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Blockchain was a hot topic at the recent KNOW Identity Conference in Washington, D.C., with a number of speakers and attendees singing the technology's praises. The conference, which ran from March 26 to 28, featured a startup pitch competition where not only were a majority of the participants using blockchain technology, but the ultimate winner's business model was based on it.
Jonathan Smith, chief technology officer of Civic Technologies Inc. and one of the panelists, was an ardent supporter of distributed ledger technology, which is not surprising given that Civic Technologies focuses on blockchain-based identity verification. In his view, blockchain holds immense promise in that it allows people to verify identities without actually revealing anything about the person.
Essentially, the blockchain would create a set of public and private keys for each user. While...