If wanted to embark illiterate people on the blockchain I would need a way for them to store them to generate private keep orally or visually. Do you know of any application generating private key and signing based on voice or a combination of bio-markers?
I’m thinking of something like repeating a text in one own mother tongue for example. My understanding is that we all have a uniq voice that is yet very costly to forge exactly (for any text) with AI speech generation. Also combining voice say ambiant sound could be a way to reinforce security. I’m thinking of a farmer identifying himself with a chicken shooting in the background. I’ve read that chicken also have uniq voice.
I think this private key generation and signing should mainly be based on voice because there are still many people without smart phones. or who are not confortable using smart phones.
I’m sure there are many projects working on that, but I don’t think anything Cardano related.
The problem you describe however sounds different - How can illiterate people hold on to their private keys?
So this depends on the scenario -
For creating and restoring wallets, people will need to hold on to their seed phrase - the list of 12/24 English words, depending on the wallet they use. Whoever has the phrase is the actual owner of the accounts. It should never be shared.
To send funds (no need for a private key to receive) they will need their private key. However, they would also need a wallet to create the actual transaction.
I think the way we use crypto now, nobody holds on to their private keys, they let their wallet take care of that for them.
If I am not mistaken the private keys also change whenever you make a transaction (correct me if I’m wrong people).
So first, we need to understand how people are going to use their crypto if they don’t operate their own wallet (If they do, they will need to be literate probably). If they don’t, then whoever is operating the wallet has control of the funds.
The only option I could see is buying and holding long term, where there is -
A wallet generation event (with multiple future buys - no problem) - seed phrase is created.
A selling event where the person would bring their seed phrase and restore the wallet before selling.
Both these events would have to be done with a party the person trusts completely. Or their money will be easily stolen by that party whenever they want to.
It is very difficult for literate, highly educated people to take responsible care of their crypto assets. I know so many people who had their crypto go “poof!” one way or another, and they knew exactly what was going on. So how could we expect illiterate people to do that?
I would not recommend someone illiterate to hold crypto assets on their own.
Hope this helps a little. Please don’t take this as expert advice, or any advice. I am not qualified.
One should not forget that joke from my country, in the world we have intellectuals (ie litterate) and the intelligent, they may be distinct people :o)
In fact, neuro-science shows that literacy does not come for free, what we gain in reading we loose else where, because the neurones we recycle in the reading circuits were not idle neurones… but that not the subject…
You are right that I was kind of asking how can one hold and mange his private keys if he can’t read or write. I was thinking of a private key generation based once voice. Say you seed phrase + a timestamp should be enough to generate a new private / public /key pair no ?
I’m not sure I understand what you are looking for here @maliky.
I imagine you could install a mobile wallet on a phone with facial recognition. Then only that person will have access to the wallet. Private keys are generated automatically. But this is actually not very secure.
If they lose the phone, they lose the wallet.
If they also don’t have the phrase seed, then they lose the money.
I’m looking for people to discuss the future and adoption at large of a technologies like cardano.
I’m looking to participate in constructive debates evolving around blockchain technologies adoption in large and preferably with a scientific approach. I think it’s important to discuss ideas, even if things are not always very focused, it still helps build a diverse (and there more decentralized and resilient) community.
I’m also looking for a space to formulate my ideas about technological development in the world in, I hope, a comprehensible way.
That been said, what you say concerning the facial recognition mobile phone may not be true because it would probably cost too much money.
Here’s more on the context. I am faced with a real world adoption problem. On one side I have a few big cacao exporters (or government agencies) who want to interact directly with the farmers. On the other side, there are ten or hundred of thousands (or million) farmers who dropped out of school before been able to read and write correctly. Both side would like to avoid intermediaries. Most farmers don’t have a bank account. Big companies don’t want to pay for millions of smart phone to put in place their payment or traceability programme, and I guess farmers need a technology apparently not much changing the way they are used to do things.
Also I think it would be an error to treat individual ‘individually’ forgetting that we are a “social specie”. We nee to rely on trust among people of the same community, like I need to trust our good intention when communicating over this channel. Relying on trust with strangers has its draw back and they are trying to be addressed by the blockchains, but setting up a system encouraging individualistic behaviour and not pushing for trust at the local level can be disastrous. I mean, think of what a family would be if every of their transaction should be signed with a private key…
Therefore I need to help both local farmers and “global efficiency”. I’m looking for a system which can handle divers degree of trust without forcing the adoption of an entirely trustless system. That is the context of my situation.
What I ask, and share here, are ideas to build such a system starting with how to have it adopted by the farmers without employing force or an authority argument (government). I think that if something is useful and easy then it is adopted. In my context Cardano is useful if it can be made easy to use even if it diminished or transfer some of the security at local trusted level (ex. a village chief or farmer cooperative).
I think that we human have by nature the ability to organise in a decentralised way when population density is low. in Agricultural area, population density is usually lower so I think we need to map cardano’s decentralisation paradigm on the existing decentralisation when the network inter-acts with local farmers, but at the other end, on the big companies side, we keep focused on privacy and security issues.
Voice or biophysical markes seem the most sensible way to secure individual wallets even if those wallets are held by a local cooperative.
I meant it as a technical solution, and it is true in that sense. I think anything involving biometric technology will prbably be expensive today, and the option I gave is a cheaper one.
Wasn’t forgetting. I was just talking about it in the context of trust.
Thank you for the background about the actual situation, that helps a lot. If you ask general questions you get bad answers, if you give context, you get help .
So I don’t think you actually need Biometrics.
I see 2 main issues with the situation you describe - 1. Operation of the wallet and the transactions
This could be done by some trusted party - a trusted cooperative as you suggested, or the state, or someone else. Since anyway this someone will be able to scam the people, and since we assume the people cannot operate the wallets themselves, I don’t see a way to make it more secure.
2. Holding on to a “Private Key” to use for transactions.
This could actually be anything, as long as both sides agree on it, but let’s take the obvious example of using the 24 word seed phrase to restore the wallet every time you make a transaction. (Of course this will be a poor solution since that gives access to a wallet, while a single private key only compromises one address I believe.)
You can take the BIP-39 word list for example (depending on the wallet used) and create a mapping/encoding/cipher that matches the needs of the farmers. You’ll need to have a “sound” or something for each word on the list, verbal, or other.
*- If you choose to trust human memory with these keys I would try to build a redundant method, where there are multiple aspects to the sounds you choose, but you only need some of the aspects to “recreate” every word.
So here you will be entering the ancient realm of manual ciphers -
Here are some examples like Ceaser’s, code books and even ASCII is a mapping (these are all text-to-text examples, you will need text-to-speech or something else).
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