s why a man who has shared the same experience before has offered a perfect solution to this identity management crisis through what he called the Tykn initiative.
The primary objective of Tykn is to restore resilient identities to individuals using the disruptive blockchain technology. Apart from being useful in terms of creating digital currencies, the blockchain technology also serves as the safest, most reliable and fastest means of keeping information intact. Papers are not durable, soft copies are not very reliable since most of these are locked in centralized locations. Blockchain technology takes every piece of information and stores them safely on various independent computers around the world in such a way that all these computers or servers can’t be compromised at once and it would take the failure of all these computers within the blockchain network to compromise or alter the information stored on them. With this, no identity information can ever be lost forever.
Blockchain technology will not only be used to store information but in the same way, the model serves as a trusted means of verification. Unlike the identity verification process in the conventional identity management system that takes days or even months of verification and yet still inefficient. There will be no need for a second eye confirmation as long as the blockchain says so.
With Tykn, individuals will also have total control of their identities and this will make that information free from all third-party interference.
Tykn will keep identity information safe, secure and will maintain a high level of transparency and not only that. Tykn will also ensure that every certificate issued at birth will match international standards and can be accessed from anywhere in the world.