Can Blockchain Give Us The Digital Privacy We Deserve?

The sprawling Mae La refugee camp deep in the jungles of northwestern Thailand seems an unlikely place to find pioneers of a new digital identity technology.

The first time Larry Dohrs visited the camp, the veteran refugee advocate, with his signature white mustache and oversized glasses, was struck by its primitive conditions and "Dickensian" decrepitude. Located 5 miles west of the Myanmar border, in the shadows of the majestic Dawna mountains, the camp was encircled by barbed wire. Ramshackle, two-story bamboo and thatch structures leaned precariously over the muddy, twisting alleyways, teaming with people—predominantly ethnic Karens who had fled violent persecution by their government.

The impermanence of the refugee existence itself, as well as how heavily it seemed to weigh on the camp residents, drew Dohrs's attention to the improbable issue of digital identity. Many refugees had been resettled to new homes in other countries, but some of the remaining 35,000 camp residents had lived there for three decades. They were seeing food rations get smaller and money for social services drying up as funding was rerouted to seemingly more acute humanitarian crises elsewhere. There were those contemplating leaving Mae La on their own, even with no place to go. But for most of them, existence outside the camp had long since come to seem unimaginable.

Most of the refugees had no form of legal identification. To leave the barbed-wire confines of their jungle way station would be to effectively disappear. The nongovernmental organizations and international aid agencies that had for decades provided them with food, health care, education and job training would remain behind, as would any record of the refugees' health histories, educational accomplishments and work credentials.

The stateless, paperless residents of Mae La lived in a bureaucratic limbo, where the only proof of who they were and what they had done existed in a series of proprietary databases outside their own control. "Their existence inside the camp is established, and their existence outside the camp is not," Dohrs says. "There's a lack of freedom. And an uncertainty that really eats at them and creates despair."

Which is one reason why, after focusing