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

I’ve been musing about a similar but more simple problem: how can we prove we are an individual human in the context of a web service. Think of this like the ultimate CAPTCHA where not only can you prove you are human but every person can do so at most once or, more pragmatically, O(once).

The closest thing we have in society today is Sign in with Apple, where you have a delegated identity provided by a company which has effectively put up a large portion of its brand value as collateral that it won’t be shady, for some definition of the term “be shady”. This is suboptimal for a number of reasons, not least of which is that they can be compelled by a government to divulge this data while (mostly) protecting their brand-value-collateral, and they can be selective in what types of services are allowed to use this system.

I’m hopeful some of the non-charlatan web3 folks can come up with some sort of scheme where a trusted entity (a government or a civil rights oriented NGO) can participate in a cryptographic handshake with an end user and a service where at the end the service receives a unique identifier for that user which can not be used to associate that user across services, or divulge to the trusted entity which services a particular individual is using. This wouldn’t fully solve the “can I give this person a loan” problem, but would make many things on the web much better (most bots pretending to be human would become cost prohibitive). I also feel like trustworthiness attestation can be incrementally built on such a system (if such a system is possible).

What a time to be alive.

- The trilemmas do not need to be solved. They just need to be acknowledged when you are designing your application so that people can understand the types of trade-offs being made. In cases where sybil-resistance is not a requirement, you can build a system that gives you privacy and decentralization. When sybil-resistance is required, you just need to think if you prefer a system that sacrifices privacy or if it sacrifices decentralization. Depending on the use-case, one might be preferred over the other.

- "Security practices are hard, no one will do it properly, they will rather have some expert that can do it for them". Well, if you don't want to deal with security hygiene, you delegate. Just like the majority of people will rightfully prefer to have a bank to manage most of their funds, one could still envision a future where service providers will act as a proxy to anything that requires "your" identity(ies).

In general, the thing that upsets me with all of anti-crypto/anti-web3 people is that they fall into the same trap as the maxis: they start from this ridiculous notion that "web3" is about creating a Highlander solution (there can be only one!) and that this solution needs to satisfy all constraints, otherwise it rubbish and needs to be discarded. The important thing by having decentralized identities (and decentralized technology in general) is that it gives new options for whole new classes of applications that do not exist. No one is being forced to adopt a system just because it is now possible to do it on a blockchain, and we do not need to destroy the current systems if they work well - or at least if they work better than any alternative. There will be even plenty of cases where the status quo is totally fine.

we are indeed social creatures and we are developing new civic and social innovations. this mostly relates to actively opting into communities with people we like that share our values and that do not attempt to control us. and crypto/web3 enables us to exit the rotten institutions that try to coerce us into being part of them, and create new institutions that represent our values.

it is pretty obvious when you think about it. only institutions we actively and freely opt into can actually be legitimate.

and the idea that something that claims a monopoly on violence also claims to be legitimate is just completely, utterly laughable. and what is going on right now is that the clown car is finally flying off a cliff :)