Caveat: I know several people involved in the DID standards development and consider them friends. Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) are important because a dec

Caveat: I know several people involved in the DID standards development and consider them friends. Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) are important because a decentralized global network with fully decentralized versions of things like Facebook, with users controlling their own data, may not be possible without them. There is a lot in the DID specs. They are perhaps best viewed as an abstraction layer for decentralized authentication, authorization, rights management, and messaging. There are many ways of implementing these standards, and this is accomplished by allowing many different DID methods. Some methods, like 'peer', do not use public sources of truth like blockchains. Many of the various methods use some given blockchain as a public source of truth. Some use a distributed file system like IPFS. The abstraction in the DID specs should allow all of these methods to interoperate (e.g., have a IPFS DID document with a btcr controller, btcr being one of several DID methods using the Bitcoin blockchain). DID methods are not a wild west however, despite the picture painted by some. There are registries for recognized DID methods that impose controls on DID method specs before they can be listed in the registry [1]. Also, I think any DID support will likely require a plugin mechanism. The app implements the DID abstraction layer and DID common functionality, then offloads DID method specific functionality to an available plugin for that method or signals an error if no plugin for that method is available. It is ironic to me that Mozilla raised the objection here, because in my mind the plugin system that made people aware of plugins is the Firefox plugin system. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/did-spec-registries/ https://www.w3.org/TR/did-spec-registries/