Litecoin and Digital Identities

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In the headline-driven world, Coin Desk is guilty of supplying viewers with a slightly misleading headline. It reads: "Microsoft Eyes Role for Bitcoin, Ethereum in Decentralized ID." For some reason, Coin Desk felt it necessary to leave out the important mention of Litecoin. Please reach out to Coin Desk for further comment.

With that out of the way, this is exciting news for new ways to leverage the distributed nature of the Litecoin blockchain as a means to store all aspects of our digital identity. As Ankur Patel from Microsoft’s Identity Division states:

To support a vast world of users, organizations, and devices, the underlying technology must be capable of scale and performance on par with traditional systems. Some public blockchains (Bitcoin [BTC], Ethereum, Litecoin, to name a select few) provide a solid foundation for rooting DIDs, recording DPKI operations, and anchoring attestations. (emphasis mine)

Litecoin in the eyes of software giant Microsoft is in an elite group of cryptocurrencies that is able to support a worldwide digital identity foundation. Microsoft is also actively working with Layer 2 solutions (Litecoin Lightning Network anyone?) to scale up to the millions of transactions per second required for the future of any viable product. What is great, is that they specifically state that block size increases will not be the solution to the scaling debate. Patel states:

While some blockchain communities have increased on-chain transaction capacity (e.g. blocksize increases), this approach generally degrades the decentralized state of the network and cannot reach the millions of transactions per second the system would generate at world-scale. To overcome these technical barriers, we are collaborating on decentralized Layer 2 protocols that run atop these public blockchains to achieve global scale, while preserving the attributes of a world class DID system.