This topic was presented at IIWXXXIX Fall 2024 on October 29, 2024.
My name is Christopher Allen. In 2016, in advance of the ID2020 conference at the United Nations in New York, I wrote “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity”, the article that described the ten precepts of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and provided the name that defined our ecosystem. Eight and a half years later, I ask the SSI community to reflect on a difficult question, one that challenges the very foundation of SSI. Has our ecosystem strayed from our principles? Have we in the SSI community lost our moral compass?
I speak not only in response to the argument last year at IIW that “SSI didn’t work” but also to underscore a graver issue: that perhaps in our pursuit of mainstream adoption we’ve sacrificed the very principles that set SSI apart.
In a world increasingly threatened by authoritarian encroachments, with troubling examples growing by the day, we face the urgent need to protect freedom. Russia and China flout international borders and expand their influence through intimidation and repression. This rise of authoritarianism is undermining human freedom across Europe, especially in Hungary, with worrying echoes in Italy, the Netherlands, France, and across the EU. The number of refugees and stateless people are rising every year.
Closer to home, we also face disconcerting overreach, such as the Texas Attorney General’s request for DMV records of people who changed their names, an alarming step towards state-enabled discrimination against trans people. If Trump is re-elected, it’s chilling to imagine what might become acceptable next.
These are ominous signs of an escalating trend toward pervasive surveillance and control, not only over our private lives but also over the core of human dignity itself. SSI was meant to stand as a bastion against these encroachments, defending personal autonomy and integrity. It imagined a world where people, not institutions, controlled their identities, without fear of overreach, manipulation, or coercion.
However, instead of holding the line on decentralization, we’ve compromised by adopting watered-down specifications such as “did:web” that diminish the resilience and independence of self-sovereign identities.
Instead of insisting that Legally-Enabled Self-Sovereign (LESS) Identity enforce strict data minimization for both businesses and governments, we have allowed over-identification to proliferate. Further, we have failed to effectively counter the overblown threats posed by the so-called ‘Four Horsemen of the Digital Apocalypse’ — software pirates, organized crime, child pornographers, and terrorists — while also overlooking the far greater risk of tyranny and its potential for real harm against those powerless to defend themselves.
These compromises have left us vulnerable, eroding SSI’s unique value proposition compared to the centralized approaches of government. As a result, centralized government approoaches such as Apple and Google’s mDL/mDoc standards and federated corporate identity efforts are now winning the market battle against our SSI ecosystem.
This is the real reason the SSI ecosystem may be faltering: not due to market forces, but because we have failed to unequivocally commit to upholding the core values of decentralization and privacy and to resisting compromises that undermine human dignity. By doing so, we have become indistinguishable from the very systems we set out to disrupt.
The question is not whether SSI has “worked” in the marketplace. It is whether we have remained true to its ethical foundation and core principles, as envisioned from the start.
The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity Links
Christopher Allen is a long-term advocate for self-sovereign identity. He popularized the term and laid out an initial set of principles in his foundational article, “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity”, coauthored the DID spec for W3c, and founded the Rebooting the Web of Trust workshops that advanced the technology for a decade. Following are articles by him and interviews with him on the topic.
- The Co-Writer of TLS Says We’ve Lost the Privacy Plot (4/24/25): An interview with Tereza Bízková for Hackernoon on how things have gone wrong.
- SSI Orbit Podcast: Christopher Allen Interview (1/31/25): Following up the “Has Our SSI Ecosystem Become Morally Bankrupt?” article, a discussion of the problems with the current SSI ecosystem.
- Echoes from History (11/15/23): How identity went horribly wrong during WWII and the warnings that offers for the future of self-sovereign identity.
- The Origins of Self-Sovereign Identity (8/9/23): Living Systems Theory, Ostrom’s Principles, and other foudndational ideas that led to SSI, and what they say about its intent.
- Private Key Disclosure (8/16/22): Digital identities are secured by private keys, but are private keys secure from the government?
- Principal Authority: A New Perspective on Self-Sovereign Identity (9/15/21): A new lens for looking at Self-Sovereign Identity, based on successes in the Wyoming legislature.
- Self-Sovereign Identity: Five Years On (4/26/21): Five years after “The Path to Self Sovereign Identity”, the successes and challenges of SSI to date.
- The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity (4/26/16): The initial article on SSI, including the ten principles for Self-Sovereign Identity.
For another rebuttal to Riley Hughes’ Medium article, please see gabe’s “The Greatly Exaggerated Demise of SSI: A Rebuttal to Premature Eulogies”.