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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

I think self sovereign identity (ie, what Keybase did but standardized and anchored on a public blockchain rather than a private database) is an interesting consumer-facing technology that is crypto based and isn't a scam.

Identity plays are tricky commercially but there do seem to be some interesting shoots of growth around it.

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I'm a broken record on why I believe this is a distinctively bad use case for public blockchains, for whatever it's worth. But it doesn't matter that I think this use case is doomed; what matters is: it's not a serious mainstream thing right now. If it becomes one, you won't have to argue; it'll be self-evidently an important use case.

Sorry to make you repeat yourself, but we’re looking at DIDs and I’d like to know your arguments against them. Do you mind linking to a comment or summarizing?

DIDs have nothing to do with blockchains, it's just that some people are trying to hype DIDs by artificially linking them with blockchains. They use "crypto" but the "old kind", the good one: cryptography.

While DIDs do not have to link to blockchains the standard itself notes:

Many—but not all—DID methods make use of distributed ledger technology (DLT) or some other form of decentralized network.[1]

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/

I think it was this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750165

Two words. Identity theft.

Could you elaborate a bit on that please? How would that pan out?

I went looking (!) and I found this comment[1] from you. To summarize:

> SSI has no human mediated account recovery and so is a toy.

I don't completely disagree, but it's not the take I was expecting.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750165

Please explain what this is a bad use case. I'd love to learn why that is.

Because you can't remove stuff from a blockchain.

Change your name? Old name still there. Change your phone number? Still there. All old email addresses? Still there.

I reckon that's now how SSI solutions use a blockchain (or at least the ones I know of). AFAIK, a blockchain is only used to resolve a DID (an identifier mapping a random ID to a bunch of public keys you control, along with a URL to communicate with your device). Your personal information, as in your name, phone number, email stay in your device and are only exchanged with the party you want to authenticate against.

I'm curious to know if there's something I misunderstood in this space

Not the person you're responding to, but my view on this is: Having one online identity that is publicly viewable by everbody is a privacy nightmare. Yes, I know that it's pseudonymous, but it's possible for a sufficiently motivated entity to find out who is behind a pseudonym.

Zero-knowledge cryptography allows you to post opaque data to the blockchain and selectively reveal properties of it to chosen people and applications.

For example, a zero-knowledge DID can generate a proof to an age-restricted application that you are over 18, without necessarily revealing your birthdate or any other information about yourself.

And this is already covered by the DID/VC W3C specs that don’t need a blockchain. An age restriction in particular will _always require the blessing of a central party_.

Nah, SSI is interesting but it has absolutely 0 need for a blockchain. It's just another case of a solution looking for a problem.

The only reason anyone cares about blockchain is because of the ability to speculate. Remove that and it's a tiny niche tech - which certainly has use cases but nothing you can build a Facebook or Google around.

A blockchain also allows software programs to interact with each other in an uncensorable way, and ensures that those programs operate the way their source code says it does. It may be a niche technology, but I think these properties are useful for a bunch of types of apps.

It is kind of entertaining to see how many profiles on HN still have their keybase identity in them.

isnt that blockchain sovereign identity? its not you that owns your identity, its the blockchain and a private key.

it be nice to prove identity via a public key, but the private key can't be trusted as the authority. They get compromised too often

This is how urbit ids work for what it’s worth, I think it’s a good model.

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