Acceptance Networks for Self-Sovereign Identity
We can't have broad adoption of verifiable credentials until we find a way to scale their presentation by providing tooling that credential verifiers can use to reduce their risk and gain confidence in the facts presented to them.
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Permissionless and One-to-One
Symmetric technology democratizes speech. The web, despite all the good it's done is fundamentally assymetric. We need a model that is permissionless and one-to-one.
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Decentralized Systems Don't Care
I like to remind my students that decentralized systems don't care what they (or anyone else thinks). The paradox is that they care very much what everyone thinks. We call that coherence and it's what makes decentralized systems maddeningly frustrating to understand, architect, and maintain.
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Decentralizing Agendas and Decisions
Allowing groups to self-organize, set their own agendas, and decide without central guidance or planning requires being vulnerable and trusting. But the results are worth the risk.
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The Ukrainian War, PKI, and Censorship
PKI has created a global trust framework for the web. But the war in Ukraine has shone a light on its weaknesses. Hierarchies are not good architectures for building robust, trustworthy, and stable digital systems.
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Seeing Like the TSA
A recent trip through SL airport's new TSA screening area shows why bureaucracies legibility fails. People aren't corporate or hierarchical. Instead they're messy... and innovative.
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Life Will Find a Way
An old apricot tree reminded me that life is wonderfully decentralized, helping it succeed in harsh conditions.
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Ten Reasons to Use Picos for Your Next Decentralized Programming Project
Picos are a programming model for building decentralized applications that provide significant benefits in the form of abstractions that reduce programmer effort. Here are ten eleven reasons you should use picos for your next decentralized application.
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Life-Like Anonymity and the Poison Web
Natural anonymity comes from our ability to recognize others without the aid of an external identity system. Online interactions will only be able to mirror life-like anonymity when we can use decentralized identity systems that don't force all interactions to be under the purview of centralized, administrative identity systems.
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Can the Digital Future Be Our Home?
This post features three fantastic books from three great, but quite different, authors on the subject of Big Tech, surveillance capitalism, and what's to be done about it.
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Decentralized System in a Box
I’ve been a beekeeper for many years. I love the honey, but I love watching the bees even more. They are a fascinating example of a natural, decentralized system.
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Legitimacy and Decentralized Systems
Why are some decentralized systems accepted and widely used while others wither? Why do some “hard forks” succeed while others fail? It all comes down to legitimacy.
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The Impact of a Network of Networks on Censorship
Creating a network of networks, where multiple ledgers serve as anchors for credential definitions, has consequences for the overall system's ability to resist censorship. This post explores why.
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Centralized Services Needn't be Evil to be a Problem
Relying on a single actor to make things work for millions is no way to do something as fundamental to human autonomy and dignity as digital identity.
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It's the Autonomy, Stupid!
The core value proposition of decentralization is autonomy. Without freedom to choose we can't build a thriving digital ecosystem that is as rich and full as the physical world we inhabit.
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Decentralized Identifiers
Decentralized identifiers are one of the foundational ideas for supporting self-sovereign identity. This post describes how decentralized identifiers work.
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Verifiable Credential Exchange
Verifiable credential exchange is the foundation of decentralized, online identity. This post describes how it works.
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Decentralization in Sovrin
Sovrin is more than a ledger and its claim to being a decentralized identity system rests on more than that. Sovrin comprises three layers, each of which promotes and strengthens decentralization and self-sovereign identity. This post discusses each layer and the decentralized features that underpin it.
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Multi-Source and Self-Sovereign Identity
Self-sovereign identity is multi-source, but not all multi-source identity systems are self-sovereign. Self-sovereignty requires that people and organizations have control of their credentials and interact as peers.
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The Sovrin Foundation
This article describes the role that the Sovrin Foundation and associated groups play in governing, operating, and using the Sovrin Network. The Sovrin Network is designed and intended to be decentralized so understanding the key influence points and community groups is important.
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Multi-Source Identity
Multi-source identity systems like Sovrin enabled richer digital identity transactions that mirror the decentralized, ad hoc nature of identity in the physical world.
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Coherence and Decentralized Systems
Building decentralized systems requires more than defining a few specifications and hoping for the best. In order to thrive, decentralized systems need coherence, the social organization necessary to get otherwise independent actors to cooperate.
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Decentralized Governance in Sovrin
Decentralized systems require governance to function well. Ideally this governance should be clear, open, and effective without impacting the decentralized nature of the system. This post describes the governance of the Sovrin network. Our approach is a constitutional model based on an agreement we call the Sovrin Trust Framework that informs and guides everything from code development to the responsibilities of the various actors in the system. The Sovrin Trust Framework enables decentralized governance of the Sovrin network.
