Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by valray 1456 days ago
The notion of decentralized identity has been an enchanting vision since Christopher Allen first articulated it in 2016. Since then, DID spec has been around for years in draft form, and there are at least a dozen vendors and/or projects producing DID-compatible or DID-relevant technology.

Of course, these different packages are not (yet) compatible, but that's not the problem. The problem is that, after a good 4 or 5 years, it's hard to find a single project that uses DID protocols at scale in a worthwhile and effective manner.

There are tons of pilot projects and PoCs. A few go into production at limited scale, languish for a while, and then do a slow fade.

I agree with other commenters that DID does not seem to address real-world pain points. I also think that the spec appears murky, abstract, overly complex and hard for developers to work with. I have tried to use DID in projects a couple of times, and found myself sidelining or pushing it into a corner of the system, because it did not seem to serve a useful purpose.

There's a recent alternative to DID, which is narrower in scope and more pragmatic. That is "login with Metamask" or "sign-in with Ethereum" (or something similar in the case of other blockchain platforms).
2 comments
chrisco255 1456 days ago
The SIWE movement probably will win out, imo. Brave already supports it natively, and services like ENS are growing in popularity and use cases. And MetaMask itself is already at 50 million installs. Most other smart contract blockchains are Ethereum compatible, so you can use the same account (via MetaMask or wallet of your choice) across blockchains pretty easily. It's also dead simple to implement as a web developer, and it's a pleasure to use as a user.
link
dmitriid 1456 days ago
> Of course, these different packages are not (yet) compatible

You say this is not a problem, and immediately say this:

> it's hard to find a single project that uses DID protocols at scale in a worthwhile and effective manner.

Of course it's hard. For a protocol to operate at scale its implementations have to be compatible

link