Strategic advantage of the decentralized internet (and SSI)
Transition from in-house to the cloud meant just starting to use someone else’s computers. It naturally created gatekeepers and controllers of the internet: both governments and FAANG.
Transition from the cloud to decentralized infrastructure IS NOT about having more computers or having them in different places. Fancy cryptography (and fancy game theory) take care of the ability to control and trust the computation results.
However, what’s absolutely required for success of the decentralized internet — is to replace rules and rules creators with decentralized governance. That is, to use open-source incentives schemes and mechanism design to guide the system’s evolution.
In SSI, DeFi, crypto, DAO, and NFT it all comes down to the same issue: how can we ensure predictable and sustainable protocol governance without giving control to the clueless investors with fat convertible notes?
In practice, for the #SSI ecosystem, it’s not as important to have yet another native library or DID method (although marginally useful). But it’s crucial to design incentivized user behavior that is aligned with the network goals. We already have tools like staking, slashing, and cryptoeconomics to achieve that.
The long-term goal the self-sovereign identity is not just about building digital driver’s licenses instead of physical ones, but rather things like:
- Provable Data Anonymization through contract-theoretic rewards: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.12442
- Maximizing the efficiency of wireless power transfer using VCG mechanism price derivation: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8786914
- Fair product rating systems to combat fake reviews: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.10954v1.pdf
- Decentralized incentivized competency assessment: https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot9-prague/blob/master/topics-and-advance-readings/vc-in-incentivized-competency-assessment.md
