Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by todd8 1723 days ago
From the article:

> We (W3C) can no longer take a wait-and-see or neutral position on technologies with egregious energy use. We must instead firmly oppose such proof-of-work technologies including to the best of our ability blocking them from being incorporated or enabled (even optionally) by any specifications we develop. If anything we should pursue the opposite: develop specifications that supersede existing specifications, but with much less power consumption. We believe this is consistent with the TAG Ethical Web Sustainability principle
1 comments
capableweb 1723 days ago
What are these people smoking? DID has nothing to do with PoW, it's merely one of the methods you could use to timestamp when a signature was made. There are plenty of other ways (centralized too, since that's probably what Microsoft and Google care about) to do this, so not sure why sustainability is being brought up as a counter-point to the DID specification.
link
detaro 1723 days ago
As someone who has attempted to follow a few events in this space, there was massive presence of PoW blockchain advocates, underlying assumption that everything is blockchain, ... and it very much felt as if other things were very much an afterthought (EDIT: and sadly such afterthoughts in theory being in the spec but useless/not really wanted is not entirely uncommon in specs). If that was a common impression others got, don't be surprised by the reaction.
link
capableweb 1723 days ago
As another person who've followed DID closely, where is the "underlying assumption that everything is blockchain" part coming from? The specification has one mention of "blockchain" and many parts of the specification leaves the storage part free for implementors to decide freely how it works.
link
PretzelPirate 1723 days ago
Daniel from Microsoft’s Identity team has been driving the Microsoft DID effort for years and has been pushing Bitcoin as the storage layer for that entire time.

https://mobile.twitter.com/csuwildcat

link
capableweb 1723 days ago
Daniel can fight for whatever storage mechanism he wants, it's not defined how the DID should be stored in the specification so people are free to store them however they want.

Then some group comes along and uses sustainability as signal against DIDs, when DID has nothing to do with Bitcoin or blockchain? Feels like the motivation for this "response" comes from somewhere else than "please think of the planet".

link