Re: Revisiting SSI at Ten -- Preliminary Revised Principles Open for Review

> I would like to discuss the goals themselves.

I have been thinking about this these past couple of days.

What are the goals of SSI, or the goals of the systems that choose to
follow these principles.
Why would they do that?

I keep circling around this idea of enabling/empowering individuals to be
sovereign over their digital selves as recognized, remembered and responded
to within a system.

This is a valuable, desirable goal because it creates systems that are open
to possibility.
Digital worlds where surprise is not only possible, but encouraged and
celebrated.
Lively worlds!

Digital systems that are free from the coercive control of unknown others
with asymmetric, unaccountable power over the rules, constraints and
capabilities of the environment and those that inhabit it.

Freedom to co-create the environment and worlds of meaning immanent within
it.
To confirm, contest and shape the values within it.
To explore, discover and pursue possibilities.

I want to inhabit digital worlds whose environments are composed of
substrates whose rules are knowable, can be reasoned about and can be
struggled against. Can be changed. With the possibility for change itself,
something that can be reasoned about.

To me this is how we get to constraints for digital bodies. Constraints
that are applied/enforced consistently across all actors.
Therefore can be reasoned about. (Acknowledging the many challenges with
impersonation etc that you refer to Juan. The uncanny gap between our human
bodies and our digital ones).

Bitcoin is exemplary of the kind of digital substrates that enable these
digital worlds.

I guess this is a bit of an abstract rant about what I personally want from
the digital systems I participate in.

But the goal, for me, is simple.

Digital systems that raise, support and encourage increasingly capable,
sovereign individuals acting through digital bodies that are truly their
own.
Digital systems that are open to possibility, to surprise and to change.

Just like free societies *should* aspire to do this for its citizens.
Digital systems that value freedom should also aspire to this.

Note, I am not placing limits on the constraints a system might apply. That
is always going to be contextual.
But they must be knowable, subject to reason and open to challenge.

