Working in banking, a client once came in for a loan. Filled the form, everything normal. When we ran his central-bank credit record (ECIB), we got a jolt: his CNIC already carried a loan — and he was marked a defaulter on it.
The ground slipped from under him. He had never taken a loan in his life.
What we suspected had happened was that his CNIC had been misused somewhere — someone had apparently used his identity to obtain a loan in his name. He had never borrowed a rupee, yet the record branded him a defaulter.
That day a fear settled in me: this could be me too. I also hand over a CNIC copy for everything — a SIM, a verification, any little task. Every copy carries my personal details. When often the other side only needed to confirm one thing — that I'm real, that I'm eligible. And those copies of mine are now lying who-knows-where.
My mind kept asking: why isn't there an alternative to the CNIC — one where verification still happens, but a person is better protected from misuse?
Later I learned @Dusk is working on exactly this idea — Citadel. It's a self-sovereign identity system where you can prove one thing (that you're eligible, or verified) without handing over your full identity or raw data to every service. Through zero-knowledge proofs, the system can get a "yes, this is true" — without you exposing everything behind it.
Which is close to what my mind had wished for: verification happens without requiring my full CNIC to be shared with every service provider — meaning fewer copies of my full identity data need to be handed around.
Honest take — this is still early and hard, and bringing real-world identity onto rails like this isn't easy. But for someone who has seen with his own eyes how a single CNIC copy can wreck a life, even the idea is valuable.
Follow the signal, not the noise.
$DUSK @Dusk #dusk
The ground slipped from under him. He had never taken a loan in his life.
What we suspected had happened was that his CNIC had been misused somewhere — someone had apparently used his identity to obtain a loan in his name. He had never borrowed a rupee, yet the record branded him a defaulter.
That day a fear settled in me: this could be me too. I also hand over a CNIC copy for everything — a SIM, a verification, any little task. Every copy carries my personal details. When often the other side only needed to confirm one thing — that I'm real, that I'm eligible. And those copies of mine are now lying who-knows-where.
My mind kept asking: why isn't there an alternative to the CNIC — one where verification still happens, but a person is better protected from misuse?
Later I learned @Dusk is working on exactly this idea — Citadel. It's a self-sovereign identity system where you can prove one thing (that you're eligible, or verified) without handing over your full identity or raw data to every service. Through zero-knowledge proofs, the system can get a "yes, this is true" — without you exposing everything behind it.
Which is close to what my mind had wished for: verification happens without requiring my full CNIC to be shared with every service provider — meaning fewer copies of my full identity data need to be handed around.
Honest take — this is still early and hard, and bringing real-world identity onto rails like this isn't easy. But for someone who has seen with his own eyes how a single CNIC copy can wreck a life, even the idea is valuable.
Follow the signal, not the noise.
$DUSK @Dusk #dusk