[Cryptography] Crypto basic income

[Ron Garret]

On Sep 25, 2017, at 12:53 PM, Roland Alden <ralden at ralden.com> wrote:

> Can a (competently collected and analyzed) sample of DNA be viewed as a "really high quality" biometric?
> 
> I get it that biometrics cannot be secrets; but it would seem that DNA might be (theoretically) the gold standard for establishment of identity. 

The problem is that it is not enough to have a unique identifier.  What you really want is a unique identifier that is *bound* to an individual *person*.  Fingerprints and iris scans are attractive because these things originate from physical objects (fingers, eyes) that are (generally) physically attached to bodies that house brains, and it is this physical attachment that provides the binding between the fingerprint and the person it belongs to.

The connection between your brain and your DNA is very different.  Your brain was built by your DNA, but it is not physically bound to your DNA the way it is physically bound to your eyes and fingers.  Your DNA can escape your body in ways that your eyes and fingers generally can’t, at least not without physical violence.  But if I can get a discarded soda can or discarded hair out of your trash I can produce copies of your DNA that are as indistinguishable from the original, because DNA is just digital data rendered in a particular medium.

The only way you could make it work is if you could reliably extract a sample from your body and sequence it in such a way that the provenance of the sample all the way to the output of the sequence was not in doubt.  That is very hard to do.

rg