There are two interesting aspects of self-sovereign identity that are not worth hand-waiving away as dystopian:
- it provides identity tools that use standards that span across geographical and platform boundaries. this is a different form of “user account” than say an online Amazon or NYStateGov account. it is good to have an option on the web for auth and identity that is detached from any single corporate entity or jurisdiction.
- unlike most of the world’s current identity systems, many of the SSI systems can and are using novel cryptography, which can combine with privacy and encryption techniques such as hashing, private keys and zk-proofs. so instead of sending photos of your passport and drivers license all over the web, SSI allows you to sign a message on a public ledger, or send a zero knowledge proof that the other end can verify.
SSI doesn’t need to replace typical identity and web auth but it could be introduced as another option.
You could consider Ethereum addresses and ENS aliases to be a limited form of SSI. MetaMask alone suggests it has several million MAUs not that this should be a metric in determining whether a tech is dystopian or not.
Various web3 platforms already require verifiable attestations through signing messages with private keys such as multi sig wallets, off chain voting, token gated access.
Are you objecting to the cryptography and theory of ZK-SNARKs or the fact that not enough production grade applications are using this new tech to your expectations?
Proving systems like Groth16 and TurboPLONK have only recently gotten to a point where they can be run in a web browser, and circuit development has come a long way with Circom 2 and now varying zkVMs being built around higher level programming languages. It is reasonable to concede that we are still some years from seeing production grade SSI + ZK tech reach a mass market.
The original commenter was speaking of things that you admit are in the fabulous future, and talking about them as if they exist in the present right now. And that's just a lie.
Exactly, why would you sing a message saying that you're logging on this or that website, for everyone to see, when you can just tell the website in question and no one else?
You don’t need to post a message on the chain to ‘login’ to a web3 site. But if you perform a transaction such as changing the state in a smart contract or withdrawing tokens based on your address and message meeting some ZK-SNARK verifiable condition, that is when you might need to post a message to the chain.
- it provides identity tools that use standards that span across geographical and platform boundaries. this is a different form of “user account” than say an online Amazon or NYStateGov account. it is good to have an option on the web for auth and identity that is detached from any single corporate entity or jurisdiction.
- unlike most of the world’s current identity systems, many of the SSI systems can and are using novel cryptography, which can combine with privacy and encryption techniques such as hashing, private keys and zk-proofs. so instead of sending photos of your passport and drivers license all over the web, SSI allows you to sign a message on a public ledger, or send a zero knowledge proof that the other end can verify.
SSI doesn’t need to replace typical identity and web auth but it could be introduced as another option.