Re: Discussion w/ Google about their DID Core Formal Objection

On 10/19/21 6:21 AM, Deventer, M.O. (Oskar) van wrote:
> I read the analysis below partly as an urge to establish “DID-brand safety 
> authorities”, one of which could be W3C itself.

Yes, and this is kinda-sorta what Google was getting at... "Vet some of these
112 options, we can't tell which ones have been vetted, if any of them."

Now, the downside there is a trap that the group has avoided to date... which
is "picking winning DID Methods". Given the input from Mozilla, and knowing
how some in the community would react to other more centralized methods, we
can almost guarantee that any DID Method we try to put through the W3C
standardization process will invoke formal objections (which is why we avoided
doing that in the first charter).

I expect we'd be able to overcome objections for did:key and did:web as long
as the vetting the group does is effectively: "This DID Method does what it
says it does."

That is, as long as did:key doesn't promise that it supports key rotation, and
as long as did:web makes it abundantly clear that it depends on DNS and a
secure web infrastructure for the DID Documents, the systems have predictable
characteristics... and that's all the DID WG could evaluate.

Things get far more dicey the second we get into "truly decentralized
methods". At present, it looks like any proof-of-work based system would
violate the sustainability principles of W3C, and any non-proof-of-work based
system would cause objections from the PoW people because it's more
centralized than necessary (maybe).

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
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Received on Tuesday, 19 October 2021 14:56:42 UTC