Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible? • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by nonrandomstring » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 5:43 AM UTC

motohagiography wrote: post #11

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 toke…

Some good points. I think a major problem is with the word "identity", is that there are always (at least two) meanings that may or may not intersect. We have self-regarding identities and other-regarding identities. The set of things we define about ourselves that includes beliefs, intentions, secrets and so on may be (for secrets must be) disjoint from the set of things others attribute to us, reputation, observed history, expectations and so on - though a mature, well integrated, social person could be expected to have a high intersection.

If we try to conflate those kinds of identity problems arise because people who are young, vulnerable, transient, in crisis need to be able to revise both kinds. Unless we are wanted criminals we have a right to be forgotten. And we all have a right to change our minds about things and re-invent ourselves.

I think we don't yet have a mature enough understanding of what identity really means for human beings to get successful digital mileage except in a few limited applications like payment systems or session management. Perhaps that's why the concept of "identity politics" is so prominently at play.

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

#32

Post by TheCowboy » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 5:44 AM UTC

I feel like the "Anonymity [is] central to the crypto world." ship sailed a long time ago. It was one of the original promises of Bitcoin but it is literally a public database.

It's also possible that a society with more transparency regarding financial transactions is the better option long-term, but surrendering the dream of anonymity is a tough one for proponents.

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

#33

Post by ggm » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 5:45 AM UTC

woodruffw wrote: post #8

ggm wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting crypto currency to one side, you are aware of the pgp 'strong set'? because six degrees of Kevin Bacon says a handful is a serious underestimate of how good transitive trust can be. The strong set is quite large. That word "transitive" is a very important qualifier here: it's weaker than an absolute statement but hierarchical PKI turns out to be weaker than theory, in practice. Crypto coins are trash. Signatu…

I'm aware of the strong set, but I was under the impression that it didn't accomplish much anymore -- GnuPG disabled SKS lookups a while back, in response to the network's inability to handle thousands of clearly malicious key attestations. The last major topological analysis I can find of the strong set was back in 2015, one year before the first series of spam attacks on SKS. (But don't get me wrong: signatures are…

As usual I'm behind the times. It peaked at 60,000 in 2018 and declined and people stopped believing in it around 2020, some people earlier. My point about scale was a footnote to history, not relevant.

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

#34

Post by bawolff » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 5:48 AM UTC

jchw wrote: post #22

Animats wrote: post #17

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

Hashcash seemed like a good idea :/ didn’t really seem to pan out, though. There’s probably some good use cases for it around, but email anti-spam probably isn’t it.

I mean, we did get bitcoin as a pretty direct evolution of that idea.

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

#35

Post by coderintherye » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 5:53 AM UTC

This is a great write-up for introducing some of these concepts.

For those who want to go deeper, highly recommend reading up more on

DIDs https://w3c.github.io/did-use-cases/ Verifiable Credentials: https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/

Some people working in the space to follow: https://twitter.com/kimdhamilton https://twitter.com/IdentityWoman https://twitter.com/ChristopherA

Also highly recommend this paper by Fennie Wang and Primavera De Filippi: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3524367 ( Self-Sovereign Identity in a Globalized World: Credentials-Based Identity Systems as a Driver for Economic Inclusion )

Self-sovereign identity has some great use cases, even if it does not solve Sybil attack problems. Further, being able to establish identity at all is still a major problem in many places in the world and a barrier to financial inclusion.

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

#36

Post by erik_seaberg » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 5:59 AM UTC

nonrandomstring wrote: post #31

motohagiography wrote: post #11

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 toke…

Some good points. I think a major problem is with the word "identity", is that there are always (at least two) meanings that may or may not intersect. We have self-regarding identities and other-regarding identities. The set of things we define about ourselves that includes beliefs, intentions, secrets and so on may be (for secrets must be) disjoint from the set of things others attribute to us, reputation, observed…

> right to be forgotten

1984 had a pretty good argument why it’s dystopian to tell people they are not allowed to remember or continue believing something.

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

#37

Post by bawolff » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 5:59 AM UTC

I think this article conflates too many different notions of identity together (which tbf, is because the bitcoin people the article is criticizing do the same thing).

Identity is one of those concepts that has a lot of parts to it, and you can do the individual parts sanely, but if you try to do everything all at once, its crazy.

As a example, my ssh key is an identity system. It works great in some contexts. Would i want my social insurance number attached to it? Obviously not, that is crazy. That doesn't mean ssh keys are bad.

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

#38

Post by dmitriid » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 6:02 AM UTC

Molly White consistently writes concise and precise essays about problems in the crypto space that the crypto "community" consistently fail to address or even respond to in as concise and precise a manner.

Well, except "it's too early" and "these articles are wrong and a smear campaign".

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

#39

Post by dropnerd » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 6:05 AM UTC

TheCowboy wrote: post #32

I feel like the "Anonymity [is] central to the crypto world." ship sailed a long time ago. It was one of the original promises of Bitcoin but it is literally a public database. It's also possible that a society with more transparency regarding financial transactions is the better option long-term, but surrendering the dream of anonymity is a tough one for proponents.

pseudonymity is a reasonable compromise.

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

#40

Post by skybrian » Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 6:06 AM UTC

ev1 wrote: post #25

skybrian wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The way I think of it, risk of accident of the delivery truck, the risk of the farm getting their crops ruined, risk of insolvency or net x day term payments, risk of loans taken out to cover patented seeds, risk of expired food. If nobody wanted to take the risk to plant each time given the potential ROI, you wouldn't get grocery items? (I'd consider this a random example https://www.callifd.com/uploads/1/3/0/7/1307…

Okay, but if you reduced or eliminated one of the risks, doesn’t the food still have the same value as before? It seems like the risk is something like a cost, to be optimized away if you can without reducing value. And it isn’t the only cost.