If ‘the future’ is trust.

Who/what - do you trust?

I mean really really trust?

And why?

How many such entities are there?

Now you meet someone outside that 🔗📼 Circle of Trust.

How do you include them in your circle of trust? What are the qualifiers?

If not include them completely - at least for a single transaction?

How many ‘circles of trust’ does the average person need?

You are boarding a plane. How much trust do you need in ‘the system’ that ensures that the pilot is qualified, that there is nobody going to be on board plotting a nefarious action, that nobody has broken into the supply chain for (say) water and poisoned the supply - and so many more things that can go wrong. How many circles of trust do you need to be confident that you can fly safely between two points without an incident?

I definitely trust Jax - but not even she can make those kind of ‘trust guarantees’. I have to trust people that I do not know, that they know something and that something is more reliable than average. Ideally - a LOT more reliable.

Now now flip it - with those considerations in mind - consider a single airline - put yourself in their shoes and ask if they’re going to let you on the plane with your ‘self sovereign identity’ that has been ‘authorised’ by an identity that they have never heard of - much less trust.

So - in order that one of their planes doesn’t suffer an incident - who do they trust and why?

Should they?

This all coming to mind as I read a couple of posts over the holidays that were totally unrelated and yet totally connected.

Separately - still waiting to see how self sovereign identity is going to work. The idealism being concocted in NZ, the UK et al will almost certainly fail (or at best be redefined to suit the outcome).

Phil’s connection to ’Visa thinking’ makes sense - but at some point - somewhere - validation with somebody / something need to be made with a ‘trusted authority’ that is bigger than you - and even 🔗 The Principality of Sealand and other similar places.

That is distributed trust - across a network - not centralised - distributed. But we know where the dominant distributed nodes are on the internet? Don’t we. We know that when we say that TCP/IP is by design decentralised. But we also know that despite this - the internet is in practise increasingly centralised.

Not sure there is going to be that much of a change with DIDs - given the current reality - and even then - careful what you wish for.

There is room for an alternative that demonstrably works. It just doesn’t fit into the model that everybody is talking about which is anyway really only about trusting devices - not people.