Why?

Today, we use globally unique identifiers thar are not under our control.

The internet is highy centralized in a couple of corporations. As users we highly depend on their policies of services and identifiers (email addresses, usernames on social media, websites dns). We do not own those identifiers.

• External authorities can revoke them
• They are context specific and therefore not interoperable
• If the organization disappears, they may disappear

Furthermore, our data is now ours and therefore our privacy is compromised.

SSI vs centralized identifiers

• Provide a verifable, decentralized digital identity;
• Let the user generate, control the identifier and the metadata related to that identifier
• a.k.a there are no "Identity Providers"

Main Characteristics of the identifier

A global unique identifier with the following principles:

1. decentralized: there should be no central issuing agency;
2. persistent: the identifier should be inherently persistent, not requiring the continued operation of an underling organization;
3. cryptographically verifiable: it should be possible to prove control of the identifier cryptographically;
4. resolvable: it should be possible to discover metadata about the identifier.

Further Research

• Are there any current wallets handling mulitple DIDs?
• For the same entity with multiple DIDS, for privacy reasons, should the DID subject also change?
• Services and service endpoints for communication

Triggers

• https://www.w3.org/TR/did-use-cases/