Introducing Human
July 13, 2023
Today we’re announcing Human, something that has been researched by many people since 2008 and that we started building 2 years ago. As Bitcoin and all other decentralized currencies are here to mitigate the central banks’ trust problem, Human is here to mitigate the democracy centralization trust problem.
Human is building a global decentralized ID registry of all humanity. It solves the problem of knowing if someone online is a real person, bot, or AI. The core principle is 1 human = 1 account, but self-sovereign, Sybil-resistant and privacy-preserving. In order to do so, we had to solve an enormous amount of technical challenges like how to make the verification process truly decentralized, don’t allow registering people more than once, keep users’ data private, how to make it as inclusive as possible, and finally how to onboard 8 billion people with easy UX. Human allows developers to utilize it knowing that every user is real, which is impossible today with any social service like Facebook or other blockchains.
Have you ever wondered why there is no online voting still? The answer is the same as why Twitter makes you pay $8 and read only 6000 tweets a day: Internet identity is broken. This is also why any type of Network State is impossible to build for mass adoption today. The cool thing is that once the mechanism of digital unique self-sovereign identity is possible, there are so many use cases that we can’t even think about at the moment connected to wealth distribution or democratic inputs.
I have lived in multiple countries for an extended time to see the problem of fake elections, misalignment of nations, nationalism, and lack of involvement of citizens in any societal issues.
But before everyone votes for the president online, we at least could eliminate fraud, scams, or an endless number of KYC checks and deepfake creations.
Human consists of four components: Human ID, which is a unique digital ID; Human Network, which is a layer-1 blockchain where every Human ID holder is a validator; Human Dollar - a new currency issued to everyone who gets Human ID; and Human App, a mobile wallet app for everyone to participate and to claim Human ID.
Everything is still experimental. Regardless, someone will inevitably make it work. All we desire at Human is to be sure we as humanity don't make the same mistake twice: there shouldn't be a single, trusted authority - governments or companies - in charge of issuing identities for fear they might manipulate the system.
We’re open-sourcing all components later this year and starting an alpha testing program in our discord today. We’re actively hiring for almost all roles if you’re interested in solving the most complex issues in distributed systems.
