Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?

This is a thoughtful treatment of some of the issues. I worked on digital identity in govt, and sovereign identity is considered seriously there. The concepts in the article force the question of what things like security, dystopian, and scalable mean, among others.

If I were to articulate the gap in perspectives, it would be that it is between the engineering view of solving problems (e.g. Vitalik's "soul bound tokens") and managing them - that is, to extract value from a dynamic, in the case of existing legacy paper/card identity schemes today.

Arguably, in a society, all value is created from risk, where someone takes on the risk of an outcome and someone pays them to hold it while reaping the benefits of whatever thing has exposure to the failure. It's imperfect on purpose, as it allows for flexibilty and non-binary failure modes, and it lets people manage (or extract value) from the shifting risk, where the result is an Economy. When you just solve a problem - let's say we had these perfect soul based tokens, where there was no ambiguity or repudiation for anything, you are depriving people of the very thing we have evolved to be good at, which is judge and collaborate to trade in risks. It's not desirable precisely because instinctually people get they don't want to become solved problems and known quantities.

Digital identity is a very nuanced power struggle going on in the background within government and industry, as identity is the substrate to a certain type of economy, and who wouldn't want to be the controller of that? The better case is having ephemeral identities and just price in insurance to transactions, much like interest rates on credit, but less centralized, and with more exposure to volatility of real life - just like other crypto solutions.

The people writing about this stuff in the crypto community are still sounding out some things for the first time, but just because they are doing so doesn't mean they are the first to consider them. When I worked on an actual govt digital identity and currency product, I pissed off the execs because I said their design didn't pass "the hookers and blow test," which is that if you can't use the payment and identity scheme for grey market transactions, nobody is going to adopt it. Not because they are vice ridden manaics, but because the human animal knows when it is in captivity and it will find ways to resist it.

This is the same reason that central bank digital currencies are going to be an economically inferior good, and create dangerous black markets that produce the dystopian corruption that idealists seem to be trying to avoid, as 1/3 of people just aren't going to trust them. Sure, you can impose the schemes, but if you have ever spent time in an authoritarian regime, you know that the culture is completely debased and anything-goes behind closed doors becase the rules themselves are arbitrary and selectively enforced, because the arbitrariness creates a sense of illigitimacy where there is nothing to trust or believe.

The stupidity of technocracies is illigitimate, and it breeds contempt and corruption. This may seem meta compared to the implementation details of some nerdy key management protocol, but I'd argue if you haven't thought these other parts through, crypto really is just some naive kids building a bike shed to fill with shaved yaks and thinking they're reinventing democracy and freedom.

Nobody gives a shit if your name is Steve Irving. They care if you're wanted in three extradition-treaty countries or on an Interpol list. Federated identities mean you can have five of them and none of them are counterfeit, which is exactly the opposite of what they want to let you into a country, out of a country, to take out a loan, or to be sitting in a jail cell.

There was a time that having multiple identities online was a sensible thing to do, and many in the privacy community wanted this, but now that State actors are fucking with elections, that use case is in serious jeopardy.

I don't understand what you mean by "all value comes from risk." Could you give examples? I don't understand how, say, the value of some food you buy at a grocery store comes from risk.

Also, you say that "instinctually people get they don't want to become solved problems and known quantities," but at least a large subset of the population wants to be famous. And it seems like being trusted by people you know has its benefits too?

Most of those ideas have been around before. See the classic "Why your idea for stopping spam sucks".[1] It's the same problem as email source addresses.

[1] https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

I could ask you the same. You responded to

> in the end, it boils down to everyone just asking to see the passport or some other government ID, or a proxy for that (credit card, library card,

with a standard on distributed identity. That doesn't answer the question. I doubled down on what OP said. So if you don't see how my response isn't a follow-up, then the three of us are talking past each other.