By Sandra Quinn

Almost every part of your life will involve some sort of account number, username, password, profile picture or personal detail.

Whether it is for your electricity account, your loyalty card for your favourite store, your bank account or your social media accounts, you are identifiable in a number of different ways.

We give away things like our name, postal address, email address, date of birth, picture, family details, mother’s maiden name and more when setting up accounts online and in years to come, the virtual world will offer up a kaleidoscope of information on our lives and how we lived them through these snippets, which we gave away so freely.

We are far from a time when you didn’t need account details, passwords or codes to gain access to our own information and details.

With the emergence of the blockchain, we finally have a chance to embrace anonymity once again, but in the digital realm.

In the future, our online persona will not be a profile picture, address, name or something, which would easily identify us to the world – instead it will be a blockchain number.

There is a wonderful freedom to be had in being a number – you are not username John1952 – a password which not only gives away your name, but also your year of birth, instead you are a string of numbers with nothing linking them to you as a person in the real world.

This is a way to reclaim privacy and control, which was lost for so long.