Re: Edge Identifiers & Cryptographic Cliques (a followup on the TPAC Future Proofing Topic)

I finally had the chance to read Christopher's posts, and I found his "Edge
Identifiers & Cliques
<https://www.blockchaincommons.com/musings/musings-cliques-1/>" post to be
one of the best blogs / papers I've read this year.

Identity is about relationships.  In Christopher's words, "Living systems
theory suggests that identity isn’t just about oneself, but about one’s
connections to the rest of society."  I've always found something weird
about the single-signature paradigm for identity (I was also confused about
the difference between private key and private password for a long time
before), and Christopher laid out its shortcomings clearly.  I agree that
modeling identity as a graph of relationships using relational edge keys is
the way to go.

I would encourage everyone to take a moment to read it.  I will also work
with Christopher to schedule this discussion into our content calendar.

Sincerely,

*Harrison Tang*
CEO
 LinkedIn  <https://www.linkedin.com/company/spokeo/> •   Instagram
<https://www.instagram.com/spokeo/> •   Youtube <https://bit.ly/2oh8YPv>


On Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 10:24 AM Adrian Gropper <agropper@healthurl.com>
wrote:

> Christopher,
>
> Much as I appreciate your leadership and innovation in matters of
> cryptography as applied to identity, I worry that digital identity is now
> distracting us from solving real application-level problems like reputation
> and accountability. Anonymity and fuzziness can only get us so far.
>
> Consider, for example, a clique that has two AIs and me acting as I think
> I understand your vision. I agree it's valuable for actors external to the
> clique to not distinguish whether the accountable entity is an AI or the
> human because this gives agency to the human. Sure, but the more relevant
> issue is how does the human delegate to their two AIs and how are the
> reputations of the AIs and the human managed (so that the system can scale
> to other humans that might want to trust an AI as part of their clique).
>
> Adrian
>
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 11:07 AM Christopher Allen <
> ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Oct 10, 2024 at 4:17 PM Christopher Allen <
>> ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com> wrote:
>>
>>> To provide more depth on the concept of edge identifiers and how they
>>> fit within the evolving landscape of decentralized identity, I've written
>>> an article titled "Edge Identifiers & Cliques":
>>> https://www.blockchaincommons.com/musings/musings-cliques-1/ Another
>>> article, with more detail, I will post next week.
>>>
>>
>> Here is the next part of this series, "Open & Fuzzy Cliques"
>> https://www.blockchaincommons.com/musings/musings-cliques-2/ .This
>> article expands on how relationship-based identity can evolve with new
>> identity models that leverage Schnorr-based aggregatable signatures,
>> distributed key generation (DKG) multi-party computation (MPC), to support
>> relationship-based identity models.
>>
>> In this latest article, I explore several new clique variants. Open
>> cliques represent organic, evolving groups that reflect real-world social
>> dynamics, without requiring all members to be directly connected. Fuzzy
>> cliques introduce threshold capabilities, enabling groups to make
>> semi-anonymous decisions where only some members need to agree—ideal for
>> situations that need flexible group dynamics. Device cliques expand
>> identity to include non-human participants like oracles, AI, or IoT
>> devices, highlighting how identity can be collaboratively managed by
>> mixed-entity networks.
>>
>> I’d love to continue our conversation on how these cryptographic
>> approaches might further strengthen our standards work. Your insights are
>> always welcome!
>>
>> -- Christopher Allen
>>
>