here's a copy on YT: "Bringing Self Sovereign Identities to the Masses via ATproto - #ATmosphereConf 2026" www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro2b... -- Also check recent stuff by @christophera.bsky.social : developer.blockchaincommons.com/meetings/202... revisitingssi.com

Has the concept of self-sovereignty affected your career or life? Tell me your story!

Do you use the term "self-sovereign"—for identity, for keys, for your wallet? If you do, it was ten years ago today I chose this term, using it to describe an inalienable right to control your own digital life. We've learned much in the last decade, so I'm offering an update.🧵…

I'm always seeking out the right words for what digital systems do to people. "Privacy" means something different in every room, and has become so overloaded it has become meaningless. "Censorship resistance" sounds like it's only about speech or money. Neither names the mechanism. 🧵…

Utah just passed SB 275 unanimously — Senate 25-0, House 70-0. Their State-Endorsed Digital Identity (SEDI) program is now law. This is a big win for self-sovereign identity. I wrote about it at @blockchaincommons.com. 🧵… /1 www.blockchaincommons.com/musings/Musi...

👍 The new Utah #SEDI draft SB0275 has the essence of my first #SSI principle that I wrote 10 years ago: "(1) An individual possesses an individual identity innate to the individual's existence and independent of the state, which identity is fundamental and inalienable." le.utah.gov/~2026/bills/...

Next year it’ll be 10 years since @christophera.bsky.social wrote The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity along with a definition and 10 principles of SSI. A group is now being convened to refine these principles. Hope to see some atproto folks get involved here, including @bnewbold.net & co.

What would it mean to build infrastructure that can’t fail you? Not one that never has problems, but where someone else can't make it unavailable to you? Where fundamental capabilities exist as rights, not revokable privileges? For this, we need “Exodus Protocols” 🧵… [1/19]

The Q3 2025 Quarterly Report from Blockchain Commons is here! Advancing Bitcoin FROST signing, strengthening provenance, launching Gordian Clubs, and a preview of Hubert ‘secret drops’—each a step toward interoperable, self-sovereign autonomous systems and resilient digital trust. 👇 [1/13] 🧵

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As a co-author & editor of TLS 1.0, I’m quite disappointed that the IETF editors & SEC Area Director have declared “rough consensus” exists to standardize PQ-only cyphersuites (rather than double encryption EC/PQ). Feels like IETF has been captured. See: blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-wea...

Can Web3 dismantle online censorship and restore true digital freedom? Explore the illusion of control and whether decentralization can break the chains. #decentralizedinternet

“If a system cannot hear you say no, it was never built for us. It was built for them.” I'll be presenting this principle to the Swiss e-ID team at a meeting open to the public on Thursday, October 2nd, 16:00 CEST (7am PDT). (meeting details below) 🧵… 1/12

After 32 years, a feature inspired by Project Xanadu's vision becomes reality. Join me for the first demo of Gordian Clubs - autonomous cryptographic objects that make coordination unstoppable. No servers. No surveillance. Just math. 🧵… 1/5

I just saw “The Majestic” on the big screen last night. When it came out it was 2001 and just felt like a nostalgic feel-good movie. But in 2025 its portrayal of resistance to government “red scare” tactics had the audience gasping with connection to Kimmel. More relevant today!

Great Article for all startups, entrepreneurs and businesses should consider the Minimum Viable Product (MVP approach to test their ideas market viability and also to have real insights to pitch to investors. #Tech #SoftwareDev #BlueskyTech #Dev #MVP #Programming #Coding #PHP #Laaravel

Agree @vitalik.ca‬ - "I support it only if it's open source" SHOULD be more common! But open source is just the beginning - it's only Level 0 of what we need! True #OpenDevelopment requires so much more to actually deliver on the promises you outline. 🧵… 1/10

FROST is a powerful next-gen multisig protocol for Bitcoin — more efficient, more resilient. Join us next Wednesday 10am PDT for a live demo + dev discussion on using FROST with BDK and Taproot via our new CLI playground. 🧵… [1/8]

Reports have been coming back from the Global Digital Collaboration conference (GDC25), and they're pretty discouraging for those of us in the decentralized tech community. I wrote about a lot of the problems today. [1/13] www.blockchaincommons.com/musings/gdc25/

Verifiable Credentials are not truth. That shouldn't be a controversial statement, but it is because the core intent of verifiable credentials has been confused following our early work. [1/11]

Bill Atkinson, one of the most quietly revolutionary minds in computing, has passed away. His creations — QuickDraw, MacPaint, and especially HyperCard — transformed not just the Mac, but how I thought about computing. A thread 🧵… 1/9

🔐 We’ve lost the privacy plot. @hackernoon.com just published an interview where I dive into how we got here—and what we still can do about it. hackernoon.com/the-co-write... 👇 (more links in 🧵…) 1/6

My thoughts on Bluesky verification as someone who was deeply involved in an analogous scheme (selecting trusted root CAs for browsers) at Mozilla many years ago. The analogy is not exact: not trusting a verifier just means no checkmark, while not trusting a root CA means nasty security warnings 1/

Today's quarterly report from Blockchain Commons covers our three big initiatives in Q1, 2025: ZeWIF for Zcash, Open Integrity for GitHub, and Post-Quantum Cryptography. It was a busy quarter! [1/12] www.blockchaincommons.com/quarterlies/...

