Genuine Global Identifiers and their Mutual Sureties.

We introduce the fundamental notion of a genuine global identifier, namely a globally unique and singular identifier of a person, and present a foundation for a decentralized, grassroots, bottom-up, self-sovereign process in which every human being may create and own a genuine global identifier. The solution employs mutual sureties among owners of global identifiers regarding the identities of their rightful owners, which results in a trust-based social network. Importantly, this approach is designed for a distributed realization, possibly using distributed ledger/blockchain technology, and does not depend on biometrics, nor does it require to store any personal information on public storage, except perhaps for the mutual surety graph itself. For the solution to be complete, additional components are needed, notably a cryptoeconomy that encourages honest behavior, in the spirit of Seuken et al., 2014, and a sybil-resilient governance system, in the spirit of Shahaf et al., 2019. We demonstrate the applicability of this framework for the use-cases of key update and sybil-resilient community growth.