In the virtual halls of Blockchain Journal (BCJ), we often talk about an elephant-in-the-room like problem that we've nicknamed "The William Shatner Problem." It all started when our technical analyst Bob Reselman was looking at some non-fungible tokens that were once minted on the Wax blockchain in partnership with William Shatner and then asked a simple question: "How is anybody expected to know for sure that it was the real William Shatner who worked on these NFTs and not an imposter?" 

When BCJ editor-in-chief David Berlind posed that same question to Wax co-founder William Quigley during the NFT.NYC 2023 conference in New York City, Quigley's answer was essentially that we have to trust Wax as a central entity to be telling the truth and that like Amazon, it's beholden upon Wax to market itself (and maintain itself) as a trustworthy marketplace. The problem with this approach is that it's a non-technological and non-standard approach that doesn't scale across the blockchain industry. In fact, BCJ's so-called William Shatner problem is not just about C2C contexts involving consumer activity in the primary and secondary market of NFTs. It's also a proxy for a larger identity issue that needs solving before businesses can fully exploit the potential of distributed ledger technologies. 

During Consensus 2023 in Austin, Texas, after Ripple CTO David Schwartz concluded a fireside chat during which he openly discussed some of the challenges when it comes to the intersection of blockchain and identity, BCJ's David Berlind interviewed him for his perspective on the William Shatner problem. Similar to some of the conclusions that were reached in Berlind's interview of Wax's Quigley, Schwartz — one of the OGs of blockchain technology — agreed that it is a problem that needs solving, joked that he and Berlind should call some venture capitalists, and suggested there may be no way to avoid the need for central authorities that vouch for the identities of blockchain users (individuals or organizations). The idea is similar to the originally intended role of Certificate Authorities back in the days of Web 1.0.

To watch the video version of this podcast or read its full-text transcript, go to:
https://blockchainjournal.com/interview/ripple-cto-david-schwartz-proof-identity-will-require-certificate-authoritylike-approach/

The video can also be watched on Blockchain Journal's YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9o1elZGZug.

Ripple CTO David Schwartz: Proof of Identity Will Require Certificate Authority-Like Approach

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