Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'
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Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'
#2First time I've seen "s12y" (sustainability) and while I'm usually averse to new buzzwords I quite like the association with "i18n" (internationalization) and "a11y" (accessibility).
Somehow feels like the trinity of responsible software ("responsible" probably isn't the right word here).
Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'
#3Self-Sovereign Identity and DIDs are a very fast moving train. People argue that in the early internet days there was a similar competition between new protocols(compare with DID methods) before we arrive in our todays HTTP(S)-only world. Similarly DID methods will probably consolidate to a handful within few years and DID Core is only a first step to get a minimal common denominator.
Also its questionable if Microsoft&Google and the others are fearing a rapidly evolving ecosystem that they can not jump on as fast and therefore remain sceptic in any case
Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'
#4Does anyone have links to the Google and Microsoft reviews mentioned in this email?
Browsing the last 6 months of public-new-work archives doesn't seem to yield many other reviews of the DID proposal.
Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'
#5One of my acquaintainces at Microsoft worked for years to get this through: https://identity.foundation/sidetree/spec/
DIDs built as a Sidetree on top of Bitcoin. At least they don’t require everything being on-chain, but securing with proof-of-work is unfortunate.
Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'
#6Called it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27024026
Feels good to be validated by someone like Tantek.
Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'
#7From the article:
> We (W3C) can no longer take a wait-and-see or neutral position on technologies with egregious energy use. We must instead firmly oppose such proof-of-work technologies including to the best of our ability blocking them from being incorporated or enabled (even optionally) by any specifications we develop. If anything we should pursue the opposite: develop specifications that supersede existing specifications, but with much less power consumption. We believe this is consistent with the TAG Ethical Web Sustainability principle
Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'
#8It's interesting to me the amount of energy people spend on convincing themselves that a technology (POW) that didn't even exist 12 years ago and ran on home PCs up until 7 years ago is somehow responsible for wildfires in California or deforestation in Brazil. DID has little to do with Bitcoin. I don't even know if it's the best option, but clearly the lack of decentralized identity on the web has been significant in propagating corporatist monopoly ownership and influence over the web. Nitting about an integration with one particular blockchain (DID works with multiple) is not productive and it's a distraction from the core point of the proposal.
At any rate, I've become fairly convinced at this point that something like ENS (https://ens.domains/) is better suited for a decentralized identity. Optionally registering a simple domain name via a smart contract and signing in to services with a public-private key pair (such as an Ethereum address) is a far superior experience to anything I've seen as far as simplicity goes. I don't need to give up personal contact info. I have ownership of my address. I can create new addresses if I need. I can augment my ENS-linked domain with social media info or website info and that is all stored on-chain. However, one-click sign in doesn't require hitting the chain, just requires signing a message. It's pretty elegant. I just think it needs more standardization.
Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'
#9One of my acquaintainces at Microsoft worked for years to get this through: https://identity.foundation/sidetree/spec/ DIDs built as a Sidetree on top of Bitcoin. At least they don’t require everything being on-chain, but securing with proof-of-work is unfortunate.
PoW is the only proof mechanism that has seen real world use for a significant length of time.
Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'
#10It is much easier to destroy than to create.
The attack on DIDs is the same pattern of attack on Extensible Resource Identifiers (XRIs), one of the standardization attempts along the path to DIDs. Politics and soundbytes popular at the time are used to garner a boost in public opinion, or to defeat something that may threaten the status quo, or to just defeat the efforts of someone disliked by a group (some of the same people in DIDs were in the XRI effort).
DIDs may not be the best technology to solve decentralized identity, but it is the best technology we have right now. ENS is great, but completely tied into Ethereum.
I am horribly disappointed in Mozilla in general, and Tantek in particular. For me this is the last signpost on Mozilla's road from being a bastion for Open Source to being a JACM (Just Another Corporate Monolith).
Why the big-name detractors coming out the woodwork now for the review did not take part in the DID standardization effort is unclear to me. They could have influenced its growth and helped it mature into something they could live with - proper pre-natal care for standards and by those involved with Standard Development Orgs.
Instead they have sent corporate hatchetmen to abort DIDs stillborn at birth.