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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'

#21

Post by [deleted] »

geofft wrote: post #19
chrisco255 wrote: post #8

It'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 i…

> It'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. I'm not sure why years of time matters. Rapid growth is extremely common in technology. How much time did you need to spend convincing yourself that a micro…

[deleted]

Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'

#22

Post by vmception »

user-the-name wrote: post #20
vmception wrote: post #15

Proof of Work (POW) solutions can be equally deployed on other consensus protocols that don't have unbounded energy demands, given the ways the platforms function. Proof of Stake (POS), Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS), etc. There should be standardized education in this field if standards communities themselves can be so reactionary, equally missing that decentralized identifiers have nothing to do with blockchain, a…

As usual with blockchain promotion, the word "can" is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

It is database state consensus acknowledgment, not blockchain promotion.

If you deploy a development environment where certain functions can run, it doesn't matter if the underlying hardware is using 1% of global emissions, or a couple households worth. This post is acknowledging that the "nearly none at all solutions exist" and are good enough for some purposes, while also acknowledging that it is weird that a standards committee did not acknowledge them but reacted to the global emissions one.

Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'

#23

Post by dboreham »

Better imho to ask: what user problem is DID solving?

Because: if it's truly decentralized then there's no need to publish it. But publication is a core aspect of DID. That it must be published is a jedi mind trick that allows in "on a blockchain". Now we see the real problem being solved (not a user problem): need something published on a blockchain.

Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'

#24

Post by pwlb »

zcw100 wrote: post #18
pwlb wrote: post #3

Self-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 Microso…

This is probably the last thing that the likes of Microsoft and Google are worrying about right now. I'm sure it is fun imagining being the lone hacker keeping them up at night.

not yet, but identity giants like okta and ping are already looking at SSI very carefully. digital identity will be key in the next years

Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'

#25

Post by Noujin »

dboreham wrote: post #23

Better imho to ask: what user problem is DID solving? Because: if it's truly decentralized then there's no need to publish it. But publication is a core aspect of DID. That it must be published is a jedi mind trick that allows in "on a blockchain". Now we see the real problem being solved (not a user problem): need something published on a blockchain.

> if it's truly decentralized then there's no need to publish it.

How do you come to that conclusion?

Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'

#26

Post by PretzelPirate »

capableweb wrote: post #11
todd8 wrote: post #7

From 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 spec…

What are these people smoking? DID has nothing to do with PoW, it's merely one of the methods you could use to timestamp when a signature was made. There are plenty of other ways (centralized too, since that's probably what Microsoft and Google care about) to do this, so not sure why sustainability is being brought up as a counter-point to the DID specification.

Daniel from Microsoft’s Identity team has been driving the Microsoft DID effort for years and has been pushing Bitcoin as the storage layer for that entire time.

https://mobile.twitter.com/csuwildcat

Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'

#27

Post by csixty4 »

pwlb wrote: post #3

Self-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 Microso…

Microsoft hired Kim Cameron at the tail end of the last decentralized digital identity craze and once built an OS feature (CardSpace) to support it. I really doubt anyone there is afraid of sovereign identity.

Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'

#28

Post by pwlb »

dboreham wrote: post #23

Better imho to ask: what user problem is DID solving? Because: if it's truly decentralized then there's no need to publish it. But publication is a core aspect of DID. That it must be published is a jedi mind trick that allows in "on a blockchain". Now we see the real problem being solved (not a user problem): need something published on a blockchain.

Not necessarily is DID connected to publishing something on a blockchain. First: DID does not make any statements to the underlying infrastructure, this can be a completely decentralized public, permissionless blockchain but also public, permissoned ledger(also decentral but a little less) or the did Methods using a central server as referenced in the w3c mozilla response. DID for example solves/enables some aspects of the 10 principles of SSI, e.g. portability

Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'

#29

Post by eoo »

geofft wrote: post #19
chrisco255 wrote: post #8

It'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 i…

> It'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. I'm not sure why years of time matters. Rapid growth is extremely common in technology. How much time did you need to spend convincing yourself that a micro…

There's a non-sequitour in your depiction of an attack. Gaining 50% of hashing power is not that interesting unless you really want to prevent someone from using their Bitcoin. And you can only prevent them from using it while your attack is sustained. When someone has gained ~50% of the hashing power, they only can do a small number of attacks [1], that are only profitable under external conditions, and even then, extremely risky unless you have a lot more than 50%.

There really are no arguments for a race-to-the-bottom boundless energy spenditure. The equilibrium point is the market's appreciation of the service of securing a network of inflationless, politically neutral money, which is a pretty cool thing to have in our world of tyrannic governments.

[1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_...

Re: Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'

#30

Post by fennecfoxen »

zcw100 wrote: post #17

Snooze. Yet another half baked idea from the W3C. Remember WebID? Probably not because it went nowhere after repeatedly ignoring major weaknesses. What did they do? Address them with well thought out solutions? No, they did exactly what they always do, ignore it until they can't and then bolt on some actually implemented solution hoping to ride their coat tails. Sort of like what we've got here with JSON-LD. So now w…

The link goes to a takedown of the idea, agreeing with you it’s pretty half-baked. Lectures on its superiority seem unlikely.
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