Re: When Technical Standards Meet Geopolitical Reality

I wrote a long email on this then realized it's better as a blog post response so I can reference it later more easily: https://kyledenhartog.com/a-pattern-of-moral-crisis/

In short, I don't have much hope that waiting longer will help to improve the overall design of this because we allowed hierarchical centralization of the issuance and elevated the power of the issuer in the name of trust. I think we're just stuck with a centralized solution for this latest iteration. And since we didn't properly address this, I think history suggests this is just another iteration of technologies co-opted during moral crisis: https://www.exurbe.com/tools-for-thinking-about-censorship/

- Kyle
On Thu, Jul 17, 2025 at 1:08 PM, Manu Sporny <[msporny@digitalbazaar.com](mailto:On Thu, Jul 17, 2025 at 1:08 PM, Manu Sporny <<a href=)> wrote:

> 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/