Bitcoin and Self-Sovereign Identity: Why Your Digital Identity Should Belong to You

Your digital identity is fragmented across hundreds of companies. Facebook knows your birthday, your friends, your interests. Google knows your searches, your location history, your emails. Your bank knows your financial life. Bitcoin’s infrastructure may enable a fundamental shift toward self-sovereign identity — identity that belongs to you, not to corporations.

The Current Identity Model

Today, your identity is a collection of accounts:

Siloed data: Each company holds a piece of your identity. Facebook has your social graph. Amazon has your purchase history. The government has your records. None of them share.

Data portability doesn’t exist: You can’t export your Facebook friends and import them to another platform. Your identity is locked into each service.

You don’t own your accounts: Companies can delete your accounts, ban your access, or sell your data at will. TheSupreme Court has ruled you have no property interest in your account data.

**Identity verification is fragme