The Spatial Web Read online

  Smart Payments enable programmable transactions that can authenticate and execute payments for any exchange of value between Users and Assets within and across Spaces in an automated way.

  Problem: Because payments are not programmable, transactions require lengthy and expensive validation and settlement and cannot easily be automated in the physical world. This costs time and money. Also, a lack of micro-transactions restricts payments to high-cost items when certain interactions like those between machines may require small continuous payments i.e. “streamable money.”

  Solution: Use digital wallets and currencies for seamless, integrated automatable payments across any app, virtual space, or geo-location across Web 3.0. Enable micro-transactions for assets, experiences, and spaces and services. Allow Users, Assets, and Spaces to use wallets.

  Benefit: Smart Payments enable automatable, seamless payments across the Spatial Web. Users, Spaces and Assets can transact with one another, subject to permissions. This allows Smart Assets to transact autonomously and enables micro-transactions globally at low or zero cost. This is not unlike the spatial transactions that occur when we exit an Uber car, enter an AirBnB home, our receive a Postmates order. The fundamental difference is that in the Spatial Web, these kinds of Spatial Transactions are a default benefit of its Smart Payment architecture. The outcome of such an architecture is a Spatial Network Economy that enables autonomic economic functions for any transaction.

  Example:

  A shopper walks into a store, is identified via facial recognition cameras, grabs the items they desire and are charged to their Smart Account upon exit.

  A gamer slays a famous dragon with a magic sword and then takes the sword into another world and sells to another player; the record of its dragon-slaying history goes with it. As the sword is used to slay various notable enemies, it is resold at an increasingly higher price across various game worlds.

  SMART ACCOUNTS

  A Smart Account is a single user account for use within the Spatial Browser and across any Web 3.0 application that authenticates, stores, and manages a User’s Identities, Asset Inventory, User and Location history, Wallets, Currencies, and Payments.

  Problem: Users have no single sign-in or account for the current web necessitating the use of multiple parties’ accounts and sign-ins to create profiles to authenticate themselves in order to access third-party resources and services. Users do not own these accounts.

  Solution: A single Smart Account for the Spatial Web that supports the W3C specification for Decentralized Identity (DIDs) enables Users to allow third parties to authenticate themselves to receive authorization to access User’s Smart Account Profile information, Smart Assets and Smart Spaces, interaction, and transaction history based on User’s privacy and permissions settings. Users own their own accounts, data, history, inventory, and content.

  Benefit: Smart Accounts enable private, secure and seamless interactions and transactions of Assets, across Spaces and between Users.

  Example:

  A specific medical student in Cuba virtually attends an operation in Brussels led by a famous surgeon and then gets to perform the same surgery virtually, while being critiqued by the surgeon and peers from around the world.

  An FAA-approved technician sees a 3D virtual copy or “digital twin” of a jet engine and its historical service record, makes repairs, and updates the service record.

  IDENTITY IN THE SPATIAL WEB

  THE FUTURE OF IDENTITY

  A verifiable and trusted identity is an essential necessity to enable the interactions, transactions, and transportation between people, places, or things.

  Identification techniques have evolved over time, from beads and tattoos, written documents and printed passports, ID cards and birth certificates of yesterday to the cryptographic signatures and facial and iris biometric IDs of tomorrow. We use these tools in order to prove and assert who we are, where we come from, and what rights we carry with us. An identity is a social tool, one that fundamentally relies on trust in the system and method used to establish and verify the identity.

  The White Paper entitled “On the Threshold of a Digital Identity Revolution” released by the World Economic Forum in January 2018 eloquently frames both the historical challenges and critical future needs.

  “The issues associated with identity proofing—fraud, stolen credentials, and social exclusion—have challenged individuals throughout history. But, as the spheres in which we live and transact have grown, first geographically and now into the digital economy, the ways in which humans, devices and other entities interact are quickly evolving—and how we manage identity will have to change accordingly.

  As we move into the Fourth Industrial Revolution and more transactions are conducted digitally, a digital representation of one’s identity has become increasingly important; this applies to humans, devices, legal entities and beyond.

  For humans, this proof of identity is a fundamental prerequisite to access critical services and participate in modern economic, social and political systems. For devices, their digital identity is critical in conducting transactions, especially as the devices will be able to transact relatively independent of humans in the near future.

  For legal entities, the current state of identity management consists of inefficient manual processes that could benefit from new technologies and architecture to support digital growth. As the number of digital services, transactions and entities grow, it will be increasingly important to ensure the transactions take place in a secure and trusted network where each entity can be identified and authenticated.

  Identity is the first step of every transaction between two or more parties. Over the ages, the majority of transactions between two identities has been mostly viewed in relation to the validation of a credential (‘Is this genuine information?’), verification (‘Does the information match the identity?’) and authentication of identity (‘Does this human/thing match the identity? Are you really who you claim to be?’). These questions have not changed over time, only the methods have changed.” In the era of the Spatial Web, a historical opportunity has emerged that radically shifts the center of gravity concerning whom we are going to ask these questions to and who we will trust to answer them.

