ion VS orbitdb

- For completeness and good scientific practice, also look at solutions beyond Ethereum: https://identity.foundation/ion/

ION decentralized identity (an implementation of the SideTree protocol)

Other uses are extremely limited IMO. Microsoft ION, an implementation of decentralised identity w3c spec, for example. It makes a Bitcoin transaction containing a hash that refers to several identities. Since the identities are mutable there does not seem much value in remembering the hash at a point in time.

I agree the website is very bad, currently. Maybe this page has better resources:

https://essif-lab.github.io/framework/docs/ssi-standards

But there's quite a lot going on... the work on SSI is being coordinated by the W3C Working Group on VCs (Verifiable Credentials) and DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers).

https://www.w3.org/community/credentials/

https://www.w3.org/2019/did-wg/

I don't know of any real-world usage yet, despite the fact that the specifications required for things to work and be used by real people already exist, and that there's a lot of DID methods (over 80 last I checked) registered, but as people have noted, most are based on blockchain (but not all... there's stuff like the peer, git, jwk DID methods that do not require blockchain)... but I have to say that, in this particular instance, blockchains may actually be a proper solution for a real problem (that of looking up public keys and metadata for entities/users in a distributed, highly-reliable manner).

https://www.w3.org/TR/did-spec-registries/#did-methods

If you want to look for related stuff, look for things that users would need to have to use SSI, like DID wallets... Some random examples I found by quickly searching:

https://www.abtwallet.io/en/

https://www.didwallet.io/

https://igrant.io/

https://www.dock.io/dock-wallet-app

https://identity.foundation/ion/

The OpenID Connect Standard is being extended to support self-issued OIDC (SIOP) which allows OIDC to interact with SSI constructs:

https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-self-issued-v2-1_0.h...

So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff being created around SSI, but admitedly, almost nothing practical yet... Hence why I was hoping to find something where this work could be very helpful, like logging into Codeberg :)

I would also recommend checking ION¹. I have tested a few DID Methods including Sovrin, Veres One, and ION, and the latter is the most spec-adherent and well-implemented, apart from receiving funding from companies like Microsoft and TBD (which is proposing web5 in the first place). And yes, it is the only DID Method to receive support from big tech (was incubated within Microsoft, then donated to the Decentralized Identity Foundation), and it also happens to be a technically good solution.

¹ https://identity.foundation/ion/

Microsoft ION --->https://identity.foundation/ion/

Doing some more research: Looks like the idea is developed by tbd.website and uses a L2 tool called ION that utilizes the SideTree protocol. Interestingly, ION does not introduce a new token which I find interesting, and one of the things I've found confusing about Stacks.

OrbitDB is not well-funded, but there's fresh work happening recently by some dedicated volunteers: https://github.com/orbitdb/orbitdb/commits/main

I've been thinking it might be practical to build a simple decentralized database, where agents just know each other, so conflict resolution does not need to be so strong and can rely on the social layer.

I think this applies to most databases, but I'm particularly thinking of internal enterprise databases, some social networks, any federated database system, and different devices of a single user

I'm thinking of this features:

1- Append-only?, full history of operations. Deletes / edits do not remove data, they only modify the "active state"

2- Agents are public keys or similar (DIDs?)

3- Operations are signed, and receivers verify if operation is valid, and sender is allowed

4- Operations form a Merkel-DAG (similar to git, they link to the tips of current "active state", like a commit/merge in git)

So far I think I've basically described [OrbitDB](https://github.com/orbitdb/orbit-db)

Consensus is where things get real hard, [OrbitDb seems to use a last-write-wins CRDT](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22920204), and although I don't know the details of orbitDb, I think for many simple use-cases, conflicts can just be resolved on the social layer. But I think we need to provide agents with good tools to resolve conflicts

I'll try my best here with some ideas:

- When merging, we can order operations by their timestamp, if operations enter conflict, raise it to the conflicting agents, or someone with permission to solve them.

If an agent makes public an operation that forks its own history, mark agent as malicious or compromised, alert other agents, this needs resolution on the social layer, you have proof of misconduct, an agent has signed diverging operations

Any operation becomes fully settled if you have proof that all agents of your system have referenced it directly or indirectly through newer operations.

Timestamps can be upgraded by using @opentimestamps to get proof that an operation existed at time X (prevents creation of operations in hindsight). Though this does not prove operation has been made public

Both use OrbitDB: Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web. JavaScript. MIT license. repo

I think a wallet-agnostic memo solution is definitely the way. Having wallets that end up (partly) incompatible is only gonna hurt the UX. Maybe a decentralised DB solution like OrbitDB or GunDB can be the best way forward, although I haven't dove deeply into the docs yet.

Checkout this https://github.com/orbitdb/orbit-db peer-to-peer database for the decentralized Web.