[Confiks]

The article completely misses the mark in creating some weird narrative about 'web3 turning into web5', all seemingly based on a wordplay announcement by Dorsey, thereby giving that project a lot of undue credibility.

In reality, many of the good projects and people referenced at the end of the article have been working for years without any notion that their projects are sprung out of some hyped but underspecified 'web3' technology.

Dorsey's 'web5' clamor is mostly about (barely [1]) implementing some existing technology and then writing a bit of slideware around it [2], which proposes to magically "allow individuals, organizations, and companies to publish credentials anyone can discover and independently verify" while not spending any thought on how such a PKI would be ("independently") governed without centralizing everything back again – an all too common failure mode of 'web3' [3].

Meanwhile, both Dorsey's slideware [4] and the actual specifications referenced [5][6] make bad technological choices with regard to privacy where users have stable identifiers (their public keys) which must be published, allowing them to be easily tracked across transactions.

While this can be used as a building block, no material on the 'web5' website or the TBD54566975 Github repository (I guess it's some other wordplay) indicates that they even recognize this as a problem, let alone that they propose how to solve it.

This is no new problem however: Sovrin – which many people referenced in the OP have worked on or with – has published a commentary on this back in 2018 [7]. There's also a great talk by Christopher Allen if you need to refresh your memory about what you need to consider when designing identity systems [8].

Otherwise the OP can be a great introduction to identity, but please don't feed the magical hypetrain.

[1] https://github.com/TBD54566975/ssi-service#whats-supported

[2] https://developer.tbd.website/docs/Decentralized%20Web%20Pla...

[3] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

[4] See the diagram on page 9 of [2]

[5] https://identity.foundation/decentralized-web-node/spec/

[6] https://identity.foundation/ion/

[7] https://sovrin.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/What-Goes-On-T...

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzM_Brpk95E&t=1574s

[ngould]

OP here. Did not mean to imply that web5 sprung out of web3 in any sense. Really I just found web3 to be a useful reference point for explaining SSI. Lots of people understand how web3 works at this point, but there's way less mindshare around the idea of a digital wallet that actually holds credentials and not just private keys.

To that end, I'm generally happy to support the hype, and hope this stuff gets more attention from the web3 lot.

[Confiks]

> Did not mean to imply that web5 sprung out of web3 in any sense.

It's really hard for anyone unfamiliar to the area to not read that in your article. To take three quotes out of the whole narrative: "But web5 takes it to the next level", "it's possible to keep the good parts of web3 while improving on its privacy properties (...) thats what web5 is all about", "In web5 (...) This is a radical departure from both web2 and web3".

I get that you wanted some nice story for your blogpost, but it's just not grounded in reality, and you're supporting the wrong actors here if you really want to claim that 'web5' is about privacy.

> I'm generally happy to support the hype

Happy to support privacy destroying technology by adopting their buzzwords while plenty of people – which you even reference at the end – do keep ethics in mind. Alrighty then.