Governance and openness
A registry that does not depend on whoever operates it.
PARCID starts out operated by a company, but behaves from day one as if it already belonged to a neutral entity: its own brand, an open specification, separate accounting and a public commitment to hand it over.
Principles
Five rules, published so they can be enforced.
Identity is free; claims are paid.
Enrolment and resolution cost nobody anything. “It is the same unit”, “this capture is real and current” or “this is how it was at that time” are operator products.
Zero personal data in the global registry.
The registry describes units that travel, not people. The label never goes in; evidence that might contain personal data is stored encrypted and read only by whoever holds the owner key.
Open and verifiable without the registry.
Public format, resolution and export; records verifiable with SHA-256, Ed25519, Merkle trees and Bitcoin anchors. If the operator disappeared, every record would remain verifiable.
Calibrated confidence, not absolute uniqueness.
No physical feature is unique the way a fingerprint is. What is promised is a measured, explained confidence, with a level that depends on how the capture was made.
The operator acts as if the registry already belonged to a neutral entity.
A brand without the operator’s name, an open specification, a commitment to hand over the namespace and separate accounting.
Public handover commitment
The namespace is not ours forever.
The current operator commits to hand over the PID namespace, the specification, the resolver and the export to a non-profit entity when any of these conditions is met:
Proposed conditions · pending decisionMeanwhile, the cost of the free registry is kept in separate accounts, and the registry’s keys are published with their rotation date.
Two layers
The registry and the operators are not the same thing.
neutral
The Registry
- Specification and PID namespace
- Issuance of identifiers
- Free, public resolution
- Export and daily anchors
- Open governance with members
commercial
The operators
- Capture stations and devices
- Sightings and operation records
- Liveness and comparison
- 1:N identification
- Evidence custody
Like a domain registry and its operators: the founding operator provides the registry’s technical service under contract, and other operators can provide services on the same identity.
Current operator
Know Your Parcel
Founding operator and first technical operator of the registry. Know Your Parcel is today a division of MDE HUB SL, based in Spain. It also provides paid services on top of identity, which are contracted with it and not with the registry.
Operator websiteLicences
What you can use, and how.
| Piece | Licence | What it allows |
|---|---|---|
| Specification | CC BY 4.0 | Copy, adapt and implement, with attribution. |
| Reference code | CC0 1.0 | Public domain: use it without conditions. |
| Public resolution data and export | CC0 1.0 | Reuse the public part of the registry without conditions. |
| Resolver, API and server-side verifier | Apache-2.0 | Run a mirror or a compatible registry, from a public repository (in preparation). |
| Independent verifier | CC0 1.0 | Check records, proofs and exports without asking the registry. |
Technical committee
The specification changes in the open.
Semantic versions
Every change to the specification is published with its version and history.
The ID format does not break
A format change only comes with a new version symbol; what was issued remains valid.
Open to implementers
Operators, device makers, developers and researchers can propose changes.
How to take part today: send your proposal or comment, naming the section of the specification.
ContactRevocation
Only for proven abuse. And in public.
- The registry only revokes for proven abuse: mass junk enrolments, illegal content in evidence or device impersonation.
- Revocation is public and justified by a code: abuse, illegal_content, device_compromised.
- A revoked ID keeps resolving, with its status. The record is kept and the ID is never reused.
- The owner can ask at any time for the raw evidence to be deleted. Fingerprints and the physical signature are not deleted: they are not personal data and they support third-party verification.
- A record is never corrected: another one amends it and the old one is marked as superseded.
Transparency
Everything needed to check us, published.
Daily Bitcoin anchor
Merkle root of all of the day’s records in a signed, chained statement, anchored with OpenTimestamps. Each record has its inclusion proof.
/api/v1/anchorsExport
Daily dump of the public part with a signed manifest, each unit by a per-unit salted fingerprint. CC0.
/api/v1/exportRegistry keys
Specification version, public keys with their identifier and rotation date, limits policy.
/.well-known/parcidAggregate reputation
The reputation of enrolment sources is published in aggregate, never per source.
What would destroy it
And that is why we will not do it.
- Storing personal data in the global database.
- Closing the format or the resolution.
- Allowing unlimited junk enrolments.
- Promising an absolute biometric uniqueness that does not exist.
Roadmap
Four planned phases.
Planned · no committed dates- A
Identity in the pilot
A PID for every pilot record, physical signature v1, lineage in consolidation and a minimal public resolution page.
- B
Comparison and liveness
1:1 comparison calibrated with the pilot pairs, passive liveness v1 on the station and sightings as records.
- C
Open base
Public specification, SDK with free enrolment, third-party devices, limits and reputation, GS1 Digital Link.
- D
Identification
1:N identification (lost property, orphan parcels) and an open-standard proposal with a first group of operators.
Open decisions
What is not decided yet, said out loud.
Already decided: daily Bitcoin anchor with OpenTimestamps, no tokens; CC BY 4.0, CC0 and Apache-2.0 licences; permanence commitments.
- Payload length: 60 bits with 2 check symbols (proposal) vs 70 bits.
- Free-tier limits and expiry of raw evidence.
- Condition for handing over the namespace.
- List of unit profiles and their own features in v0.2.
- PID reservations for offline stations: size and expiry.