BlockChain developer Christopher Ellis

Government issued passports can be quite costly, and depending on your nationality, it can be tricky to acquire one. And as for getting a visa to visit another country, that may well be one of the most difficult tasks you’ll ever have to face if you come from a third world country.

To solve this problem, software developer Christopher Ellis may have found a way to provide everyone in the world a universal passport, proof of existence, and identification system. Called the World Citizen Passport, it uses Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), a data encryption and decryption computer program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication, and the Blockchain, the transaction database used by Bitcoin, to create a unique ID that’s virtually impossible to fake.

In an interview, Ellis stated that he wanted to “create a voluntary ID system in which my proof of existence could be backed by a social network of my choosing.” But the question now is whether governments would accept this kind of passport as proof of identification.

“The real story here is why the governments didn’t invent this sooner,” he says. “I came up with this over a weekend in my spare time, why didn’t they? How long long has PGP been around?”

On GitHub, Ellis further described what the World Citizen Passport is. He explained that the main goal of the project is create a simple process for anyone in the world to create their own Private Passport Service which can be used to validate and prove the existence people using tools that are already available.

He goes on to explain that, “We will prefer open source where available and we will draw on the cryptographic tools like Public Private Key Cryptography (PGP) and blockchain technology in the form of Bitcoin.

“By doing this we aim to give people across the world the ability to grant one another World Citizenship by virtue of their being witnessed in space and in time. This witnessing can be documented with photography and video, that content can be signed with PGP signatures, hashed and timestamped. It can then be joined with Social Network Validation services like Onename.io & Keybase.io before being plugged in to more dynamic reputation systems.”

The World Citizenship Passport aims to empower people in the same way that Bitcoin allows people to take charge of their finances, free from the control of government institutions. The passports would rely on the people who use them, rather than any government.

It’s a fanciful idea, but even if most of the world’s population supports it, it’s doubtful that governments would follow suit.

photo credit: origami_potato via photopin cc