Is "acceptably non-dystopian" self-sovereign identity even possible?

What even is self-sovereign identity? Good question. Ask yourself what makes you an identifiable person? The answer to that is really "for who?". For the government, your Social Security number is that. If you work for a company you have some identifier. The question being posed here is can we identify a unique person without centralized organizations? Maybe, but it is a lot harder than it may seem.

Self-sovereign identity is one of those things that sounds wonderful at a glance, but can get pretty dystopian the more you start to think about it. Conversely, centrally-controlled identifiers left to governments and corporations have their own obvious and serious issues particularly when it comes to marginalized groups, oppressive governments, and access.

This topic is related to crypto technology but not necessarily the same. The same way crypto argues that people should be able to have their own way of storing and transacting value without a central entity, this tech argues that we should be able to assert and prove our identity without a central entity. Leave the Social Security number at home.

Digital identity has its own trilemma: privacy, Sybil resistance, and decentralization.

I setup a BrightID profile a few weeks back because there are several crypto projects that use it as a way of validating you. BrightID is not perfect and this article highlights many issues with it, and all approaches to this problem.

I do think this is an interesting problem to solve, and could unlock some very compelling real-world use cases when combined with other things.