
Open, Decentralized, Identity Ecosystem - Fiahil
http://identity.foundation/
======
motohagiography
Key problem for them to solve is not data, it's legitimacy.

The use cases for digital identity were things like getting speeding tickets,
fines, taxation, collections, and other social management uses. Basically the
stuff that nobody wants unless they want other people to be subject to it.

It meant that digital identity must be imposed, and so the customers for it
needed to be in the position to do so. There are lots of systems, markets and
communities that work just fine without registered identities, and arguably
the only thing that doesn't work with collateralized social identities is
subjugation.

The goal seems to be to create something with enough value that it will be
worth federating to, but the legal and political factors in governing that
federation will be on the order of complexity of creating another agency the
size of something like the ITU.

~~~
carapace
Hernando De Soto wrote a book called "The Mystery of Capital" and in it he
points out that the ability to enforce laws and contracts depends on the
ability to apply consequences to the people _correctly identified_ who break
them. For example, an electric utility can't provide power to a community if
it can't identify and shut off power to the people who can't or won't pay
their bills. De Soto points out that e.g. having a recognized official title
to your own home not only enables the landowners economically, it also gives
them something to lose so that the government has leverage to enforce laws and
contracts.

~~~
motohagiography
I heard him speak once, and he spoke about titles for land in shanty towns as
a potential solution to some poverty as well.

Identity tech marketing people go on about it extends franchise to people for
public services, and solves the problem of the "unbanked," which _should_
return results in greater social equity. There is a large social justice
aspect to it, where people engaged in distributing benefits need to know who
to give them to.

Of course, the criticism of this is that is what borders are for, where
citizens are presumably equal within them, and detailed identity attributes
for benefits and equity is a recipe for facilitating totalitarian urges. This
gets very political very quickly.

Identity is an ancient problem. Like old testament ancient problem where even
back then numbering people allegedly gets you plagues. (presumably because
when you get lots of people together and living longer, that's what happens)

Digital identity tech is a fascinating, difficult problem that is a proxy for
governance in general. Vendors would prefer not to freight their products with
that, but it's really the ur-problem.

~~~
carapace
I agree with you. Look at China's social credit system. (Does it solve
anything or does it just push the equilibrium to a more intense "energy
level", when a black market crops up for fake social identities, etc.?)

I think that advancing technological capabilities will eventually make it
impossible to participate in "the system" (National, Global, whatever) without
being subject to a pervasive surveillance (which is already happening.) So we
will be forced into some sort of totalitarian system whether we like it or not
by our own technology. So to me it seems like the real question is what kind
of totalist system should be build?

To be sure we are confronting these questions already (cf. the Ashley Madison
data breach and how it stirred up, uh, conversation around extramarital
affairs.)

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identity-haver
That's a really interesting mix of partner companies: blockchain, healthcare,
banking, IT consultants, payments, Microsoft, telecoms, enterprise identity
providers. Basically everyone except Google and Facebook, who are competing
for web identity supremacy and far ahead of everyone else (and Amazon, who
could do the same with their number of users).

~~~
ocdtrekkie
It tells you exactly what you'd expect: That everyone wants to work together
at this except for the monopolies who want to ensure they can control it.

------
ForHackernews
RIP Persona [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/Per...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/Persona)

------
Communitivity
I worked with some of the people involved in this back when I was on the OASIS
XDI TC, before my then employer 'suggested' I leave working on standards and
focus on BD. The DID people I know are smart and passionate, with a lot of
domain experience. I hope that this gains wide adoption.

------
treelovinhippie
If all of these decentralized identity companies truly want an open and self-
sovereign system, the big question is: are they willing to shutdown their
operations once that is achieved?

Or are they all attempting to monetize identity with various business models
that are against the stated goal?

Identity should be owned by the individual, and the universal
decentralized/distributed identity protocol should be owned by the commons.
Any for-profit business model for identity (90% of the member companies) will
inevitably seek to silo and exploit data to achieve monopoly and extract
economic rents.

------
stevetodd
I like decentralized identity though I feel like it either needs a killer app
that uses it or a better value proposition. As it stands, I don’t see non-
technical people jumping to it unless they have a technical friend telling
them too. I hope someone can tell me I’m missing something.

~~~
canadaduane
I think this will be part of a much larger social movement--the distribution
of trust across networks as an incremental improvement over the
gateway/database/single-point-of-failure model we've organized ourselves
around right now.

I presented a little bit about this (how decentralized identity &
decentralized apps intersect) here:
[https://decentralizedsummit.com/agenda/duane-
johnson/](https://decentralizedsummit.com/agenda/duane-johnson/)

------
g45y45
its missing an http to https redirect. this is important! How can i trust this
group with identity if they cant even get secure websites right.

~~~
deweller
The site appears to be hosted through github pages [1] via Cloudflare.

Is that even an option at github?

1: [https://github.com/decentralized-identity/decentralized-
iden...](https://github.com/decentralized-identity/decentralized-
identity.github.io)

------
niedbalski
openid, is that you? welcome back!

~~~
djsumdog
That's the problem with groups like this. Are we really going to get back to
the point where we can just type in our own identity providers? Stackexchange
was the last big site that I used which still had OpenID support and it had
less than 1% usage:

[https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-decline-of-
openid/](https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-decline-of-openid/)

~~~
sliken
Seems like the biggest problem with OpenID is they had a marketing push,
multiple sites (like google, yahoo, and facebook) bragged about it. The
problem is large companies could grab about providing OpenID, while not
allowing logins from any other OpenID provider. So you needed an OpenID
account/login per provider... which is useless.

