Episode 082: 01‐28‐2025 Achieving Standard DID Methods - GluuFederation/identerati-office-hours GitHub Wiki
Title: Intro to Sidetree, ION, and Element
-
Host: Mike Schwartz, Founder/CEO Gluu
-
Guest: Daniel Buchner
Description
Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) promise to reshape the digital identity landscape, empowering individuals and organizations with greater security, privacy, and control. Join us for a discussion with Daniel Buchner, a leading innovator in decentralized identity and former Microsoft executive, as he delves into the topic of "Achieving Standard DID Methods."
We'll discuss the technical and organizational hurdles to interoperability, and learn how open standards and collaboration across the ecosystem are driving the adoption of decentralized identity.
Homework
- Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) as an Identifier Metasystem
- Decentralized Identity: The Basics of Decentralized Identity
Takeaways
-
⚡ Fundamentally, a global decentralized identity infrastructure needs a way to identify an entity, and a way for that entity to prove it controls that identifier. The simplest mechanism would use a public key as the identifier, and the entity could prove control by decrypting a challenge.
-
⚡ One of the big technical challenges is chaning the public key identifier: key sizes increase over time as older algorithms and key strengths become vulnerable. So there needs to be a way for people to record that they were using this old key, but now they are using this new key.
-
⚡ Daniel posits that the current 200+ DID methods need to come down to around three or four. A simple DID method that uses the public key as the identifier; a DID method that uses DNS (or Web), where the root of trust is the TLD registrar. One that uses a distributed hash table or "DHT", like Bittorrent. And finally, maybe one DID that uses a sidechain that writes to Bitcoin -- although that sidechain must have no monetary value.
-
⚡ The DID community advocating for DIDs is also hindering its adoption by not combining forces to make a compelling case to browser vendors. If the DID community is divided, it will never be able to overcome an even more reluctant Apple, who has very little interest in portable identity.