"So... how, exactly, do they propose tying together a human being with a public key, thus creating a DID, without the use of a central registrar?" The answer,

"So... how, exactly, do they propose tying together a human being with a public key, thus creating a DID, without the use of a central registrar?" The answer, as you might expect, is with a blockchain. There was a booth last week at the decentralized web summit for the "BTCR DID Method" which I believe is sponsored by W3C. You can read about it by going here: https://decentralizedweb.net/science-fair/ https://decentralizedweb.net/science-fair/ Here you are: "The Bitcoin Reference DID method supports DIDs on the public Bitcoin blockchain The Bitcoin Reference DID method (did:btcr) supports DIDs on the public Bitcoin blockchain. The Bitcoin Reference method has minimal design goals: a DID trust anchor based on the Bitcoin blockchain, updates publicly visible and auditable via Bitcoin transactions, and optionally, additional DID Document information referenced in the transaction OP_RETURN data field. No other Personal Identifiable Information (PII) would be placed on the immutable blockchain. A secondary intent of the BTCR method is to serve as a very conservative, very secure example and some best practices for creating a DID method. The use cases for BTCR are focused on anonymous and pseudo-anonymous identities, web-of-trust style webs of identity, and absolute mimimal personal information disclosure. Other DID methods will likely need to loosen these standards. Some aspects of the BTCR method will not be practical if inappropriately scaled — for instance, there is a transaction cost to update keys and DDO object, potential UTXO inflation (i.e. one additional unspent output for every BTCR-based identity), and even if segwit isn't used it could cause blockchain bloat. However, identities using the BTCR method can be a strong as Bitcoin itself -- currently securing billions of dollars of digital value."