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Is Sovrin Decentralized?
To determine whether Sovrin is decentralized, we have to ask questions about the purpose of decentralization and how Sovrin supports those purposes.
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The Case for Decentralized Identity
We cannot decentralize many interesting systems without also decentralizing the identity systems upon which they rely. We're finally in a position to create truly decentralized systems for digital identity.
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Launching the Sovrin Network
The Sovrin network for identity is now live and accepting transactions. Sovrin provides a global identity infrastructure that supports self-sovereign identity and verifiable claims. This blog post describes the launch ceremony that we conducted. This is the beginning of Identity for All.
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A Mesh for Picos
This post describes some changes we're making to the pico engine to better support a decentralized mesh for running picos.
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Sovrin Web of Trust
Sovrin uses a heterarchical, decentralized Web of Trust model to build trust in identifiers and give people clues about what and who to trust.
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Life-Like Anonymity
Natural anonymity comes from our ability to recognize others without the aid of an external identity system. Online interactions can only mirror life-like anonymity when we have decentralized identity systems that don't put all unteractions under the purview of centralized administrative systems.
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Decentralization and Distributed Ledgers
Some claim that decentralized system that have to be governed aren't really decentralized. This article explains why that thinking is misguided.
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Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure
Centralization leads to security, usability, and privacy problems. This paper shows that the problems of centralized directory systems like DNS and PKIK can be addressed through the use of decentralized directories like the blockchain to create a distributed PKI (DPKI).
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Decentralization Is Hard, Maybe Too Hard
Decentralized thinking is hard. So hard that future generations might see the Internet as a historical abberation.
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Silo-Busting MyWord Editor is Now Public
The MyWord Editor and nodeStorage system are a perfect example of what I call a personal cloud application architecture.
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IBM's ADEPT Project: Rebooting the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things, only a few years old, needs a reboot. So says Paul Brody of IBM. The IBM Adept project is a proof of concept for an open, decentralized Internet of Things.
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Re-imagining Decentralized and Distributed
I'm re-thinking how I use the words centralized, decentralized, and distributed to describe systems.
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Building a Universal Silo
The Internet is being ruined by corporate silos that take away our personal freedom in exchange for services. Some think what we need is a universal silo that we can all be part of. There are different approaches to achieving that goal that will have very different outcomes.
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The CompuServe of Things
On the Net today we face a choice between freedom and captivity, independence and dependence. How we build the Internet of Things has far-reaching consequences for the humans who will use—or be used by—it. Will we push forward, connecting things using forests of silos that are reminiscent the online services of the 1980's, or will we learn the lessons of the Internet and build a true Internet of Things?
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Networks vs Hierarchies
Good talk from Fred Wilson on how networked systems are changing business and how we all interact with one another.
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Decentralized Systems: Thermoregulation in Bee Hives
I started monitoring the temperature of my beehive a few weeks ago. The result was a deeper appreciation for the beauty of decentralized algorithms.
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Living in a Silo Can Be Dangerous
When you live in a silo, asphyxiation is a real danger. Twitter had the temerity to actually take advantage of its one-sided terms and conditions and now people are mad. Don't get mad; change the game. Protocol gives us the tools to fight back. The only way to protect yourself is to move to a decentralized architecture.
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Pagerank for Event Graphs
Using an event graph can help us understand relative connectivity in a decentralized network of event-based applications.
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Facebook Domination Isn't Inevitable—It's Not Even Likely
More people—especially geeks—need to understand that protocols are worth the effort they require. And let's not dodge that; decentralized systems are more work. They are harder to design, harder to build, and harder to bootstrap. But the forcing function, freedom, is powerful and eventually wins out.
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Harnessing Decentralized Resources in Disasters
By now we know that the gunman responsible for yesterday's carnage at Virginia Tech was a South Korean student. A video-game crazed South Korean student, if you believe the other Dr. Phil. It's not too early to think about what we could do differently in the future, however. Yesterday, I received an email from David Stephenson, who's blog is still broken with some of his ideas of the role Web 2.0 technologies could play. I'm sure he won't mind me giving them broader exposure here and commenting. David said: There's NO PLACE in our society that should have been
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Rohit Khare and Decentralization
Yesterday I put another edition of the Technometria Podcast on IT Conversations. This one is Matt Asay and I talking with Rohit Khare. We had a great conversation about decentralization that ranged from the stock market to Nigerian 419 scams. Today I posted another edition of IEEE Spectrum Radio--a panel discussion of the FBI Virtual Case File debacle. This is a case study in how to screw up a software project.
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