The 2024 annual report from @BlockchainComns 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]

RT @btcpolicyorg: "Identity is the foundation - our 'layer zero' - for participating in modern life. Yet in the United States, our relation….

And of course you can always support @blockchaincomns itself by becoming a financial patron, to help us fight for our principles. [13/13]

Join me at the @blockchaincomns Gordian Developer Meetings, propose a topic where we can hash out these issues. [12/13]

If you want to support true decentralization, amplify this message. Talk about what's wrong, what you don't like, and how you'd like to see it resolved. [11/13].

I talk about all of this and more in my newest Musings . but this isn't just Musings. We need solutions. We need action. And we need it now. [10/13]

The self-sovereign identity community is caught between philosophical purity and practical irrelevance. We're at a time of reckoning where we're going to succeed with our ideals or fail. (Spoiler: Not looking great for the good guys right now.) [9/13].

This isn't just this one conference. We're having increasing problems even defining what decentralization is within our community. [8/13].

As for eIDAS and EUDI, I've written about their shortcomings before. [7/13]

But Germany is simultaneously cutting deals with Google for a ZKP library—and though it could be a theoretical great foundation for our work, it currently ties you to the Google surveillance apparatus. [6/13].

Europe is doing superificially better. The Swiss presentation was all about privacy, democratic involvement, and achieving public buy-in. These are the right things to rah-rah about. [5/13].

On the other hand, you had Google and Apple. That's our representation? Corporations with their own interests!? (With those interests mostly being making money and achieving corporate lock-in.) [4/13].

GDC25 encapsulated it perfectly with its representatives for the US. On the one hand, you had a RealID proponent—all 9/11 and Patriot Act rah-rah. State control, not decentralization. [3/13].

Bottom line: we're seeing a lot of lip service to decentralized principles but applications are instead inverting our goals of independence and self-sufficiency. [2/13].

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]

Regime change happens.

“…the difference between the countries is stark: in the Netherlands, 75% of Jews tragically lost their lives, compared to 23% in France. The difference lies in how each country dealt with identity: what they were willing to record and what they were not.”

“ProPublica has obtained a blueprint of the system, which would create an “on demand” process allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain (from the IRS) the home addresses of people it’s seeking to deport.” 🤬 This is so bad on so many levels🧵….

RT @btcpolicyorg: FEATURED VIDEO: @HRF Chief Strategy Officer @gladstein presents "Bitcoin is the Most Powerful Human Rights Technology of….

RT @zachherbert: Why Ledger is really killing the Nano S. Ledger had announced back in 2022 that they were phasing out the Nano S, and has….