Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0 (W3C draft)

This spec is awesome for us. Much of the cannabis space in USA depends on these government systems that require a central authority (read: government software) to generate IDs and lot-identifiers for items in the system (or they charge $0.40 for single-use RFID tags). And those systems are buggy, offline, broken, errors, etc, etc, etc.

So, this distributed ID system would permit us to take the central generator OUT of the process -- and do so following a coming global standard (rather than the current attempts to try one-off "unique" methods).

We were already doing something very similar to what is in this document -- which is nice, validates some of what we were already thinking. And I think it will be easier for us to bring others in with some "official" specifications. (I know it's draft only right now).

I think it's really just the fact that it's a standard.

its really hard for me to understand this document, it would be nice to have a section with better examples and relationship to things that are more widely known. how does this relate to http and similar protocols to get the documents, how is it related to foaf+ssl and webid. how is the cryptography part really done and what is the relationship to pgp. i know all these things are completely different but i could not explain in what way...

This should be v0.1 based on the actual utility of the spec, just because it's been incubated for so long doesn't magically make it useful.

DIDs are fundamentally antithetical to privacy and will only enable a deeper and more obscure level of tracking to all applications that use them. They were originally inspired for mapping public blockchain use-cases, but IMO personal identity and related keys should _never_ be put on a public chain, who thinks this could ever be a good idea or architecture?

All of the suggested "workarounds" to layer on privacy to DIDs are just lip service in the spec, there's zero technical requirements for an implementation.

I worry that DIDs based on this spec will be deeply harmful if widely deployed with the multiple layers of abstraction, required dependencies on massively complex things like JSON-LD, and abundance of implementation-time choices. It's such an easy "spec" to embrace and extend by big tech, it has no teeth to prevent tracking abuse and it should develop those as hard normative implementation MUSTs before v1.0 versus the non-normative "Privacy _Considerations_" it has now.

Identity is too important to have it done wrong.

You should have a look at this doc: https://w3c.github.io/did-spec-registries/#did-methods

Lots of concrete examples of how DIDs are being implemented. Ceramic is particularly interesting and advanced in their thinking.