> I believe this idea could integrate with Block’s vision for Web 5, which to the best of my understanding, also anchors Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) into the Bitcoin blockchain.
There's a lot of effort going on in the EU to enable international, decentralized identity that can be recognized by every country. The first thing they decided was that DIDs on the blockchain are a terrible idea. GDPR demands that personal information must be protected, but having your DID in a blockchain forever, for all to see every transaction your DID ever performs, goes completely against that. It's one of those ideas that doesn't pass even 5 minutes of light consideration when you actually understand the implications.
However, DIDs are not tied in any way to blockchains, so they're still a good idea, just the ideal implementation needs to be found yet.
There may be use cases where a DID tied to a verifiable history is a feature (particularly for organisations as opposed to individuals), but for most people having it linked to a blockchain is definitely not the way forward. Also, blockchains and associated protocols can become defunct, or dwindle in usage until a 51% takeover of the remainder is feasible, or many other things.
I imagine that in the end, a DID will be a private/public keypair wrapped in some hardware that the average person can use.
No. That's just strawmanning a terrible implementation.
Here's another less terrible one: Public certificates of ID issuers are what's stored on-chain. Individual users have their (potentially locally generated) DIDs cross-signed by an issuer. The only data being stored on-chain is issuer certificates (and potentially further signatures and metadata around them) and this makes it possible to run the whole scheme in a more decentralized fashion.
There's a lot of effort going on in the EU to enable international, decentralized identity that can be recognized by every country. The first thing they decided was that DIDs on the blockchain are a terrible idea. GDPR demands that personal information must be protected, but having your DID in a blockchain forever, for all to see every transaction your DID ever performs, goes completely against that. It's one of those ideas that doesn't pass even 5 minutes of light consideration when you actually understand the implications.
However, DIDs are not tied in any way to blockchains, so they're still a good idea, just the ideal implementation needs to be found yet.