Some thoughts :)
Will




On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 3:56 PM Casanova, Juan <J.Casanova@hw.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hi Will,
>
> It definitely connects to what I was saying, and is perhaps a more
> constructive and less oppositional view of it, which is welcome.
>
> In terms of what the "digital body" might be, I feel we can probably best
> define it by expressing what it can do and what others can do with it.
> While the physical body comes with inherent constraints, the digital body
> has very few of these, and in particular, it has a complicated relationship
> with identity (impersonation and total anonymity are possible until
> additional constraints are added), and we can see that this has advantages
> and disadvantages. It can be liberating from some of the constraints of the
> physical body such as the threat of physical violence, but it can also have
> new negative psychological, social, or economic consequences.
>
> Ultimately I also feel that this would benefit from expressing things
> explicitly in terms of power and incentive structures, because otherwise
> "good", "bad", "harmful", "advantage", and "disadvantage" has a different
> meaning for each of us. Christopher's principles do this to a large degree,
> but perhaps they would benefit from making it more explicit. I think my
> concerns come precisely from not having that framing to establish what we
> are talking about. The ultimate goals feel implicit, with the principles
> being the most basic rules that must be followed to achieve those implicit
> goals. I would like to discuss the goals themselves. We won't reach a
> universal agreement of what they should be, but we can at least understand
> where things are coming from and what they are for.
>
> *Juan Casanova Jaquete*
>
> Assistant Professor – School of Engineering and Physical Sciences – Data
> Science GA Programme
>
> *j.casanova@hw.ac.uk* <j.casanova@hw.ac.uk> – Earl Mountbatten Building
> 1.31 (Heriot Watt Edinburgh campus)
>
>
>
> Email is an asynchronous communication method. I do not expect and others
> should not expect immediate replies. Reply at your earliest convenience and
> working hours.
>
>
>
> I am affected by Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder. This means that I am an
> extreme night owl. My work day usually begins at 14:00 Edinburgh time, and
> I often work late into the evening and on weekends. Please try to take this
> into account where possible.
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Will Abramson <will@legreq.com>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, April 29, 2026 11:55
> *To:* Casanova, Juan <J.Casanova@hw.ac.uk>
> *Cc:* Christopher Allen <ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com>; Credentials
> Community Group <public-credentials@w3.org>
> *Subject:* Re: Revisiting SSI at Ten -- Preliminary Revised Principles
> Open for Review
>
> ****************************************************************
> Caution: This email originated from a sender outside Heriot-Watt
> University.
> Do not follow links or open attachments if you doubt the authenticity of
> the sender or the content.
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>
> Juan, I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts with the
> community. Welcome!
>
> Christopher, thanks for your effort in championing an overdue iteration on
> these principles and persistently questioning if the direction and the
> futures of some of the technologies being deployed are the ones we want.
>
> I share some of Juan's concerns around the framing focusing on systems
> enabling an individual to be self-sovereign within it. Or empowering
> individuals with self-sovereign identities.
>
> I think we mean we should have sovereignty over our digital selves in much
> the same way we are sovereign of our living human body.
>
> I am currently reading On Freedom by Timothy Snyder - highly recommend -
> in this book he attempts to define freedom and identifies five properties
> of freedom.
> So far I have only read the first two - Sovereignty and Unpredictability.
> Let me share a few insights I think are relevant.
>
> First, is that no human is born sovereign. When we are born, we are
> utterly dependent on the care and attention of others. Over time we learn
> and grow.
> It is only through this that we can become increasingly sovereign.
>
> Increasingly capable of making informed, value based judgements as we
> negotiate the constraints of the present drawing on our experiences of the
> past to bring about better futures for ourselves.
>
> To be sovereign, is not to be free from constraints, it is to be informed
> about them and our capabilities to struggle against them.
>
> Snyder rightly, in my view, connects sovereignty with the living, feeling,
> experiencing human body. Our mediator with the external world, both
> enabling and constraining us.
> It is through our body, that we can recognize and appreciate our shared
> existence. We see ourselves and our world through the eyes of others.
> We seek to construct mutual, shared, intersubjective understanding and in
> the process discover new capabilities for taking sovereign, unpredictable
> actions.
>
> I am still very much processing this, but it makes me wonder what are our
> digital bodies. Rather than identity, which I do not think is something we
> can or should be sovereign over perhaps we are talking about a digital body.
> Our mediator with the external digital environment such a body might
> inhabit.
>
> To be sovereign over a digital body, would not mean to have complete
> freedom from constraints. To act without fear of accountability.
> I think it means to be meaningfully informed about the digital