Today marks 20 years since Git’s birth, and our digital world runs on its foundations—but trust was never part of its design. Can you trust a Git repo? That’s why I created the Open Integrity Project: to bring integrity and provenance to code. 🧵…[1/14] www.blockchaincommons.com/musings/open...

Really cool approach! I wouldn’t be surprised if Anthropic implemented something similar to this as a premium Claude Code feature for teams. I especially like the idea of capturing context of thought process and decision points… if only we could get people to do that too 😅

I've been experimenting with Claude Code CLI - @anthropic.com's new command-line interface that lets you work with Claude AI on coding tasks directly from your terminal. It's quite powerful, but benefits from structured guidance. Here is a repo with what I've learned so far. 🧵… 1/12

I've been finding @anthropic.com ‘s agentic "Claude Code CLI" quite powerful (and I like the TUI aka Terminal User Interface). Mostly I use it to facilitate git flow branch management. My bootstrap files for a new repo to use with the `claude` cli tool is at github.com/ChristopherA...

Last year, I talked about the identity tragedy of World War II on #Foremembrance Day (March 27th). It was a harsh example of the damage that we can do when we record identity. This year, I fear things are getting worse. Remember: "Regime change happens"…🧵[1/5]

The "Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) enshrines fundamental freedoms, but without economic agency — the #FreedomToTransact — many of those rights ring hollow. 🧵👇 [1/14]

The 2024 annual report from Blockchain Commons is here! It highlights our work toward an open, secure, and compassionate digital infrastructure, emphasizing interoperability and self-sovereign wallet standards through key projects: dCBOR, FROST, and Gordian Envelope. 🧵… [1/11]

We will be holding a @BlockchainComns meeting on January 24th at 10am to discuss the upcoming Zcash extensible Wallet Interchange Format (ZeWIF). If you're a wallet developer using or interested in using Zcash, I invite you to attend! [1/7] forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/zcash-exte...

👍📣 "In EUDI’s implementation today this is a single point of failure where issuer corruption can cause huge damage to persecuted minorities and targeted subjects: it delegates the revocation issuance to a single entity instead of requiring more approvals by a quorum of stakeholders."

What are the principals of design for enabling autonomy, dignity, and trust in digital systems? I wrote about that today. [1/9] www.blockchaincommons.com/musings/Valu...

Hey Folks, just a reminder that our FROST Wallet Developers meeting, hosted by Blockchain Commons, is tomorrow at 10am PT. [1/2]

Hierarchies thrive on obedience; networks thrive on cooperation. The future belongs to those who dismantle the former and build the latter.

Building networks on cooperation & equal participation demands authentic ecosystem leadership & aligned incentives focused on real-world impact, not personal gain. But true ecosystem leadership is rare. Many network leaders today advocate for extreme collaboration but use it to push their agendas.

FROST is coming! This December 4th (10am PT/1pm ET/7pm CET), Blockchain Commons will be holding a special meeting for developers interested in incorporating FROST into their wallets or other programs [1/9]

I actually am a strong disagree on "trustless" and "zero trust" There is no such thing as trustlessness or zero trust Instead there is such thing as *building trust* and *consent* in a hostile world We can't live without being able to cooperate and bulid trust. I believe in "secure cooperation".

“Decentralization is the result of a system that diffuses power throughout its structure, so that no node holds particular power at the center.” Brilliant!

This is an excellent review of some options for Bitcoin to use quantum-computer resistant hash algorithms (like SHA256) for signatures. Some of the best choices require no key reuse, which is also the best practice today. Don’t reuse keys or addresses! conduition.io/cryptography...

Just read this fascinating piece on the origins of Self-Sovereign Identity #SSI by @christopherallen.bsky.social www.lifewithalacrity.com/article/orig... A must-read for anyone interested in digital identity, decentralized systems, and how SSI is shaping the future of trust online.

In real life, we extend trust gradually, slowly learning about people we're interacting with & revealing more of ourself in the process. Why don't we do that in the digital world? That's the topic of "Building Trust in Gradients", today's Musings. [1/11]

@jay.bsky.team I don’t know if you are looking for an independent board member, but if you’d like to consider person who chose the term and wrote the 10 principles of self-sovereign identity, contact me.