After three decades of building internet infrastructure, I’ve learned that the most dangerous moment isn’t when a system fails, it’s when it succeeds and then inverts its purpose. This week confirmed that again. Anthropic abruptly disabled its frontier models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for every customer, to comply with a U.S. government national-security order. The immediate disruption was minor: the…
Often, the first thing that I hear when I describe Gordian Envelope is that we already have too many credential formats. They’re right. We’ve got JWT, SD-JWT, JWE, COSE, mDoc, JSON-LD VCs, AnonCreds, BBS+ presentations, and at least five more depending on which working group is awake this quarter. XKCD 927, “The 15th Standard”, is the obligatory citation, and it lands. So I want to start with the…
Today, Blockchain Commons published a progress report on Amira. This is a use case that I wrote almost a decade ago supporting one of the real-life situations that I felt that DIDs needed to support:
On March 3, Vitalik Buterin posted a manifesto on X1. It introduced a new term: sanctuary technologies. Ten days later, the Ethereum Foundation made it official with a 38-page mandate document, which they described as “part constitution, part manifesto.”2 I noted this briefly in my recent Dispatch on Technology Paternalism, but the new mandate deserves its own treatment. When Vitalik talks about…
Ten years ago this week — on April 26, 2016 — I posted “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity” on my Life with Alacrity blog. I had been thinking for a while about what a digital identity movement would need to stand for, and the piece ended with ten principles and a request: I seek your assistance in taking these principles to the next level. I did not expect what happened next. Those ten…
It’s been ten years since I wrote the principles of self-sovereign identity. Though my focus was on identity systems, my underlying concern was always agency: ensuring that individuals remain in control of their own digital lives. Today that concern is more important than ever because of the deployment of LLM-driven agentic systems. We can increasingly empower agents in the digital ecosystem to…
In 2016, I chose the term “self-sovereign identity” to describe what identity systems should protect. But the community I helped to build has been getting captured, as evidenced by EU wallet regulations and ISO standards that are consolidating around the same platform gatekeepers we set out to displace. I’ve been looking for the right word to describe the issues with what’s happening to digital…
UPDATE, March 5, 2026: SB 275 has passed the Utah legislature unanimously — the Senate voted 25-0 and the House 70-0 — and has been sent to the governor for signature. It takes effect May 6, 2026. This is a huge win. If you’re in Utah, thank your representatives. If you’re in another state, point your legislators at SB 275 and Wyoming SF39 as model legislation. The fight now shifts to preservation…
In 2016, I published The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity (https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/article/the-path-to-self-soverereign-identity/) and with it proposed ten foundational principles for digital identity systems. These principles were centered on human dignity, agency, and consent and quickly became a touchstone in the emerging world of Self-Sovereign Identity. At the time, I asked for…
ABSTRACT: Digital infrastructure is built on sand due to its control by centralized entities, most of which are focused on profit over service. We need Exodus Protocol services that build infrastructure without centralization, ensuring its continuation into the far future. Bitcoin offers our prime example to date. Five design patterns suggest how to create similar services for coordination,…