Musings of a Trust Architect: Has our SSI Ecosystem ...
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
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...| Blockchain Commons
Reflections on recent conversations about digital identity, sovereignty, and the erosion of foundational principles Echoes from Geneva I wasn’t present at the Global Digital Collaboration conference (GDC25), but the observations shared by colleagues who attended have crystallized some issues I’ve been wrestling with for years. I should note there’s a selection bias here: I’m the author of the 10 principles of self-sovereign identity, so my community tends to have strong opinions about...| Blockchain Commons
“Cypherpunks wouldn’t just critique the surveillance state—they’d also call out us technologists for enabling it. We were supposed to resist, not retrofit.” Christopher Allen recently talked with Tereza Bízková in an interview that was published to the front page of Hackernoon. It was headlined “The Co-Writer of TLS Says We’ve Lost the Privacy Plot”. In it, Christopher talks about what privacy means to him, what he thinks about recent privacy efforts, how centralization has ...| 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
First published to the AKASHA blog. Manning Publications has just published "Self-Sovereign Identity: Decentralized digital identity and verifiable credentials". Congratulations to the co-editors, Alex Preukschat and Drummond Reed, for getting 24 chapters, 5 appendices, and a further 11 online-only chapters out the door. No mean feat. My copy will drop on the doormat any day […] The post Self-Sovereign Identity — the book, the dystopia appeared first on Philip Sheldrake.| Philip Sheldrake
ABSTRACT: Self-Sovereign Computing is a transformative paradigm designed to empower individuals to take command of their digital journey and to uphold their dignity, human rights, and resilience online. It encourages proactive collaboration among individuals, collectives, and platforms to enhance digital autonomy and to mitigate vulnerabilities. Building on Christopher’s initial ideas of self-sovereign identity, self-sovereign computing introduces an allegory that revisits some foundational...| Life With Alacrity
This article was originally published as an advance reading for RWOT12 in Köln, Germany on August 9, 2023. It has been slightly edited for this reprint. ABSTRACT: Self-sovereign identity represents an innovative new architecture for identity management. But, we must ensure that it avoids the pitfalls of previous identity systems. During World War II, two identity pioneers, the Dutch Jacobus L. Lentz and the French René Carmille, took different approaches toward the collection and recording ...| Life With Alacrity
