This article will discuss DID (Decentralized Identifier) ​​from the perspective of supervision, and then explore decentralized domain names from the perspective of DID.

What is a decentralized domain name? (If you know, you can skip this)

Take ENS (Ethereum Name Service) domain name as an example. ENS is built based on the ERC721 protocol, which means that each ENS domain name represents an NFT (Non-Fungible Token). Before the emergence of decentralized domain names, blockchain wallets were just wallet addresses consisting of a long string of characters, such as everyone's computer IP, and almost no one cared what this string of characters looked like.

Traditional Internet (DNS): Each website has an IP address corresponding to it. In order to make the website easy to remember and better display the name and nature of the organization, domain names such as .com, .net, etc. appeared later.

Blockchain (ENS): Each ENS domain name can be mapped to a specific wallet address/DNS address

degenl.com<----->100.10.0.1 (for example)

julizi.eth<----->0x1EA64B245c8234865BCBEF335da4aB96235EB926 (for example)

julizi.eth<----->degenl.com (you can use degenl.com to accept cryptocurrencies such as BTC/ETH)

State functions and supervision

Historically, the government's control over the lives of members of society has been different, which is reflected not only in the scope of government jurisdiction, but also in the intensity of its intervention in personal life. With the continuous advancement of technology, the emergence of new technologies has increased the intensity of government/big business intervention in personal life to an unprecedented level.

First, internally, the state has three main functions: security, justice, and protection.

Safety: Protecting Life and Property

Justice: political fairness and economic fairness

Protection: Protect all resources within the country

From ancient times to the present, when citizens enjoy the benefits brought by the state's exercise of its functions, the first thing they must give to the state is to obey all the laws, regulations and systems formulated by the state.

Safety

State function: protection of life and property

Citizens' obligations: Citizens' behavior records (mainly whether they have committed crimes), birth information, etc. are entered into the national regulatory database; movable property, immovable property and intellectual property rights are regulated by national laws.

Fairness

State functions: political and economic fairness (not discussed in detail)

Citizens' obligations: Citizens abide by the laws and regulations of the state and accept the supervision/monitoring of the state.

Protection

State function: protect all resources within the country

Citizens' obligations: Citizens abide by the laws and regulations of the state and accept the supervision/monitoring of the state.

As a result of sheer size, the government, the maker of national laws, becomes increasingly distant from the citizens, and the laws and regulations it makes become increasingly intrusive on the citizens. The same is true between state-run business and business run by large private companies: the regulatory apparatus is, if not intentionally, distant from those it controls.

The emergence of Bitcoin as a financial asset is more like a product of the times that will inevitably appear when a country reaches a certain size and the government's intervention in citizens increases. New technologies can help the government strengthen its control over citizens, while also protecting citizens in some aspects.

However, when Bitcoin/Ethereum develops to a certain scale, that is, when more and more legal tender regulated by the state flows into Bitcoin/Ethereum, government supervision will gradually penetrate into digital currency.

As a pioneer in returning the ownership of financial assets to citizens, Bitcoin will inevitably bring more profound thinking to society. In addition to assets, what else needs to be returned to citizens? What else is being interfered with too much by the government or large enterprises?

What we usually think of is the personal information of citizens, especially those that are not under the explicit supervision of the government, such as purchase records, browsing records, your delivery address, gender, and age on online shopping platforms; chat records, browsing records, gender, and age on social platforms; and level records, chat records, and copy progress in games.

Behind the need to protect personal information are actually our unmet needs: we hope that our chats will not be monitored, we hope not to receive personalized recommendations without consent, and we hope that our private information will not be sold for 50 yuan online.

But I think that at this stage, projects related to the protection of personal information (Socialfi, DID) have not figured out which personal information needs to be protected immediately? Why should it be protected? Can it be better than the existing protection? What kind of benefits can protection bring to citizens? If you think that uploading user chat records to the chain can be free from government supervision, and using NFT as a social identity attribute is worth tens of millions of dollars for investors, it is undoubtedly a gamble for both the project and the investors.

DID from the perspective of on-chain and off-chain information

First, we define all historical information that can be put on the chain and authenticated as DID.