> environment, our capabilities within it and the webs of accountabilities
> that entangle the activities we might take.
> The actions each one of us inhabiting these digital environments takes
> must be recognized and celebrated as inherently unpredictable.
> Digital systems must stop rendering predictable objects and nudging us
> towards ever more probable states.
> They must stop seeking control over us and start trusting us to make our
> own sovereign choices to freely act under constraints.
>
> Not sure this really responds to you Juan as I intended - apologies.
>
> Still hoping this might trigger some interesting thoughts.
> Will share more when I have had time to digest it properly.
>
> Looking forward to the conversation next Tuesday Christopher,
> Thanks,
> Will
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 6:48 PM Casanova, Juan <J.Casanova@hw.ac.uk>
> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I tried to compress this but it's still long, so here's a *TLDR*: I fear
> that the way these principles are worded leans too heavily on an
> individualist view of society and not enough on a collectivist view of
> society. I would like to ask how some of my concerns around the need for
> accountability and enforcement in digital systems are addressed by this set
> of principles, and ensure that they offer a balanced view of the tension
> between individual rights and collective rights.
>
>
>
> I fear I might come across as adversarial to the spirit of these
> principles. I don't know how to dissipate or manage that while saying what
> I want to say. Or rather, *asking* *what I want to ask*. I am fully in
> tune with the spirit of these principles (I think what I'm asking about is
> more what is missing from them, or how they might be applied to certain
> situations), and I also echo some of the mentioned concerns, particularly
> about real world applicability. But I also understand principles happen
> before application. I see, like most of us do, that concentrated power
> accumulates even more power and captures well intended structures to
> perpetuate and make "injustices" worse. However, I think some of those are
> also enabled by philosophical oversimplifications that allow bad and
> chaotic actors to use systems in unjust ways. I am paying attention to this
> community *because I care about getting this right*, but I am still
> inexperienced in it. Think of the rest of my email as me asking you to tell
> me where I'm wrong.
>
> I am talking about the tension between individualism and collectivism.
> These principles, to me, come more heavily from an individualist
> perspective than a collectivist one. I don't claim that they or Christopher
> are saying this, but if I squint a little, it almost feels like the
> document is saying "if everyone has total individual freedom, the world
> will be a good place". I don't think that is true.
>
> If I witness a murder, I expect to be able to go to the police about the
> incident, they'd investigate it and, hopefully, put the murderer in prison.
> Normally, this will be *against the murderer's will*. I fear that a
> direct application of the individualist view of these principles can
> effectively make this impossible in the digital world. My main question is: *How
> do you balance the self-sovereign principles protecting individuals with
> collective needs? *A few points:
>
>
>    - I understand that *authority entities (e.g. police or government)
>    can become corrupt and a vector for concentrated power*; and that this
>    is one of the issues that self-sovereign identity is trying to address.
>    This is a good and critical goal, and I am *not *advocating for large
>    centralized power necessarily. Authorities are tools that collectives use.
>    It is the collective that holds the actual right to hold individuals
>    accountable. But the tension between the right of the collective to
>    accountability (through whatever means necessary, it does not have to be
>    central authorities necessarily), and the right of individuals to protect
>    themselves and make choices, need to be carefully balanced. Full
>    individualism leads to no accountability. Full collectivism leads to
>    repression.
>    - *This is a real issue in the world right now*. This is a
>    philosophical argument but it is grounded in real things that happen now
>    which are also huge problems. To give just one example, cryptocurrency
>    technologies are great theoretical tools that have a lot of really valuable
>    uses, but they have also been used by bad and chaotic actors to avoid
>    accountability. Paying for criminal services, tax avoidance, insider
>    trading, manipulative pyramid schemes, and more, harm the collective by
>    exploiting a lack of accountability, and ironically ultimately allow some
>    of those individuals to capture the centralized authorities that do exist.
>    - I am not advocating for centralization necessarily, *I am advocating
>    for accountability*. Or at least, that the principles should allow for
>    systems to enforce that accountability, rather than demonize them. I
>    believe this can be achieved with reduced centralization, making it harder
>    to capture power. Also, not all systems that fall within these principles
>    need to care about accountability and enforcement, but it needs to be at
>    least possible to do so.
>    - *This issue doesn't go away just by having better individual rights*.
>    Enforcement is necessary, and enforcement requires and depends on systems
>    that have accountability mechanisms. We can make it harder for people to
>    murder, steal, manipulate, or coerce, but we cannot fully eliminate it.
