Re: When Technical Standards Meet Geopolitical Reality

On Wed, Jul 16, 2025 at 3:59 AM Christopher Allen
<ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com> wrote:
> The original article is at https://www.blockchaincommons.com/musings/gdc25/
>
> After three decades of building internet infrastructure, I've learned that the most dangerous moment isn't when systems fail, it's when they succeed in ways that invert their purpose. We built protocols for human autonomy and watched them become instruments of platform control. We created standards for decentralization and saw them twisted into new forms of centralization.

Hey Christopher, I do agree with a lot of what you say in your blog
post. It is disappointing to see our work co-opted and twisted into
something we didn't intend it to become. To have the core principles
whittled away until they are unrecognizable.

That said, we're not done yet. The decentralized bits are taking
longer to build... and some are impatient and are slapping together
systems in haphazard ways. It's always far easier to build centralized
systems quickly and that's partly what we're seeing here -- a rush to
move fast, because the funders don't have unlimited patience and
money, which typically drives towards centralization.

We have, however, also made significant progress towards our
collective goals. I know you remember that there was a time where
there was NO path to global standardization wrt. these decentralized
technologies, even back in 2017. We fought hard for a place at the
standards-setting table and we have that now. Fast forward to today
and we have a global DID standard and a global VC standard (with many
other supporting specs as global standards). We are actively working
toward pushing DID Method standards now as well as digital wallet and
protocol standards.

The scale of the GDC event that you mentioned, which was somewhat
disappointing from a decentralization perspective, was unfathomable to
us back in 2015 -- that many people getting together to talk about
digital credentials and digital wallets and empowering their
populations is a good thing because it introduces many of the concepts
we've been incubating here and elsewhere to a larger audience. Some of
that audience is going to double-down on centralization while others
go searching for something more decentralized and self-sovereign than
what's happening in the EU right now... and they'll eventually find us
and the technologies that we've created.

This is what scaling a community looks like -- sometimes, it doesn't
scale in the way you want it to because not everyone got the
decentralization memo... or they got the memo, but needed to ship
systems to placate their funders... and they did that because the
decentralization stuff we're working on is still not easy enough to
use that it can replace some centralized systems.

So, there's work to do -- on DID Methods that are more decentralized,
on protocols that are more decentralized, on authorization mechanisms
that are more decentralized, and on storage systems that are more
decentralized. We continue to work on those things as a community in
order to provide them as viable options so that the next time someone
goes to build a system... building it in a centralized way is around
the same level of effort as building it in a decentralized way.

In the meantime, people will continue to build centralized systems for
a variety of reasons... and while that's disappointing, that's not
what we're focused on here. That people are building centralized
systems has as much relevance to us as a monarchy has to a democracy.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
https://www.digitalbazaar.com/

Received on Thursday, 17 July 2025 01:07:45 UTC