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

Or it exists so that everyone makes sure that everyone else understands the words/concepts being used in the same way.

What does (e.g.) "full payment on final construction" mean? Well, it depends on who you ask. Contracts there to (hopefully) make sure everyone is agreeing to the same transaction.

No. Give up illusions like your rights exist in some vacuous transcendental place outside of other people and society. Read, "Leviathan" by Thomas Hobbes or if you really want to get the, "tarian" washed out of your soul dig into Rousseau's, "the Social Contract."

I will state this over and over: "The Divine Right of Individuals" is a myth rooted in how the United States' constitution is worded. God isn't real and he can't give you rights and claiming in a court of law (made up of people) where evidence is of the highest concern, "God gave me rights and I'm a sovereign unto myself do to certain unalienable rights which I cannot obviously or readily demonstrate without making an appeal to hundreds of years of political development" doesn't seem a compelling enough reason for society to release a suspected criminal or the like.

Meta: The fundamental fallacy with crypto is that it ignores that the vitality of, "currencies" is quite like the vitality of languages vs their counterparts, dialects-- What makes distincts a dialect from a language? Borders and armies. It's a tough pill to swallow that the world is kind of fundamentally based on violence but once you get past what is sometimes referred to as, "Democratic Peace Theory" and have a sense of history (start with Thucydides) it becomes very hard to take the idea of cryptocurrency seriously. Digital payments have practical value. I think that's about the extent of it. Trustlessness is a character defect and a social mallady and it doesn't surprise me nerds see this as forward movement.

The argument is effectively boiled down to “here are a bunch of people working on very hard problems. Hard problems are hard, and therefore crypto won’t work”.

If you were to replace the word crypto with “computers” or “space travel”, most folks here would push back, saying that “yes these are hard problems, but there’s a lot of people working on it, and there’s lots of different solutions in many different directions.” And that would be a perfectly reasonable counter.

Most pro-crypto and anti-crypto have attached their identity to liking or dislike crypto.

If you disagree, ask yourself if, upon meeting someone who likes crypto, your brain naturally likes or dislikes the person. If you see someone talk about crypto in a positive light on the internet, do you instinctively upvote or downvote them?

This identity makes it very hard to make rational predictions about crypto. It’s too easy to weigh the same evidence in favor of crypto if you like crypto, or against crypto if you don’t like crypto.

Since most folks on HN dislike crypto, you may want to ask “what evidence would cause me to think crypto would work? What evidence would cause me to think it was good? Say crypto worked in 20 years, what would now like?”

If, when you’re attempting to answer those questions, your brain instead starts to answer the opposite questions (ex: “here is why crypto can’t possibly work”), then you know you’ve been trapped by the soldier mindset, and are not thinking rationally.

If your mind draws a blank or thinks “there is no evidence that crypto will work”, then either you are living in a bubble, your brain refuses to see information counter to your prior, or you have to figure out what makes you more able to understand the situation.

Could we avoid armchair diagnoses? For society to function we need to maintain the polite fiction that one's actions are determined solely by their will.