Quote from: adub on October 25, 2014, 03:33:24 PM

Do you have anyone advising you on regulatory compliance?

That's an interesting question, because the idea behind BitName (which is currently merely a concept) is that it's intended to provide a kind of a marker or starting point where skilled developers could proceed to work on details of a system that would enable anyone to express identities or facets of identities regardless of where they live in the world, in a manner that either circumvents totally or renders moot any laws or regulations regarding identity. So I'm not sure that having someone advise on regulatory compliance would be needed here, unless it was to advise (with an eye towards regulatory responses) on how to present the repository, license it, or develop it, in a manner that would make it very difficult or next to impossible for regulators' actions to have any real impact. The license may change on the repository (and if you have checked, you will notice that there is no USPTO patent or trademark that existed on "BitName" prior to when the BitName repository and license were created on Github (https://github.com/abisprotocol/bitname)). At such time when developers would code a trans-identical system, it's quite likely that the BitName proposal will at that point have been forked or simply published as a totally different repository by an anonymous code author. Thus when code corresponding to it is ultimately published it may very well be in different repositories with completely different names. BitName is merely a conceptual starting point.

To answer your question simply, though: No.

There already exist projects which are oriented toward the use of Bitcoin in the context of authentication or identity. You might have already seen BitID (https://github.com/bitid/bitid), which is not intended as a general-purpose identification system, and Bitpay's BitAuth (https://github.com/bitpay/bitauth), which suggests that "In the future, an identity system could be built around BitAuth keys where a user could create one key to represent an identity which could authenticate against multiple services." These are already developed projects. The projects are open source and technically could be used by anyone interested in doing something using that code either equivalent to or quite different from what you see in the BitID and BitAuth descriptions. And despite the fact that there is a regulatory element in the Windhover proposals - proposals that BitPay (authors of BitAuth) support -- you will note that nowhere in BitAuth (which was developed well prior to the Windhover announcements) is there any reference to regulatory compliance. (Unless you are looking at their license that BitPay used for the BitAuth repository ~ which is MIT, same as what Bitcoin is released under (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/COPYING))

[Just as an aside, the BitName project is intended to serve in part to provide users with the option to circumvent or make impractical or impossible, any implementation(s) of those parts of the Windhover proposal that are based in, would be reliant upon, or would facilitate, regulation ~ by which is meant not only that classical old-school centralized regulation, but as well, the newer concepts of decentralized regulation, bitlaw, etc ~ thus at minimum BitName would be designed to help ensure that there would not be consensus to support widespread adoption of regulated decentralized identity, and that any trans-identical proposal which would emanate from BitName would have anonymous characteristics at its core while still providing users with the option to express identity or 'facets' of personality in ways that the user desires to express (importantly, without relying upon or facilitating regulation).]

So, for this project which is simply described as "a permissionless decentralized trans-identical system with anonymity and user choice at its core," would there be a need for someone to advise the project on regulatory compliance? Probably not, except as has been described above, if you were to provide regulatory advice, or if it were to be sought, it would be only that advice "that would make it very difficult or next to impossible for regulators' actions to have any real impact."

Examining for a moment, though, things like SEC or CFTC's "rules and guidelines to require certain regulated entities to establish programs to address risks of identity theft," as an example, one of the things that should pop out at you is that these are just one country's rules. Were developers to try to take into account the rules of one, or ten, or nearly two hundred countries in the world today, there would be no software ever developed. Thus when developers do forge ahead it is not with the idea that they are supposed to be consumed with concern over this regulation or that, but rather, the idea is to simply generate innovative solutions that previously didn't exist.

"2+2 will always equal 4, no matter how many guns the 'government' points at the equation."