>    Avoiding the discussions about failure modes and how to deal with them
>    would make any set of principles awfully incomplete and not functional.
>    - I understand that *a balance must be struck*. The same way you can't
>    guarantee total individual freedom, you can't guarantee total collective
>    safety either. I am not advocating for strict guarantees, but I want to
>    make sure that the principles at least acknowledge the tension.
>    - I honestly believe that being more explicit about this tension in
>    the community *might actually reduce the power of destructive bad
>    faith arguments. *To put a very concrete example, classic "but what
>    about the children?" arguments that back abominations like the UK's Online
>    Safety Act would be weaker if we acknowledged the concerns they are
>    weaponizing more clearly and addressed them more sensibly.
>
>
> At this point I want to defuse my tone once more. I am a newcomer to this
> community and an inexperienced person in this world as a whole. Some things
> in this email may be easily debunkable and/or factually incorrect. If so, *please
> point them out to me*. I genuinely would be happy to come out of this
> with a reading of these principles where I can actually see how what I am
> saying is being taken into account or why some of my arguments are not
> really that strong. It's just hard for me to phrase things in a different
> way than I have because I don't have all that language and experience. I am
> here to learn, I promise. I just currently feel that this seems missing or
> actually in opposition to the strong and almost absolute wording of some of
> the principles as they are right now, and I hope that's just a lack of
> understanding on my part.
>
> Very sincerely,
>
> *Juan Casanova Jaquete*
>
> Assistant Professor – School of Engineering and Physical Sciences – Data
> Science GA Programme
>
> *j.casanova@hw.ac.uk* <j.casanova@hw.ac.uk> – Earl Mountbatten Building
> 1.31 (Heriot Watt Edinburgh campus)
>
>
>
> Email is an asynchronous communication method. I do not expect and others
> should not expect immediate replies. Reply at your earliest convenience and
> working hours.
>
>
>
> I am affected by Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder. This means that I am an
> extreme night owl. My work day usually begins at 14:00 Edinburgh time, and
> I often work late into the evening and on weekends. Please try to take this
> into account where possible.
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Michael Herman (Trusted Digital Web) <mwherman@parallelspace.net>
> *Sent:* Monday, April 27, 2026 16:54
> *To:* steve capell <steve.capell@gmail.com>; Christopher Allen <
> ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com>
> *Cc:* Credentials Community Group <public-credentials@w3.org>
> *Subject:* Re: Revisiting SSI at Ten -- Preliminary Revised Principles
> Open for Review
>
> ****************************************************************
> Caution: This email originated from a sender outside Heriot-Watt
> University.
> Do not follow links or open attachments if you doubt the authenticity of
> the sender or the content.
> ****************************************************************
>
> Continued...human curiosity...
>
> P4: Expand to 7-8 principles
>
> R4: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69ef85fe3b8081919f21065cc6ea33d9
>
>
> Get Outlook for Android <https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Michael Herman (Trusted Digital Web) <mwherman@parallelspace.net>
> *Sent:* Monday, April 27, 2026 9:41:43 AM
> *To:* steve capell <steve.capell@gmail.com>; Christopher Allen <
> ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com>
> *Cc:* Credentials Community Group <public-credentials@w3.org>
> *Subject:* Re: Revisiting SSI at Ten -- Preliminary Revised Principles
> Open for Review
>
> Human Context: Whenever I see a set of categories, dimensions, principles,
> etc., my First Principles mindset asks:
>
>    - How well does the proposed set represent an **orthogonal spanning
>    set** covering the particular subject area?
>
>
> ChatGPT Verification-First Analysis
>
> Acknowledgement: None of this analysis would have been possible without
> the 1000s of person-hours of human effort that were invested in creation of
> the text of the 16 Principles of SSI.
>
> P1: How orthogonal and complete is this spanning set of 16 Principles of
> Self-Sovereign Identity?
> https://revisitingssi.com/library/ssi-principles-2026-redline/
>
> R1. https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69ef7d9403048191b8be54a58f49d72b
>
> Acknowledgement: Orthogonality may not have been one of the original
> goals; I believe completeness is.
>
> Note: These responses are long.
>
>
> P2. Reduce the 16 principles into a truly orthogonal minimal basis
>
> R2: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69ef7d9403048191b8be54a58f49d72b
>
>
> P3: Derive a testable scoring framework for real SSI systems against these
> 6 axes
>
> R3: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69ef811ac290819197f97b5f0c6eb285
>
>
> Human Summary to follow...
>
> Michael Herman
>
> Decentralized Dissident
>
> Get Outlook for Android <https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* steve capell <steve.capell@gmail.com>
> *Sent:* Sunday, April 26, 2026 7:33:46 PM
> *To:* Christopher Allen <ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com>
> *Cc:* Credentials Community Group <public-credentials@w3.org>
> *Subject:* Re: Revisiting SSI at Ten -- Preliminary Revised Principles
> Open for Review
>
> Dear Christopher,
>
> What an excellent set of principles.  I have a couple of thoughts but they
