Why the Internet Needs an Identity Metasystem?
If we are to move more and more of our lives to the digital realm while also preserving agency and autonomy, we must create a digital world that allows us to jump the trust gap we inevitably have with people, organizations, and things when our interaction is digital.
An identity metasystem provides the long-missing identity layer for the Internet that will allow this to happen. The metasystem can be incorporated into every digital tool and system providing a consistent, trustworthy experience that feels as friction-less and natural as identity in the physical world.
Decentralized, self-sovereign identity (SSI) depends on an identity metasystem and is the foundation for a decentralized Web — a Web that flexibly supports the kind of ad hoc interactions people have with each other all the time in real life. We’ll never get an online world that mirrors real life and feels frictionless and life-like until we do.
The identity metasystem represents a universal trust framework because its trust model has five important characteristics:
1. Credentials are decentralized and contextual — There is no central authority for all credentials. Every party can be an issuer, a holder (identity owner), or a verifier. Verifiable credentials can be adapted to any country, any industry, any community, or any set of trust relationships.
2. Credential issuers decide on what data is contained in their credentials — Anyone can write credential schemas to the ledger. Anyone can create a credential definition based on any of these schemas.
3. Verifiers make their own trust decisions about which credentials to accept — There’s no central authority who determines what credentials are important or which are used for what purpose. The metasystem supplies the technical underpinnings for cryptographic trust, upon which context-specific trust frameworks can operate.
4. Credential verifiers don’t need to have any specific technical, contractual, or commercial relationship with credential issuers — Verifiers do not need to contact issuers to perform verification.
5. Credential holders are free to choose which credentials to carry and what information to disclose — People and organizations are in control of the credentials they hold (just as they are with physical credentials) and determine what to share with whom. This is sometimes referred to as self-sovereign identity (SSI).
Metasystems accelerate innovation and reduce engineering complexity by providing standard ways of doing things. Thus, universal solutions solve previously intractable problems and make new applications more broadly available. A trust framework with the characteristics listed above changes how we live our digital lives. The Internet changed the world because it provided a universal means of communicating. An identity metasystem changes the world by providing a universal means of trusting.
Source: Phil Windley Blog and Sovrin
