According to the World Bank a billion people in the world lack legal identification. That is a billion people with a trace of proof of who they are, without assured access to basic human rights. This number does not include millions of others who are issued inferior forms of legal identification in the form of sub-citizenships, alien passports, non-citizenships, refugee and stateless identification papers, and many other forms of unequal proof of identity. The problem is rooted in how proof of identification is still issued and owned by a centralized authority—the state. An authority that time and time proves to be fragile, corrupt, unpredictably unethical, incompetent, malicious, and otherwise human—all too human.

The problem is clear. The potential solutions, not so much. Theoretically, decentralized self-sovereign identification could alleviate the aforementioned problem, but in practice we are yet to see how that could be possible. What is essential is to draw lessons from the vulnerable populations that ended up on the wrong side of state security and lost their legal identification, or had it degraded. Blockchain solutions can play an important role in realisation of identity sovereignty independent of state control, generating a healthier environment in securing identification. This may also in the interests of each society to secure a more stable, corruption-free environment where abuse of power of legal identification is mitigated.