Comment by fc417fc802
23 days ago
> I've done some work in the DID space. Not really a fan, and the space is full of half working implementations like this post documents.
I would be curious to hear your broader thoughts. I haven't actually worked with did but I did read through a large portion of the spec back before bluesky first launched. My impression was that it's a genuinely useful direction to go in but the standard seemed verbose and overly complex to me given what it does. But then that's not an uncommon thought to have about something you don't properly understand. (TBF I also feel that way about a lot of standards that I do understand reasonably well so perhaps I'm the problem here.)
Not the parent poster, but the cynical impression I had from very early on for DID is that almost all of its complexity and much of the reason its space is full of half-working implementations rather than working ones is pretty obviously because it was designed to be an abstraction layer on top of "namecoins" and when the "namecoin" dependency was removed (for good reasons) there were not enough good ideas for what to replace that dependency with, sort of intentionally leaving what was left of the design in a sort of guaranteed perpetual state of half-implementation (including implementations based on some of the original "namecoin" ideas).
This is fairly accurrate
Much of DID itself is basically a standardization of the idea behind Keybase, ie, using control of a private key as a marker of identity.
This in itself is a pretty good idea (with some bad usability, but at least technically interesting)
DID falls over because it has a bad interop story, and much of it is based on crypto-based implementations (again, technically interesting but bad usability plus a monetary incentive to go after your details).