  A UNIVERSAL SHIFT IN PERSPECTIVE

  Occasionally, throughout history, revolutionary paradigm shifts occur that alter our understanding of the world and our place in it. In astronomy, in the mid-1500s a shift occurred that would spark the Scientific Revolution and set the stage for the Industrial and Information Ages to follow and literally redefine our place in the universe.

  This shift was from the predominant view of the cosmos referred to today as the geocentric model which described a Universe with Earth at the center and the Sun, Moon, stars, and planets orbiting around it—to that of a heliocentric model in which the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun at the center of the Solar System. Although the idea that the Earth may rotate around the Sun, and not the other way round, had its roots in early Pythagorean thinking…it wasn’t until Nicolaus Copernicus’s “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” in 1543 that the world became aware of this. Over the next century, the seed of heliocentrism grew its way through the Asian, Islamic, and European scientific communities until it finally blossomed with Galileo’s proof, based on his observations of the cycles of the moon. For his historical discovery, Galileo was tried by the Inquisition, found guilty of heresy against the church and the biblical narrative of creation and humanity’s place in it. He was forced to recant the facts of his discovery, on peril of death and was sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life.

  What exactly was Galileo’s crime? He had publicly placed his faith in objective and observable data and not in the subjective infallibility of the church. Galileo was one of the first to clearly state that the laws of nature are mathematical. He wrote “Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe ... It is written in the language of mathematics, and i
ts characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures.” Galileo’s groundbreaking scientific work and “trust in math” forged the path that led us to our greatest scientific inventions, eventually inspiring the work of Descartes and Thomas Newton whose achievements in philosophy and physics became the iron bedrock upon which the Industrial Revolution was ultimately built upon. Importantly, the key shift in the western world from the Scientific Revolution to the Industrial one was a shift from the faith in the centralized powers of the church to that of the decentralized trust in the verifiable power of science—in observable facts over unquestionable faith.

  This change started with a willingness to shift perspective, coupled with an intense curiosity of the mind and an unquenchable desire to uncover a better way to describe reality more accurately and truthfully. Today, we have a similar opportunity to adjust our perspective in such a way as to create downstream changes that could alter our understanding of the world, ourselves, and each other for generations to come.

  We will need to shift as we did before—from the geocentric notion that centrally-controlled 3rd parties are the ideal parties to validate, verify, and authenticate our identities and the data associated with them. We need to shift from a worldview in which we orbit around the respective planets of Web 1.0 and 2.0 service providers, subject to the gravity of their user agreements, ownership, and monetization schemes.

  In this new worldview, our geo-centric perspective shifts to a heliocentric model where we discover ourselves to be like the sun, the source at the center of our own data system, where we verify, and authenticate ourselves, in a decentralized manner, where 3rd parties request access and permission to promote to us, to use our data, and where they orbit us.

  Like the World Economic Forum white paper’s title suggests, we are indeed on the threshold of a digital identity revolution. Much like the Scientific Revolution changed our model of the Universe from a geocentric to a heliocentric model, in the Digital Universe of Web 3.0 we must shift our center of gravity from a service-centric to a self-centric model for Digital Identity and all that comes with it.

  Each person should be able to decide what information about themselves is collected as part of an online profile and of that information, they should have control over who has access to different aspects of it, and in what ways it can be used. Online identity should be maintained as a capability that gives the user many forms of control.

  Blockchain technology offers the promise to revolutionize digital identity by returning ownership of personal data from companies and governments to individuals, such that individuals have the power to share their data with others and revoke it as they please as a human right.

  TRUST IN MATH

  Trust in the Webster-Merriam dictionary is described as “Assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.”

  One can argue that Trust is the central orienting factor and organizing principle of our lives. Who or what we trust, when, how, and why determines much of what we call success in life. This is because Trust is the mediating force for any and all interactions. It is the scorecard of historical data combined with a map of trusted relationships and the proximity that a new one may have to a current or previous one. When we do not have direct historical data on a subject, we often rely on the proxies of relationships in individuals, organizations, and systems that we do trust. “Knownness” matters in the realm of Trust. The Mafia has understood this for years. It is often why family members are classically the most trusted and most likely to fail. We have a trust bias that lacks quantifiable validity.

  Often based on proof of past performance, Trust’s main purpose lies in its relevance to future activities. No one worries about trusting someone or something or some system in the past. You either trusted or you didn’t, and determined trust was wise or it wasn’t. In either case, the outcome has been written into the stone tablet of time and cannot be unwritten. Our concern lies in the future with respect to Trust.

