SSI Orbit Podcast: Christopher Allen Interview
On January 31, Christopher Allen spoke with Mathieu Glaude at the SSI Orbit Podcast on the controversial topic “Has Our SSI Ecosystem Become Morally Bankrupt?”. Following the video link, below, are Christopher’s Musings on the topic, overviewing some of the material from the video.
The legitimacy of the modern self-sovereign identity (SSI) industry is a vital question to ask, because in the last year I’ve become to wonder if DIDs and VCs could actually lose. In my opinion, the main threat is that we made compromises in the development of these new self-sovereign technologies that led to them not being differentiated from centralized identity. We betrayed our principles.
But that was actually a pretty small portion of a wide-ranging discussion of identity between myself and Mathieu that I hope you’ll listen to. It also covered my history, the history of SSI, the ideals of SSI, how we’re losing them, and where that could lead us. (Spoiler: it’s not a good place.)
“We’ve seen what happens when you have too much control in a single authority … and we’re forgetting those lessons. We have to minimize the risks when [authorities] are wrong or their powers are abused.”
My own history in the cryptography & identity field dates back to meeting the founders of the Xanada Project, working with RSA, writing SSLRef, coauthoring TLS, and working with elliptic curves. This history all offers ideas for digital identity! For example, Xanadu was one of the inspirations for my ideas of edge identifiers & cryptographic cliques that I recently released.
I also talked about how self-sovereign identity, DIDs, and VCs all matured at Rebooting the Web of Trust. Early on, we worked with experts from the UN and people working with the refuge crisis. We had all the right ingredients! But it’s so easy to lose the ideals behind a technology. Groupware lost its collaborative processes. TLS became centralized. We had ten principles for self-sovereign identity, but they’ve been somewhat lost.
“Somehow we disconnect our words from where the real power is, which is anti-coercion and anti-violence.”
I always intended those principles to be a starting point. I was surprised when folks at RWOT weren’t interested in reviewing and revising them. Now, that disinterest has resulted in SSI technology that’s losing against MDLs and other centralized tech. Part of the problem is that privacy doesn’t seem important to people. I think it’s a vocabulary disconnect. Privacy allows us to avoid violence and coercion. Maybe those are the words we need to concentrate on!
Unfortunately, we’ve seen what happens if we walk this path. Jacobus Lentz’s enthusiastic identity work leading up to WWII led to genocide in the Netherlands. That’s what happens when identity is centralized.
We need to talk more about all of these aspects of identity, so that the digital identity of the 21st century protects our basic human rights. I hope you’ll join me in discussion here or in the Youtube comments.
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.