Christopher Allen

Blockchain & Decentralized Identity Architect — Internet Cryptography Pioneer — Co-author TLS Security Standard — Collaborative Tools & Patterns

Alacrity, noun. From the Latin alacritas meaning promptitude. Similar in meaning to its synonyms Velocity and Celerity, all three mean quickness in action or movement. Alacrity stresses promptness in response to a suggestion or command, cheerful and eager willingness, appropriate quickness, and in general the beginning of fast movement.

Life with Alacrity is the personal blog of Christopher Allen, covering topics of community, decentralized identity, collective choice, online privacy, and more. Popular articles include “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity”, “The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Size”, “Dunbar & World of Warcraft”, and the Community by the Numbers series.

Christopher is available for personal consulting engagements on decentralized digital trust, online collaboration, identity management, digital assets, smart contracts, and human-rights privacy. Please email if you are interested.

Most Recent Post

2024-10-29: Musings of a Trust Architect: Has our SSI Ecosystem Become Morally Bankrupt?

This topic was presented at IIWXXXIX Fall 2024 on October 29, 2024.

My name is Christopher Allen. In 2016, in advance of the ID2020 conference at the United Nations in New York, I wrote “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity”, the article that described the ten precepts of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and provided the name that defined our ecosystem. Eight and a half years later, I ask the SSI community to reflect on a difficult question, one that challenges the very foundation of SSI. Has our ecosystem strayed from our principles? Have we in the SSI community lost our moral compass?

I speak not only in response to the argument last year at IIW that “SSI didn’t work” but also to underscore a graver issue: that perhaps in our pursuit of mainstream adoption we’ve sacrificed the very principles that set SSI apart.

In a world increasingly threatened by authoritarian encroachments, with troubling examples growing by the day, we face the urgent need to protect freedom. Russia and China flout international borders and expand their influence through intimidation and repression. This rise of authoritarianism is undermining human freedom across Europe, especially in Hungary, with worrying echoes in Italy, the Netherlands, France, and across the EU. The number of refugees and stateless people are rising every year.

Closer to home, we also face disconcerting overreach, such as the Texas Attorney General’s request for DMV records of people who changed their names, an alarming step towards state-enabled discrimination against trans people. If Trump is re-elected, it’s chilling to imagine what might become acceptable next.

These are ominous signs of an escalating trend toward pervasive surveillance and control, not only over our private lives but also over the core of human dignity itself. SSI was meant to stand as a bastion against these encroachments, defending personal autonomy and integrity. It imagined a world where people, not institutions, controlled their identities, without fear of overreach, manipulation, or coercion.

However, instead of holding the line on decentralization, we’ve compromised by adopting watered-down specifications such as “did:web” that diminish the resilience and independence of self-sovereign identities.

Instead of insisting that Legally-Enabled Self-Sovereign (LESS) Identity enforce strict data minimization for both businesses and governments, we have allowed over-identification to proliferate. Further, we have failed to effectively counter the overblown threats posed by the so-called ‘Four Horsemen of the Digital Apocalypse’ — software pirates, organized crime, child pornographers, and terrorists — while also overlooking the far greater risk of tyranny and its potential for real harm against those powerless to defend themselves.

These compromises have left us vulnerable, eroding SSI’s unique value proposition compared to the centralized approaches of government. As a result, centralized government approoaches such as Apple and Google’s mDL/mDoc standards and federated corporate identity efforts are now winning the market battle against our SSI ecosystem.

This is the real reason the SSI ecosystem may be faltering: not due to market forces, but because we have failed to unequivocally commit to upholding the core values of decentralization and privacy and to resisting compromises that undermine human dignity. By doing so, we have become indistinguishable from the very systems we set out to disrupt.

The question is not whether SSI has “worked” in the marketplace. It is whether we have remained true to its ethical foundation and core principles, as envisioned from the start.

For another rebuttal to Riley Hughes’ Medium article, please see gabe’s “The Greatly Exaggerated Demise of SSI: A Rebuttal to Premature Eulogies”.




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