Re: When Technical Standards Meet Geopolitical Reality

On 11/08/2025 22:20, Joe Andrieu wrote:
> Hardware is incapable of fulfilling the role of issuer.
>
> This remains an area where the VC spec incorrectly states that any 
> "entity" can fulfill a role.

The organisation that developed the hardware could put its name on the 
issued VCs if legal culpability is a pre-requisite. But legal 
culpability is a separate topic for debate. If a VC is purely a 
statement made by an entity, then hardware can fulfil this role as the 
VC spec indicates.

I can imagine various use cases where legal culpability is not a 
requirement. E.g. a householder installs an entrance gate with a device 
that reads the fingerprints of visitors, and is designed to keep out 
wild animals. When the gate operating machinery receives a VC from the 
fingerprint device indicating that a human is at the gate, then it opens 
the gate to let the human enter.

Kind regards

David

>
> The role fundamentally gives in the legal culpability for the 
> issuance. A device cannot have legal culpability. A legal person 
> (human or incorporated) can.
>
> Joe Andrieu
> President
> joe@legreq.com
> +1(805)705-8651
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Legendary Requirements
> https://legreq.com
>
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 1:06 PM David Chadwick 
> <d.w.chadwick@truetrust.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
>     On 11/08/2025 20:32, Daniel Hardman wrote:
>>     I think the issuer of this verifiable data must be one or more
>>     individual human beings.
>
>     I think the issuer could be a tamperproof piece of hardware with
>     its own private key that could read a biometric of a human, along
>     with liveness testing, and assert that the entity that just
>     provided the biometric to it, is a live human being.
>
>     Kind regards
>
>     David
>