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

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

#31

Post by ska »

openthc wrote: post #21

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 o…

If I recall correctly there is related work getting some traction in Canada too, which is on the whole further up the curve on some of this stuff due to federal legalization.

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

#32

Post by ska »

lightgreen wrote: post #3

Unless I miss something, this looks like a solution to nonexistent problem?

> Unless I miss something, this looks like a solution to nonexistent problem?

The generalizable answer to this is that almost always if some group of people has spent a good chunk of effort but you don't "get it", you have missed something.

The less you know about the domain, the larger and more diverse the group and the bigger the effort, the more likely this is to be true.

Of course there are exceptions, but they are rare.

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

#33

Post by WoodenChair »

ska wrote: post #32
lightgreen wrote: post #3

Unless I miss something, this looks like a solution to nonexistent problem?

> Unless I miss something, this looks like a solution to nonexistent problem? The generalizable answer to this is that almost always if some group of people has spent a good chunk of effort but you don't "get it", you have missed something. The less you know about the domain, the larger and more diverse the group and the bigger the effort, the more likely this is to be true. Of course there are exceptions, but they a…

> The general answer to this is that almost always if some group of people has spent a good chunk of effort but you don't "get it", you have missed something.

Sure, but that doesn't mean that the group of people has cogently explained their work for their target audience. In this case, the target audience would be developers, whom it seems from the comments are confused.

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

#34

Post by ska »

WoodenChair wrote: post #33
ska wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless I miss something, this looks like a solution to nonexistent problem? The generalizable answer to this is that almost always if some group of people has spent a good chunk of effort but you don't "get it", you have missed something. The less you know about the domain, the larger and more diverse the group and the bigger the effort, the more likely this is to be true. Of course there are exceptions, but they a…

> The general answer to this is that almost always if some group of people has spent a good chunk of effort but you don't "get it", you have missed something. Sure, but that doesn't mean that the group of people has cogently explained their work for their target audience. In this case, the target audience would be developers, whom it seems from the comments are confused.

That's true, but I think it's a different problem. It's not clear that a spec should be expected to contain all the context needed.

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

#35

Post by jFriedensreich »

uberdru wrote: post #29
jFriedensreich wrote: post #25

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…

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.

that explains a lot but also how would this even work? every solution that relies on generic did s would have to implement all supported methods? or is every method an incompatible namespace in which case what is even the point of did? i really don't get it...

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

#36

Post by 7steps2much »

mooreds wrote: post #5
lightgreen wrote: post #3

Unless I miss something, this looks like a solution to nonexistent problem?

See also https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro... The European Commission is thinking about these problems too.

Correct me if I am wrong, but most of these services, such as the electronic signature, the electronic seals and the document exchange functionality outlined on that website are all dependent on a central authority are they not?

Your signature certificate is issued by your government (or an organisation working for said government). The seals are created with certificates that are, once again, created by a central authority.

The document exchange is really just a fancy way to store files on your device and send them.

As far as I can tell none of this is decentralised? I don't really see why they would want to decentralise it either, your digital identity as a citizen only exists because a central authority, a nation in this case, validated you to be a citizen ...

As mentioned, correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I can see all of these EU plans are basically just giving each EU citizen a cert that is issued by their government and some nice applications that build around those certs?

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

#38

Post by jFriedensreich »

uberdru wrote: post #29
jFriedensreich wrote: post #25

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…

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.

and regarding ceramic : i tried finding out what the heck that was and had the same amount of luck as with did. is this written for a different species of developers? they seem to try solving the same problems of ipfs pubsub and ipns but without any hint how they solved it.

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

#39

Post by naravara »

jeremie wrote: post #27

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 p…

> 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?

Functionally, how different would this be from the status quo? Between the FAANGs basically already having near-universal identifiers for all of us and everyone's information being leaked in a variety of breaches to where it's essentially public knowledge to any black hats or state actors I'm not sure how down the downsides are?

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

#40

Post by dwaite »

jFriedensreich wrote: post #35
uberdru wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that explains a lot but also how would this even work? every solution that relies on generic did s would have to implement all supported methods? or is every method an incompatible namespace in which case what is even the point of did? i really don't get it...

TL;DR it remains to be seen if DIDs create more problems than they solve.

I think you got it correctly. "DID" is basically a qualifier for identifiers which can have metadata resolved about them using 'some mechanism', and there are 100+ mechanisms (DID methods). These all have varying technical and non-technical differentiating factors, partially described in the DID Rubrick https://w3c.github.io/did-rubric/ .

DID methods will not have consistent features nor will the metadata resolved by them consistently meet your data requirements, so you will be limited both in terms of methods you can accept for your use case, and DIDs you can accept within that.

One if the base ideas is that it puts users in control of their identity by "owning" a DID, presumably with a lot of local software assistance. This is likely not a single DID, both for interoperability and privacy reasons.

It is also likely the DID will be "controlled" by others in some cases - e.g. if a employer or bank accepts DIDs as an authentication system, they will want to be able to guarantee the authentication meets their standards/regulatory requirements.

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