Why identity cannot be an input to vaccine passport checks or any other real-world digital authorizations — In computer systems it is common to construct digital gates around a service. The most common example is a username and password login gate that does a combination of authentication (i.e. verifying who is accessing the service) and authorization (i.e. what functions of the service can be executed). This approach…

Making Good on the Original Promises of Self-Sovereign Identity — Correlation is the primary tool used by established online services to create real-world political aggression against dissenters. …

But There is an Alternative — On September 1st, 2021 a member of the W3C Advisory Committee filed their response to the “Call for Review” of the Decentralized Identifiers v1.0 Specification (DID core spec). In short, the conclusion of the reviewer is a formal objection and recommendation that the proposed specification not be published as an…

Cryptography Always Works, With or Without Privacy Regulations — “The Self-Sovereign Identity community has been saying ‘any day now’ for 10 years. Why has it stalled? Because many in the industry are greedy cargo cultists. …

Political Solutions Never Solve Technological Problems — The W3C has been hard at work for the last four years in endless political fights over the design of the standard for decentralized identity documents and their identifiers. The end result is a design-by-committee solution that is malformed, didactic and fights adoption. It fails to meet basic requirements for…

T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶d̶o̶c̶u̶m̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶l̶i̶c̶e̶n̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶u̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶C̶r̶e̶a̶t̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶C̶o̶m̶m̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶A̶t̶t̶r̶i̶b̶u̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶4̶.̶0̶ ̶I̶n̶t̶e̶r̶n̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶(̶C̶C̶ ̶B̶Y̶ ̶4̶.̶0̶)̶ ̶l̶i̶c̶e̶n̶s̶e̶.̶ This is a copy of the specification now governed as a Community Specification hosted on Github. This project is generously sponsored by Google and the Linux Foundation. This specification documents a new, proposed protocol Git…

All of us intuitively have a sense of what trust is and how to earn and maintain it as well as how to lose it. Trust never comes for free. The cost of earning trust is consistent trustworthy behavior over time. It forms our reputation in our social circles. But…

There are so many people today focused on “re-decentralizing the web.” They have a popular belief that when the web was invented it was a wonderfully optimistic vision of decentralization, governed by democratic principles and full of free information available through open access that all of humanity benefited from. They…

All networks begin as only one thing; one neuron, one cell, one chip, one computer, or one user. One entity alone is not a network, but it is the starting point for understanding the unified theory of decentralization. One entity is fully sovereign, it has no connections to anything else…