[jonahbenton]

The user problem- for those who see it that way- is that right now, digital stuff related to a person, is tied up primarily with the person's email address, or in some cases with the person's phone number.

(For the purposes of this discussion, call the email address or phone number an "identifier".)

Why is this a problem? Two reasons:

1. People don't "control" those identifiers

Many email addresses used in this context are controlled by employers, and the person's right to use them ends when they leave employment. Or they are controlled through expensive commercial arrangement between the person and the platform, and the person may lose access if they are no longer able to afford the platform. Or, they are free, offered by large data harvesting/advertising platforms, who mine data stored on the platform, and as below, linked to those identifiers from other platforms, to create advertising and propaganda targeting profiles.

2. Those identifiers are used by others to contact the person, and are therefore long-lived, which means they are also a vehicle for correlating an individual's activity across internet platforms who are necessarily presented with those identifiers by the person when they engage with the platform.

DIDs are an attempt to have identifiers that are controlled by people that:

  * are inexpensive
  * can be short-lived and "rotated"
  * can be specific to the relationship between a person and a particular platform
  * can support more tailored association of personal data to identifier
  * can better support the person's management and correlation of their platform relationships, while minimizing if desired that the correlation of identifiers back to a person by the platforms themselves
  * and support other use cases

In terms of "decentralization" and "publishing"- there is definitely a need to publish identifiers in some cases. People want to find others, and want to be found. Whether that publishing constitutes centralization is nuanced.

But the key issue is that right now it is hard to impossible for a normal person to engage with a small or large platform that does not involve a widely used identifier.

[EDIT: whether normal users consider this to be a problem is an open question, and as is whether they would if a solution existed to the problem...]

[csixty4]

Somebody introduces a new technology to address these concerns every couple years and it doesn't go anywhere. These aren't actually problems to a lot of users. That's the real problem that needs to be solved - awareness. And that's a lot harder than taking the identity solutions we came up with in the Identity 2.0 days and adding a blockchain.

[capableweb]

> Somebody introduces a new technology to address these concerns every couple years and it doesn't go anywhere.

That's the problem, we need protocols and standards, then laws to enforce those, not _technology_. The DID specification is a "old" attempt at this, I remember first coming across DIDs back in 2015-2016 sometime, so DIDs are hardly new.

> we came up with in the Identity 2.0 days and adding a blockchain

Good thing no one has suggested to add any blockchains! Commentators here on HN would do themselves a service by reading the actual specification before commenting, seems to be a common misconception that DIDs has something to do with blockchains.

[drdeca]

While of course it is just one of many (alongside e.g. “just use a public key”(or hash of one or something. I don’t know the details), and “just use a github username”, when looking at the example resolver, and trying to read the docs, my impression was that a fair proportion of the examples given were blockchain related?

So, that could be part of the reason for the misconception.

I was first introduced to it by the, bold post on the Protocol Labs (the people behind IPFS) blog, about ION as a particular type of DID (sorry, “type of” is probably not quite the right terminology, but I’m not sure what the preferred terminology is) which appears to use the Bitcoin chain (but in a way that involves only very few transactions and very little on-chain data).

Personally I found the FAQ page for DIDs to be a little,

well, it isn’t particularly focused on assisting the reader in evaluating “should I care about this”?

I guess in some ways it seemed a third of the from being a normal FAQ and being a specification, or, not a specification but a, documentation of policy and plans etc.

[westurner]

> Somebody introduces a new technology to address these concerns every couple years and it doesn't go anywhere. These aren't actually problems to a lot of users.

"Use Cases and Requirements for Decentralized Identifiers" https://www.w3.org/TR/did-use-cases/

> 2. Use Cases: Online shopper, Vehicle assemblies, Confidential Customer Engagement, Accessing Master Data of Entities, Transferable Skills Credentials, Cross-platform User-driven Sharing, Pseudonymous Work, Pseudonymity within a supply chain, Digital Permanent Resident Card, Importing retro toys, Public authority identity credentials (eIDAS), Correlation-controlled Services

And then, IIUC W3C Verifiable Credentials / ld-proofs can be signed with W3C DID keys - that can also be generated or registered centrally, like hosted wallets or custody services. There are many Use Cases for Verifiable Credentials: https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-use-cases/ :

> 3. User Needs: Education, Retail, Finance, Healthcare, Professional Credentials, Legal Identity, Devices

> 4. User Tasks: Issue Claim, Assert Claim, Verify Claim, Store / Move Claim, Retrieve Claim, Revoke Claim

> 5. Focal Use Cases: Citizenship by Parentage, Expert Dive Instructor, International Travel with Minor and Upgrade

> 6. User Sequences: How a Verifiable Credential Might Be Created, How a Verifiable Credential Might Be Used

IIRC DHS funded some of the W3C DID and Verified Credentials specification efforts. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26758099

There's probably already a good way to bridge between sub-SKU GS1 schema.org/identifier on barcodes and QR codes and with DIDs. For GS1, you must register a ~namespace prefix and then you can use the rest of the available address space within the barcode or QR code IIUC.

DIDs can replace ORCIDs - which you can also just generate a new one of - for academics seeking to group their ScholarlyArticles by a better identifier than a transient university email address.

The new UUID formats may or may not be optionally useful in conjunction with W3C DID, VC, and Verifiable News, etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28088213

When would a DID be a better choice than a UUID?