Re: Ideal set of features and DID Methods?

On Fri, Feb 20, 2026 at 5:55 AM Jori Lehtinen <lehtinenjori03@gmail.com> wrote:
> I honestly think we should focus only on the high assurance decentralized model, because it works for all use cases...

In theory, yes. In practice, no. The feedback we have from a number of
small and big governments are that they are not comfortable with going
fully decentralized yet. They want DNS-based identifiers that have a
known trust model. They might consider moving to fully decentralized
in time, but these organizations are not known for being early
adopters. They have too much reputational risk at stake. That is why
we need did:web (as much as a number of us don't like it).

> So basically the rotation event (and all other event too) have to always be singed by the last known private key.

That's not good enough. You also need to ensure that the history is
anchored in time to something you trust, somehow. This is what proof
of work does in Bitcoin, proof of stake does in Ethereum, watchers do
in did:webvh, and witnesses do in did:cel.

> Here is my take on a Cryptographic Event Log:
> - https://z-base.github.io/json-web-history/

Yikes... alg=none by default, yet another JSON Web conflation, no
ability to do set-based signatures, no witnesses. I get that the spec
was AI-assisted, but it's broken in at least four ways right now:

alg=none means none of the history is signed.

Basing it on Json Web Anything tends to conflate the signature
envelope with the data model, and it looks like that's the case here.

Using JW* means that you get 33% bloat for every log entry and
counter-signature you do... signing overhead goes exponential fast.
How are you going to support anything but the controller of the
document signing?

Not having a witness (time root) means that history can be arbitrarily
re-written by the controller.

Each one of those is a fatal flaw that would need to be fixed. While
others will argue that building on top of JWS is perfectly fine, we
have found it to be ill suited for these sorts of use cases.

-- manu

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

Received on Friday, 20 February 2026 14:21:10 UTC