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
On January 31, Christopher Allen spoke with Mathieu Glaude at the SSI Orbit Podcast on the controversial topic “Has Our SSI Ecosystem Become Morally Bankrupt?”. Following the video link, below, are Christopher’s Musings on the topic, overviewing some of the material from the video. The legitimacy of the modern self-sovereign identity (SSI) industry is a vital question to ask, because in the last year I’ve become to wonder if DIDs and VCs could actually lose. In my opinion, the main th...| 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 United Nations in New York, I wrote “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity”, the article that described the ten precepts of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and provided the name that defined our ecosystem. Eight and a half years later, I ask the SSI community to reflect on a difficult question, one that challenges the very foundation of SSI. Has...| Life With Alacrity
I regularly post all of my “Musings of a Trust Architect” to both here and Blockchain Commons, but other posts at Blockchain Commons may be of interest as well. Here’s a look at other topics at Blockchain Commons this year. Quarterly Reports What is Blockchain Commons exactly? And what’s going on there? Those are discussed in the quarterly (and yearly) reports. Blockchain Commons: Q3, 2024 Blockchain Commons: Q2, 2024 Blockchain Commons: Q1, 2024 Blockchain Commons: 2023 in Review Ech...| Life With Alacrity
Digital communities are collections of individual entities that are connected together. They can be modeled as graphs, with the individuals being nodes and their relationships being edges. Traditionally, identity models have focused on the nodes, but in Musings of a Trust Architect: Edge Identifiers & Cliques, I suggested that both private keys and public-key identifiers could be based on the relational edges, and that when you combined a complete set of edges you could create a cryptographic...| 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
