10I/ Trade-Offs for SSI Adoption / Elina Cadouri

Session 10I

Trade-offs for SSI Adoption

Session Convener: Elina Cadouri

Notes-taker(s): Joshua Coffey,

Tags / links to resources / technology discussed, related to this session:

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

• Convener is building an SSI product and wants to have a conversation about the possible trade-offs of adopting SSI

• Key management is really difficult for individuals
  • Is it worth someone not having their own keys in order to make the user experience easier?
  • DeFi / crypto group would likely never accept anything but managing their own keys
• Terminology issue – should we be using “VCs” and “DIDs” when people have no idea what those mean?
• Value proposition of attacking someone’s phone is massively increased – I can take everything from you solely by hacking your phone
  • I used to have to break into your house
• Onboarding is not easy
  • One has to understand many things before they can get a footing
  • Is it better to educate users about SSI, or just deliver a product to them that does it without them knowing the terms?
• Companies have to choose between adopting a standard as-is and not having everything they might want, or going proprietary and breaking *interoperability
• Might be linked to financial speculation / web3 / etc. due to shared terminology
• “Decentralized” is not a selling point, but “owning your own data” might be
  • Many people are scared off by the word “decentralized”.
    • Many companies really like centralization and don’t want to give you the power to own your own data
• SSI is incredibly complicated and implementation is very difficult, which encourages people to make use of abstractions which remove some of the benefits from the system
• We should all leave this conference / industry and go get jobs in other industries and bring SSI with us
  • We have to go to where the users are, rather than thinking “if we build it, they will come”
  • Does any of this actually matter to those external companies? What do they actually view as value propositions?
• Accepting smaller user bases as a starting point instead of trying to do the whole world at once
• This building should have the highest concentration of people who have self-sovereign identities in the world, but basically nobody here even uses it
• What are the barriers that need to be brought down for SSI to happen?
  • We need to figure out what we’re doing in regards to interoperability – do we dedicate resources to it or go our own ways?
  • Interoperability needs to come about as a result of a strong desire to link multiple ecosystems together, as opposed to building the bridge first and hoping land arrives around it
• We need more people focusing on actual verticals as opposed to building platforms and abstractions
• Stop renaming things every six months
• We want people to share our vision and love SSI with us, but instead maybe we should just deliver things which work for them
• Standards elsewhere come about to standardize existing proprietary products/protocols/interactions – it’s very unusual to start with a standard and attempt to find a use case later, as we are.
• Anyone who says that SSI is the solution to all problems is giving bad advice
  • Sometimes traditional solutions are just better
• Could be an opportunity cost where we’re not thinking about how to improve the current centralized/non-SSI solutions we have, and spending all our time on SSI which might not happen
  • Maybe the best option is to just lobby for strong data protection laws – that might be the best thing for the state of Identity in a long time.
    • It’d also help drive adoption of SSI as companies need to find alternatives to just guzzling data
• There are cultural and jurisdictional differences between countries
  • Chinese government requires that all encryption be backdoorable
  • Things we take for granted as being “value-adds” (privacy, security, etc.) may simply not be something that certain cultures care or think about
  • Maybe we should spend more time in Europe than in the United States
• Where is the call for SSI going to come from?
  • Governments? Citizens? Companies?
• Blockchain / Web3 could be a huge driving force behind improved identity standards and protocols
• Maybe we find one unified use case that we all work towards