brockm on Nostr: Come to realize one of the reasons people don't get DIDs, is they think they're just ...
Come to realize one of the reasons people don't get DIDs, is they think they're just glorified pubkeys, or they're glorified decentralized Apple Wallets. This is just a wrong mental model.
The way to think about what DIDs and Verifiable Credentials from an engineering and application developer perspective, is to view them as a wholesale replacement for DNS and Certificate Authorities. They decentralize away from ICANN.
They are a new universal identity layer for the internet. But because they are open an extensible protocols, we can do everything from validate that website is legitimately owned by a company or individual. Or they can be used to model a driver's license, where a government agency issues the credential. The protocol doesn't care.
I think people who think they're "too complex" and add nothing that pubkeys don't, haven't thought too deeply about the totality of problem of identity on the internet, and are likely taking DNS (a highly centralized form of identity) for granted. When they probably shouldn't.
The way to think about what DIDs and Verifiable Credentials from an engineering and application developer perspective, is to view them as a wholesale replacement for DNS and Certificate Authorities. They decentralize away from ICANN.
They are a new universal identity layer for the internet. But because they are open an extensible protocols, we can do everything from validate that website is legitimately owned by a company or individual. Or they can be used to model a driver's license, where a government agency issues the credential. The protocol doesn't care.
I think people who think they're "too complex" and add nothing that pubkeys don't, haven't thought too deeply about the totality of problem of identity on the internet, and are likely taking DNS (a highly centralized form of identity) for granted. When they probably shouldn't.