Musings of a Trust Architect: The Gordian Club - Lif...
Imagine: A reporter maintains a list of sources and the information they provided for an article critical of the federal government. This is a requireme...| Life With Alacrity
On September 28, 2025, Switzerland adopted the use of “electronic proof of identity,” or e-IDs, to be issued and administered by the Swiss government. Use of the e-ID is meant to be voluntary and free of charge. However, there’s still real concern about the use of e-ID in Switzerland. The vote passed with just 50.4% of the voters in agreement. A previous vote on the same subject failed in 2021. And, I think there’s real cause for concern. Fortunately, I was able to talk directly about...| Life With Alacrity
Imagine: A reporter maintains a list of sources and the information they provided for an article critical of the federal government. This is a requireme...| Life With Alacrity
Reflections on recent conversations about digital identity, sovereignty, and the erosion of foundational principles Echoes from Geneva I wasn’t presen...| Life With Alacrity
ABSTRACT: “Fair Witnessing” is a new approach for asserting and interpreting digital claims in a way that mirrors real-world human trust: through personal observation, contextual disclosure, and progressive validation. It can be implemented with the decentralized architecture of Gordian Envelopes to allow individuals to make verifiable statements while balancing privacy, accountability, and interpretability. At its core, fair witnessing is not about declaring truth, it’s about showing y...| Life With Alacrity
In early 2025, Blockchain Commons architected and engineered a major project for the Zcash blockchain: the ZeWIF specification that allows all of its wallets to interoperate. Interoperability is something that I consider vitally important for a technological ecosystem, so I was thrilled that Blockchain Commons could improve interoperability for Zcash. Here’s a bit more on why, what Blockchain Commons did for Zcash, and what I’d like to do for other technological communities. The Limits of...| Life With Alacrity
When can you trust a software release? How do you know that a software repo is safe, that it represents the intent of its creators? On the 20th annivers...| Life With Alacrity
I recently wrote about “How My Values Inform Design”. There I discussed the issue of autonomy and how it can be supported by progressive trust, proof ag...| Life With Alacrity
This summer, we’ve been iterating through an article intended to talk about the success that Blockchain Commons has had working with the Wyoming legislature to help to define a first-in-the-country legal definition of digital identity. The Digital Identity Working Group for the Wyoming Select Committee on Blockchain meets again next week, on September 21-22, 2021. I will be providing testimony there at 2pm MST. As a result, we’ve decided to release the current draft of this article on dig...| Blockchain Commons
This topic was presented at IIWXXXIX Fall 2024 on October 29, 2024. My name is Christopher Allen. In 2016, in advance of the ID2020 conference at the...| Life With Alacrity
