Reinvent Secure and Confidential Communication for a post web3
It is too personal with email or phone
Today’s communication channels need to be revised. They are tethered to sensitive identifiers like phone numbers or emails, often made public and exceedingly difficult to discard or modify. This is especially true for phone numbers. Imagine the repercussions of your phone number being leaked; at best, you’d be inundated with spam.
Another side effect of your phone and email quite often is Personal identifiers that conflict with the concept of pseudo-anonymous connections.
I want an identifier that describes the communication channel for a particular relation instead of a concrete person.
DAO use cases and Wallet addresses as a communication medium
It could be a game changer for DAO contributors — quite often, you have a contractor’s wallet and Ethereum address without the possibility of keeping a private communication channel. Organizations were forced to repeatedly use Discord or any chat-based web2 platforms as a workaround, and not all participants were.
Creating a communication channel around a blockchain address is already a step toward better privacy and more web3 friendly. However, we still have mixed concerns and maybe force users to create a separate wallet. It could still be inconvenient. The Wallet is still quite sensitive.
Smart contracts could be an answer with an account abstraction, but they lock users to a concrete blockchain and raise the overall cost of onboarding and communication.
We need an inexpensive identifier for onboarding and abstract enough to describe entities without network or financial context.
But what if there was a way to revolutionize this system?
A new way of looking at yourself — You are the network
Many products fail to create one identifier for a person, which is a good reason for it. You are not a single identity. You instead act as a network inside a complex, interconnected social community. So it would be best if you had multiple identifiers for yourself.
New communication pattern that focuses on relations and pseudo-anonymous connections.
One more paradigm shifts your identifier is more connected to a peer relation than your identity. We could create an identifier for a link instead of personalities.
What if you could communicate through a channel with an identifier that could be effortlessly dropped or disregarded?
Or better yet, have distinct identifiers for varying types of relationships? Taking it a step further, for those who prioritize privacy imagine creating a new identity for every relationship or, to a certain extent, for every transaction. But the game changer identifier describes a relation, not a person. In the case of DAO, you create an identifier representing your working channel for a particular task or DAO you work with.
Self-Sovereign Messages
This is where Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) come into play.
The concept of sovereign messaging, integrated with self-sovereign identity, allows users to have multiple digital identities (DIDs) for different channels. These can range from being private to semi-public. The flexibility to disconnect or drop a DID empower users to control their communication channels.
For this, we need the following building blocks:
- Identifier (DIDs)
- communication medium and architecture for message exchange
- user-facing protocols that connect identifiers with persons/organizations.
— Address book like trust registry
— KYC trust providers and protocols
- Persistent layer
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Disclaimer: rest of the article could be a too technical and require a bit of reading and technical skills but keep following.
DIDs as a rescue
Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) are new identifier that enable verifiable, self-sovereign digital identities. Unlike traditional identifiers, such as usernames or email addresses, DIDs are fully controlled by the DID subject, independent from centralized registries, authorities, or intermediaries. They are created, managed, and stored on distributed, decentralized networks like blockchains. DIDs use asymmetric cryptography, ensuring the owner has complete control over their identity without relying on a central authority and can securely prove ownership.
More about DIDs for the organization could be found in an article
## How DID could talk to each other?
I covered this topic in great detail. You can find it here
To recap, we have a few significant options
- DID Auth for simple ownership proofs
- DIDComm v2
- DWNs more about DWNs could be found
DIDComm is often cited as a potential solution for messaging. However, DIDComm could be more technical and low-level. It doesn’t provide an end-to-end experience, especially in transport and persistence. This leaves users grappling with challenges that should ideally be addressed at the platform level.
The decentralized web nodes (DWN) offer a fresh perspective. Their emphasis on enhancing messaging protocols promises security and confidentiality in communication.
One of the standout features of DWNs is the introduction of protocols. These protocols define the nature of communication, the type of data exchanged, and the data format. By installing a protocol, both parties can initiate contact with a predefined context, eliminating guesswork.
DWN offers a persistent layer and Relay infrastructure that allow building the decentralized application and keeping in sync of different user devices and identities.
What should be done on top of DWN?
DWNs give good building blocks but still require work on a protocol and application parts
- Communication Protocol design
- Personal KYC and trust registry flow or, let say, a way to build your address book to connect DIDs to organizations and persons
- in Your network of networks identity in scope of relation management. How to switch your identity in the context of relations
