Decentralised Wallets are Coming

Title: Decentralised Wallets are Coming, Hurrah!

Abstract: We've been working in the Global South on Trustworthy Digital Infrastructure (starting with Digital Identity) with Gates Foundation funding for 5+ years. Way back near the start, I suggested that decentralised id would be the way to go to gain the populations' trust in many countries. Initial reactions were at best sceptical - we build a prototype service (trustchain) and mobile (feature phone) client (SIMple Id) that presented tokenized verifiable credentials, and people were impressed but dismissive - may, clearly has government agencies breathing down their necks to make sure population surveillance would be enhanced...of course, populations got that and responded with "well, hey, then we wont use your pesky intrusive service".

So now the reaction is very different, and many nations we visit are working actively on distributed wallet based systems (similar to proposed European approach). All that remains centralised is foundation id (typically things issued by governments anyhow like birth certificates and passports and maybe driving licenses etc). 

The other side of this is a nice idea on how to make the infrastructure for partly state-bases services sustainable in terms of software support - by allowing wallets to proliferate, be diverse with varying roots of trust, and interoperate via federation, there is now a commercial model for such services and a means for government to collect fees for commercial use of the government root of trust, if necessary...

Bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Crowcroft