Re: Does the W3C still believe in Tim Berners-Lee's vision of decentralization?

Hi Manu,

> So
> the Ethereum community will have a choice to consolidate to one method that's
> backed by the Ethereum blockchain, or lose out to other blockchain networks
> that do consolidate.

But this doesn't show luck of interoperability? An Ethereum resolver should be able to accommodate all of them, may be with some pieces of configuration for each of them

> There used to be LOTS of OpenID providers listed on websites... but over time,
> it just consolidated to Google, Facebook, Apple, and GitHub (for example)


Check institutional login here https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp You can login using the user management system of over 100 universities. Each university uses its own type of "registry" and you need only one resolver (may be with a configuration file with over 100 entries, but still).

> I hope that helps why we don't believe that we're not promoting fragmentation
> and divergence in the long term.

Of course. I also believe that in the long run things will converge, for example when we have the DID resolution protocol (https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-resolution/) or with SIOP. So, IMHO saying that "we are targeting interoperability and convergence but we are missing some parts" is an honest response to Mozilla's and others comment. But Evernym's blog post appears to me like saying "we already have it and you are stupid you didn't read the specifications". 

Best,
Nikos

--
Nikos Fotiou - http://pages.cs.aueb.gr/~fotiou
Researcher - Mobile Multimedia Laboratory
Athens University of Economics and Business
https://mm.aueb.gr

> On 15 Oct 2021, at 12:09 AM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
> 
> On 10/13/21 12:39 PM, Nikos Fotiou wrote:
>> You are saying "[...] DID Method you want to, as long as the site supports 
>> it".
> 
> If you want something to work, the site has to accept it, yes... however,
> that's not the only thing I was saying...
> 
>> Isn't this the perfect example of fragmentation and divergence? E.g., 
>> currently the DID registry has 15 methods that use Ethereum to store 
>> information. IMHO it should be trivial to support all them (at least some 
>> basic functionality, such as "retrieve the authentication key"). But as
>> far as I understand, it isn't! Even if it is, it is not properly
>> demonstrated. Right now the situation appears like having an OIDC library
>> ("the DID resolver")  that must be modified for every new authorization
>> server!
> 
> Let's start with an example that works instead of the examples that don't.
> 
> did:key is an example where, as long as the site supports did:key, you can do
> cryptographic authentication with it. There are not 50 ways to resolve
> did:key, there is one way, and that one way can be adopted by all sites.
> 
> It is true that we have 112 DID Methods, but we expect there will be market
> consolidation over time, and some DID Methods will win out over other ones.
> 
> For example, taking your example, yes, there are 15 methods that use
> Ethereum... and no one wants to support 15 different Ethereum resolvers, they
> probably only want to support ONE of them (if they care about Ethereum). So
> the Ethereum community will have a choice to consolidate to one method that's
> backed by the Ethereum blockchain, or lose out to other blockchain networks
> that do consolidate.
> 
> There used to be LOTS of OpenID providers listed on websites... but over time,
> it just consolidated to Google, Facebook, Apple, and GitHub (for example). We
> expect the same thing to happen with DID networks, but this time, you'll be
> consolidating to something that is not owned by a single corporation, and
> something that doesn't hoover up all of your data as a result of you logging
> in with them.
> 
> I hope that helps why we don't believe that we're not promoting fragmentation
> and divergence in the long term.
> 
> -- manu
> 
> -- 
> Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> News: Digital Bazaar Announces New Case Studies (2021)
> https://www.digitalbazaar.com/
> 
>