Take three. And action!
Yes, this is my third attempt at writing about DiDs, decentralized identity. If we want to split hairs or be lenient on me, it's actually only the second attempt to put down words. The first attempt was me talking out loud on a deserted beach on the way to Cape of Kolka. Must have been day 3 of my 113km hiking challenge. 20km into the hike of that day with another 10 to 20 ahead of me. No kidding, that was the plan. I called it quit around the 35km mark, with 45 minutes or so of sunlight left. It was the start of 1.5 days self-talk 🤪 Something broke...DiDs are simultaneously a philosophical concept and a technical infrastructure. Of course one is tied to the other, as technological development is spurred by our ideologies. You laugh? Then explain what the Zuzalu movement is, if not an experiment closely intertwining ideology of how people should be living with technology? Or the investment in vitamins and supplement? Or research into nano-technology and brain implants? Nothing but a step to make science fiction reality.
I can't help but associate the idea of a decentralized identifier (DiD) with the shards of identity, offline, online, and onchain, humans naturally have. We are multifaceted and our behavior is a testament to it. Again and again I have to correct myself: It's decentralized identifier and not decentralized identity. The distinction is important. The former is a technological solution, while the latter is a manifestation of human's split personality.
In the beginning, there was the allure of an online stage that is only for you. A podium, a stadium where you are the only show. Facebook perfecting it with The Wall giving us a tool to get others to flock to us, leave messages and read our thoughts. Cracks around copy-right of pictures were showing early, but nothing too serious to make us stop and think.
And the internet brought forth fame and fury yielding fruit after their kind: And Humans saw that it was not good. Discontent rose for having relinquished ownership of their digital selves. Humans looove to own stuff. There's a little Golum in all of us screaming "It is mine, my precious!"
It might be the original sin, but unpacking this thought further would lead this post into a completely different direction, and I'm already struggling keeping my thoughts in line. Let's look up, march on and not be distracted by Shiny New Objects!As I said, second was discontent to having to relinquish control. Control over our identity. It stunk deeply to give away ownership of who we are. It doesn't matter that this identity was digital. The notion that you could build a digital life but not take it with you when you moved to another digital platform felt like betrayal.
OpenID, the user-centric log-in system that rose with social media, put a federated entity at the center of the identity-sharing process. You could share your identity with another third-party, if they followed the policies of the central entity that "owned" your entity. If not, too bad for you. Central entity goes down? What a shame, your digital self is now dead. You want to use a different platform? Good for you, start from scratch.
Now greed was more subtil than any emotion of the human. The increasingly inhumane intelligence, reading, watching, listening and analyzing every byte. Did Facebook really give Netflix access to our private messages as a source of inspiration for series and movies? Data is the new oil (and sea is turning into blue gold, but that's another Shiny New Object), and humans, producers of data, are tapped. Albeit, not a la Matrix style in some slimy basket.
Decentralized identities experience a rise thanks to the ideological package of crypto and technological progress. In 2019 W3C[1] published their first recommendation for Verified Credentials, one of DiDs legos. The current document describing the core architecture, data model and representations is dated July 2022. We're so early.
In crypto, we eliminate the middle-man in financial transactions, but don't feel comfortable trusting a string of letters and numbers. The idea of anons is weird, uncomfortable. You know what they are saying: "if you don't have to hide something, why not reveal who you are?"
Because it's none of your business who I am!
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.
Take one: And so decentralized identity solution are created. For privacy reason. Creating a disconnect between the entity holding your identity, and the entity looking for confirmation about who you are. You get to create Verified Credentials attesting that a piece of information about you is true, and sharing only this Verified Credentials, instead of your complete identity. You get to port your identity from platform to platform, looking for a better home, just like humans have been nomading for millennials on the physical world.
rewind, and try againTake two: And so decentralized identity solution are created. For scoring reason. Organizations in web3 accepted that they can't know who they are dealing with, but they want to limit their risk. Organizations wanted to know if these are "good" and "trustful" people. Can you work with them? Can you lend them money? What can you sell to them?
And that was my struggle when drafting the original post. Decentralized identity tap into a multi-party problem. On one side you have individuals. People want to be selective about with whom they share what information, they want to be private. On the other side you have organizations. They want to sell to individuals, and hire them. And for this they need reassurance.
But before we turn companies into the boogie man, even humans want reassurance before dealing with other humans. Why do we have ratings on marketplace platforms like AirBnB, Uber and so on (not that rating eliminates the problem)? Too many of us got scammed, rugged or hurt by strangers and fake friends. Word-of-mouth has, even in this digital world, such a high value because of the human connectedness that is implied in it. I know for sure I'd prefer to check out a community's bro-ranking instead of joining it as an anon to figure out the vibe, or seeing a person's goodwill score before replying to their dm.
[1] W3c is the World Wide Web Consortium. It's an organization that develops international standards for the World Wide Web. It has been founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee.
