[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.