"Is 'acceptably non-dystopian' self-sovereign identity even possible?"

An essay about self-sovereign identity, decentralized identity, verifiable credentials, soulbound tokens, and all those other terms that have been flying around lately.

https://blog.mollywhite.net/is-acceptably-non-dystopian-self-sovereign-identity-even-possible

@molly0xfff

How can centralization help implement privacy-preserving Sybil resistance? (Not rhetorical, I'm sometimes out of the loop with protocols such as escrow.)

If there's privacy, it's hard to know who people are even if you're centralized; Wikipedia for example (where the problem is called "sock puppets").

Sybil resistance sounds good to me, I'm getting sick of waking up in strange rooms in weird clothes trying to find my wallet and not recognizing the name on any of the ID cards.

@Sandra @molly0xfff I've been toying with the idea of verifiable credentials myself, for a good decade and a half, actually, and I genuinely think there is potential there. There are a couple of things the blockchain world gets very wrong, though, the first of which is that it needs to involve any kind of blockchain/record.

But the far more worrying thing is that they all seem to want to enforce things computationally about people. That's the dystopian bit.

@Sandra @molly0xfff Privacy and centralization is really more of a question of which data you reveal to whom. Let's say you do want to receive money to your bank account. As Swiss numbered bank accounts show, you really just need to provide an opaque identifier of sorts to achieve that.

You want to verify that it's at a particular bank? Have that bank sign it. You want to verify that it's owned by some person? Have the bank sign a hash over the person's id...