  For the better part of human history our fundamental trust, in reality, has been based on a combination of experience—in the form of empirical sensory data and in the ephemeral—and our interpretation of that data and how we attribute its causes. One might call it the Senses vs. Spirit debate. Millennia have been spent arguing about the veracity of the claims for the empirical vs. the ephemeral as the basis for trust in reality. But along the way, a third contender has quietly entered the field—digitization.

  As our trust has increasingly shifted to digital formats, we don’t so much trust our senses or our spirit guides as much as we trust the data.

  Tesla drivers today have three options for driving.

  Drive yourself. Trust your senses.

  Let god drive. Trust the spirit.

  Let the car drive. Trust the data.

  Increasingly we will be relying on data to inform and drive the operations and activities of our world, our markets, our energy, transportation, health, and entertainment. Data integrity and our ability to interrogate its provenance and history will be central to our ability to trust anything of real importance in the future.

  Finally, by allowing data ownership to move from companies and governments back to individuals, not only are individuals able to trust that the data they use can be validated through decentralized mechanisms but also organizations and governments can trust that they have reduced their own exposure to liability and risk associated with storage of such sensitive personal information.

  PRIVACY BY DESIGN

  The Spatial Web must enable “privacy by design.” Privacy by design provides for individual control, trust, and security. And enables anonymity and auditability. It utilizes cryptographically-secured digital identity to “trustlessly” complete interactions and transactions that previously required the exchange of personal data and layers of verification. With the Spatial Web Protocol Suite the provenance of every thing, person, place, and transaction can be verified via an entry in a Distributed Ledger.

  The Spatial Web identity architecture ensures that “privacy by design” is both a foundational principle and a core architectural imperative, where individuals possess the unalienable right to control their own digital identities. Each individual manages precisely what personal information is collected as part of an online profile or service, and defines who has access to this information, and the specific ways it may be used in any physical or virtual space.

  Spatial Web account holders should have an absolute right to define bounded access to the complete contents of their own digital profile at any time. An online identity service can be maintained specifically to manage the many layers of control in a convenient and secure manner, as without a sufficient degree of flexibility and transparency, the trust in a system of federated network identity will be minimal.

  INTEROPERABLE ID

  A 21st-century digital identity system needs to create global identities, crossing international and virtual boundaries, without losing user control. Thanks to persistence and autonomy, global identities can then become continually available. Of course, these identifiers are not limited to humans. They can be applied to any and all people, places, and things, physical or virtual in nature.

  To register the identity of any user, space, or asset on the Spatial Web, an individual or organization must first create an account and request a globally unique “decentralized identifier” (DID) based on W3C Standards. DIDs can be stored on a blockchain with quantum-resistant encrypted private keys which can be coupled with biometric markers and location-specific anchors to provide multi-factor spatial authentication, affording greater resiliency against Sybil and other types of attacks.

  Think of them as super secure URLs for people, places and things instead of just for pages.

  The number of IoT devices is estimated to reach 75 billion by 2025, and soon after will begin to approach the trillions. By standardizing data schemas facilitated by the trust enabled by DIDs, every IoT device can contain its own v
erifiable DID Activities of drones, cameras, cars or robots can be managed via spatial permissions. Essentially enabling a Spatial Contract to define that “these DIDs (drones) are allowed to be inside this DID (Spatial Domain of Santa Monica, CA) on this day/time/weather etc.” Having standardized IDs for any device in the IoT means that a global data commons and marketplace can arise. This will enable a global network of devices where spatially permissioned data can be transferred from machine to human and machine to machine. This free flow of securely-monetized data, functioning like a central nervous system for the planet, can enable ecosystems of efficiencies between humans, machines, and AI between communities, corporations, cities, and countries.

  DIGITAL PROPERTY RIGHTS

  P roperty can be physical or non-physical. By law, property is owned by a person, or jointly by a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation or even a society. Depending on the nature of the property, an owner of property has the legal right to consume, alter, share, redefine, rent, mortgage, sell, exchange, transfer, give away or destroy it, and to exclude others from doing these things.

  Property rights were originally invented for land (real property) and then ideas (intellectual property). Until recently property rights did not extend to the digital world. The Spatial Web Protocol Suite provides a standard and open method that enables owners of digital property to assign property titles to various forms of digital data and then record the provenance of these titles on a blockchain. This creates secure digital property, and secondary markets around the digital property, which ultimately grows into a digital or virtual economy. Digital Rights are as critical to this emerging economy as physical and intellectual property rights were to our traditional agricultural and industrial economies.

  The Spatial Web gives people the power to apply the same ownership principles that we have established in the physical world (e.g., owning land on which a house is built, owning a physical item to digital representations of themselves, their personal data, and 3D digital objects. Digital property, therefore, includes digital information related to our identities, avatars, virtual spaces, and digital assets including all of their interactions, transactions, contractual rights, and location history. When tokenized using a Distributed Ledger, physical or digital property can allow multiple parties to own fractions of the property or asset.