On-chain information

Thanks to the emergence of hash algorithms, peer-to-peer networks, asymmetric encryption and other technologies, the existing on-chain information (historical behavior of wallet addresses) is generally censorship-resistant, truly belongs to the wallet owner, and has a high degree of credibility. Therefore, the user's on-chain information can be classified into the DID category with relatively low implementation difficulty.

Off-chain information

No matter how the technology advances, off-chain information such as your university diploma, real estate, car, bank deposits, etc. can only be proven to belong to you under the supervision/certification of the government/centralized institutions. At present, mapping off-chain information to the chain cannot bypass centralized supervision/certification. Otherwise, if the DID information is forged and your funds are defrauded, do you need the government/centralized institutions to protect your rights and interests at that time?

If men were angels, there would be no need for any government; and if angels ruled, there would be no need for any external or internal control of government. - The Federalist Papers

Therefore, before the regulation of this circle becomes clear and mature, DID based on pure on-chain historical information (native) of blockchain is more debatable.

Decentralized Domain Names and DIDs

*The DIDs discussed here refer to DIDs based on pure on-chain historical information.

*Only discuss specific theories, not specific technical implementation details

The advantages of decentralized domain names as blockchain native infrastructure, taking ENS as an example:

●Associated with the wallet address, identifiable

● Low threshold for understanding, great potential to become the entry point for web2 users

At present, all interactions in this circle are based on wallet addresses. The historical information left by wallet addresses from creation to use is valuable. However, because the threshold for creating wallet addresses is low and the difficulty is small, the same person can create a large number of wallet addresses. Therefore, changing wallet addresses is an act with negligible cost, which makes it impossible for wallet addresses to accumulate more historical information.

For decentralized domain names such as .eth/.bnb/.bit, people are currently seeing more value in domain names with strong consensus, such as 3- or 4-digit domain names and names of large organizations and companies (Paradigm.eth was sold at a price of 420 eth). People are not aware of another value of decentralized domain names at present - making wallet addresses "easy to identify", that is,

Personal on-chain identity = wallet address (not easy to identify) = decentralized domain name (easy to identify)

If we can map the historical behaviors of all wallet addresses under the same private key to a decentralized domain name, and attach different labels to the historical behaviors of the wallet addresses, individuals/project parties/exchanges can use these labels to determine whether the historical information of this wallet address (that is, representing this person, this decentralized domain name) has the value they deserve. For example, the labels of 001.eth include "Crypto punk holder", "Monthly transaction flow of 10 million US dollars", and "Holding 4-digit ETH". I use the following picture to represent the main logic:

The mapping relationship between the label and the historical behavior of the wallet address can be ensured to be public and fair through open source code.

Related Projects:

At present, blockchain technology is still immature, and DID is still in an exploratory stage. There are also different sub-sectors in the DID track, such as on-chain identity aggregation, on-chain behavior authentication, etc. However, only 1 or 2 of the existing DID projects can finally succeed (or even none at all).

But now in the DID track, I am more concerned about the projects that combine "decentralized domain name-DID". As long as it fits this kind of gameplay, I will try to participate. The following are related projects I found** (not investment advice), but since I mainly use this article for learning and discussion, I will not analyze a specific project.**

Project name: New Crypto Space (@newcryptospace)

Found information:

1. Projects on Arb, plans to be pure on-chain DID

2. Tokens have been issued, and you need to use them to register a domain name

3. We plan to start airdropping domain names at the end of November. Please refer to the official Twitter for airdrop rules.

4. It is most likely a Chinese project (I am quite worried about this)

5. This is a very early project, and marketing has not yet been done. The above traffic is from tap water.

Project name: .Ether Name Service (@etherdomain)

Found information:

1. Plan to create web3 identity

1. One-time purchase, the current registration price is relatively low (four-digit domain name 0.003E)

2.0% Creator Fee

3. There is an on-chain referral program (I understand that the project party will cooperate with other projects, and those who hold NFTs can get certain benefits)

4. It also looks like a Chinese project (I am quite worried about this)

5. This is a very early project, and I don’t know how it will do web3 identity. Currently, there is no information.

References for this article:

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