> are not easily reflected as edits to the document because they rather apply
> to the whole document.  So I’ll write them here for consideration.  Feel
> free to ignore or tell me what I might do to help reflect these in the text
> (or related text).
>
>
>    - *Express as model law.*  My first thought is that these principles,
>    whilst a laudable statement of what we’d all love to see, are not going to
>    be implemented by just wishing they were true because some of them
>    (deliberately) are opposite to what a selfish commercial interest might
>    want.  Therefore many or all of them would become real and enforceable only
>    when they are reflected in national law.  To that end, it’s helpful to
>    write them as “model law” in legally defensible language that is more or
>    less ready to selectively cut and paste into national regulations. This is
>    what the UN often does with treaties and actual model laws like this one -
>    https://uncitral.un.org/en/texts/ecommerce/modellaw/electronic_transferable_records.
>    It’s one of many model law documents from UN/CITRAL. The SSI principles
>    aren’t quite written this way.  Not suggesting to change the principles but
>    maybe consider an accompanying document that is written as implementable
>    model law?  Acknowledging the high risk of hallucination and mistakes,
>    here’s what chatGPT thinks needs to happen before these principles could
>    become model law -
>    https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69eeb8b7a374819190bb1337327f976f
>    - *SSI Principles are for people not things*.  My second thought is
>    that these principles reflect how we’d like to see technologies like DIDs
>    and VCs used with people to protect their rights and privacy and so on.
>    However these same technologies can be very usefully applied to inanimate
>    things - like an ocean consignment where the consignment would have a DID
>    and the Bill of Lading for that consignment would be a VC.  Ocean bills are
>    negotiable instruments that are explicitly designed to allow trading of the
>    goods while at see. So we want the tach to allow trading of goods but most
>    certainly not the trading of people. The ocean bill is a pair document that
>    has stubbornly resisted digitalisation because of the difficulty of finding
>    an open and interoperable way to verify integrity (easy with VCs) and
>    record transfer of ownership (possible with NFTs but not very interoperable
>    - so DIDs with key event histories offer an alternative).  However the
>    valid application of the same SSI technologies to this domain of the
>    shipment of things would directly contravene several of the principles -
>    with good reason.  So maybe the principles (especially if translated to
>    model law) need to clearly scope their applicability to people and not to
>    things?
>
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Steve Capell
> UN/CEFACT Vice-Chair
> steve.capell@gmail.com
> +61 410437854
>
>
>
> On 26 Apr 2026, at 6:22 pm, Christopher Allen <
> ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com> wrote:
>
> On April 26, 2016, I published The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity
> <https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/article/the-path-to-self-soverereign-identity/> and
> closed it with a request: *"I seek your assistance in taking these
> principles to the next level."*
>
> Ten years to the day, I am publishing a first community draft as a major
> revision:
>
>
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P13Wy1plHWXIonErNXSG8R-n9L4fWTtUzglAcObNSXs/
>
> A stable archival copy is mirrored:
>
>     https://revisitingssi.com/library/ssi-principles-2026-redline/
>
> The draft preserves the 2016 language verbatim wherever it survives, so
> the continuity remains visible alongside revision. It organizes the
> principles into four layers -- foundational, relational, technical,
> political -- and adds six new principles:
>
>   * Inalienability
>   * Cognitive Liberty
>   * Relational Autonomy
>   * Stewardship
>   * Equity
>   * Anti-Coercive Design
>
> The revisions grew out of five months of discussions at RevisitingSSI.com,
> with contributions from Kim Hamilton Duffy (DIF), Vinay Vasanji (EF),
> Georgy Ishmaev (Inria), Martina Kolpondinos, Ian Grigg, Philip Sheldrake,
> Matthew Schutte, and many others.
>
> I am publishing in redline form, on this anniversary, precisely because it
> is unfinished. My hope is to iterate it with this community and others over
> the coming months and present a more mature version at the Global Digital
> Collaboration (GDC) event in Geneva this September.
>
> *Four ways to participate*
>
> 1. Read and comment in the Google Doc. Every clause is open for inline
> comment.
>
> 2. Find me next week (April 28-30) at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW)
> in Mountain View, CA. I will be there all three days and plan to propose at
> least session -- more if there is interest.
>
> 3. Join me next week when I am a guest in the CCG call, May 5, 9:00-9:50
> PDT / 12:00-12:50 EDT / 18:00-18:50 CEST (16:00 UTC).
>
>     Event:
> https://www.w3.org/events/meetings/6c106024-7f5f-4297-972b-18af6432aaef/20260505T120000/
>
> 4. Attend the dedicated Revisiting SSI community discussion on May 20
> (10am PDT / 7pm CEST). Meeting access is shared on the Signal group and the
> announcements list:
> https://www.blockchaincommons.com/dispatches/ssi-invite/#-join-us
>
> The work between now and Geneva depends on this community pushing back on
> what is imprecise, challenging what is wrong, and adding what is missing.
>
> -- Christopher Allen
>
>
> ------------------------------
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