Microsoft’s ION Digital ID Network is Now Accepting Bitcoin Payments

Michael Saylor, the MicroStrategy CEO, shared a Microsoft story on how the global IT giant is developing a project to assist ordinary people to safeguard their digital identities by accepting Bitcoin payments.

#Bitcoin is the future of digital identity.https://t.co/QDNuV3W08Y

— Michael Saylor (@michael_saylor) July 9, 2021

Microsoft’s ION Digital ID Network Accepts Bitcoin Payments

Microsoft is a contributor to the ION project, which aims to create Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). These identifiers would serve as anchor points for all of a person’s Internet activity.

This technology would provide people the freedom to own and defend their online privacy against government monitoring, security breaches, and data leaks, prohibiting internet behemoths from controlling users’ online accounts, passwords, and personal and financial data.

“If Bitcoin aims to remove centralized institutions’ control over money, ION is attempting to accomplish the same with online identities.”

The Bitcoin blockchain is used in this case to provide a high level of decentralization and security while creating DIDs.

Are Decentralized IDs The Way Of The Future?

Contributions to Microsoft’s ION have come from Bitcoin and cryptocurrency heavyweights like Casa, ConsenSys, Gemini, BitPay, and Protocol Labs, as well as teams from Cloudflare, Spruce, and others.

ION has also collaborated with the Transmute and SecureKey teams on the development of their own DID networks.

Decentralized Identity is an excellent example of a non-monetary use case for public blockchains like Bitcoin, and it’s even on the radar of the World Economic Forum’s blockchain head. 

The organization for web standards created in 1994, WorldWide Online Consortium (W3C) is presently examining DIDs as a candidate suggestion, which means the forum is contemplating adopting these identification frameworks as an international standard.

The head of Blockchain Commons and crypto veteran Christopher Allen stated that Microsoft embracing Bitcoin’s characteristics for DIDs is a “move in the right way.”

“You might have a service in the cloud-hosted by Microsoft Azure that is completely safe because everything in it is encrypted with the keys that you control and everything that runs under your authority, although it is in the cloud,” Allen explained.