Blockchain & Decentralized Identity Architect—Internet Cryptography Pioneer—Co-author TLS & DID Standards—Collaborative Tools & Patterns
Joined January 2007
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15 Jan 2025
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]
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Closely related to my recently Fable 5 threads on the threat when intelligence requires permission, and on self-sovereign computing, is this article by @awrigh01: KEYQUOTE: "Closed systems give the state a control surface. The very levers that make the kill switch possible also let a regulator or an administration press an unwilling provider until the model says no, and the user never sees the pressure, only the refusal."
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.@TheAhmadOsman has written the essay this Fable 5 suspension moment needs. His core observation is exact: AI labs are "selling cognition as infrastructure," and "once cognition becomes infrastructure, access control... becomes a social bottleneck." …🧵
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Related from @awrigh01: "Closed systems give the state a control surface. The very levers that make the kill switch possible also let a regulator or an administration press an unwilling provider until the model says no, and the user never sees the pressure, only the refusal." x.com/awrigh01/status/206591…
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.@0xSero just showed what exit looks like: frontier intelligence on hardware he owns — the week governments pulled rented models for everyone. He's the cure to the disease I've been naming for years: permissioned AI, the biggest centralizing hole of the modern era… 🧵
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My diagnosis: x.com/ChristopherA/status/20…
A permission regime can revoke a rented model — not the one running on your desk. Sero's proof: Qwen locally < $1,000 of hardware, 30 open compressions, intelligence you own. Self-Sovereign Computing: your model, your hardware, your data.
.@TheAhmadOsman has written the essay this Fable 5 suspension moment needs. His core observation is exact: AI labs are "selling cognition as infrastructure," and "once cognition becomes infrastructure, access control... becomes a social bottleneck." …🧵
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Diagnosis without exit is just complaint; exit without diagnosis is just hardware. Together they're a strategy – own the model, the hardware, the keys. Self-sovereign identity, computing, and now cognition no one can revoke or rent back to you. Own the stack! blockchaincommons.com/dispat…
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Ahmad ask to us make "a tiny declaration of independence." A GPU, local inference, open weights. I would add your own keys — this is Self-Sovereign Computing: blockchaincommons.com/dispat…
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None of this is inevitable. We routed around centralized control before; we can build the exit again — self-sovereign identity, computing, and now cognition that no one can revoke, degrade, or rent back to you. Own the stack!
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Permissioned AI is the biggest hole yet. As Ahmad puts it: "Claude is not your agent. Claude is Anthropic's agent, rented to you." This is an inversion I keep naming — when a right quietly becomes a revocable privilege. When it needs approval, it's not a right, it's permission.
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The only way out is the one that's always worked — exit. "Without the ability to walk away, consent collapses into coercion." Exodus Protocols: blockchaincommons.com/musing…
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I've watched this since I co-authored TLS 1.0 — every decade we patch one architecture that funneled rent and control to a center, and a bigger hole opens. "We built protocols for human autonomy and watched them become instruments of platform control: blockchaincommons.com/dispat…
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This isn't hypothetical. Anthropic just pulled Fable 5 for everyone on a U.S. government order — and Fable already required 30-day retention of your data. The next turn is obvious: an ID check to use a frontier model: principles of age-gating applied to thought.
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Jun 10
🤬"The idea that an authoritarian government would use artificial intelligence to suppress dissent is troubling enough. But the use of A.I. to predict dissent well before a person has taken action has become a nightmare scenario" nytimes.com/2026/06/01/us/po…
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Keyquote: “This means that the EU could decide at any time that ZKP may no longer be used, and in one stroke the app would fall back to its default mode, meaning that every post on social media carries an ID tag.”
Jun 1
The EU age verification app is presented as “completely anonymous”. But the risk is that member states (the countries are supposed to create their own versions of the open-source EU app) use it to introduce identity verification that makes it impossible to post anonymously on social media.
The idea behind “completely anonymous” is to use Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) cryptography to break the link between the age credential issuer (EU governments) and the regulated services/sites. Currently, the EU app does not have ZKP functionality, contrasting Ursula von der Leyen’s claim that the app ”is technically ready to be used”. But more importantly, the app is designed to always function without ZKP technology; if ZKP is unavailable, the app falls back to a non-ZKP model. Even if fully developed ZKP technology could be implemented in the future, it would remain an optional extra feature that countries may choose to disable and that the EU could remove at any time.
This means that the EU could decide at any time that ZKP may no longer be used, and in one stroke the app would fall back to its default mode, meaning that every post on social media carries an ID tag. By that point, an infrastructure will already have been rolled out; people will have gotten used to it, and it will be harder to roll it back.
More details on mullvad.net/blog/age-verific…
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Apr 28
This is a serious problem. We need our wallets to be robust in adversarial environments. Join the Gordian Wallet to explore identify best practices.
🧵 you can hold the most private coin on earth. doesn't matter if your wallet app pings 40 servers the second you open it. your IP is out before you generate a key.
so I tested 13 web3 wallets on first launch:
clean android, no sim
apks via gplaydl
wifi vpn
pcapdroid per app
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Christopher Allen retweeted
Apr 27
Spent 6 months trying to launch a practical version of SSI at a large fintech, and failed. Huge supporter of your work, but found it extremely hard to change identity practices in finance. Hope we become self-sovereign one day
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Christopher Allen retweeted
Apr 27
SSI has consumed most of my waking hours over the past few years, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I had the privilege to write my PhD at @TU_Muenchen on the topic, focusing on SSI in a b2b setting.
SSI is great because it is self-guaranteeing its promises, and organizations need digital sovereignty just as much as people do. Now, I continue my work building digital supply chain software with SSI at heart.
It has also made it impossible for me to unsee the crazy asymmetry of information/power around internet identity. Never looking at a social login the same way.
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