satanik

I would like to also add https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/peer-star/pull/15 to the list of links.

If anyone is really into decentralized identities and authentication, please give it a read. Feedback would be appreciated!

It depends on the DID method. The DID is a string with the following pattern: did:<method>:<method-specific-id>. There's a variety of DID methods with different underlying public ledgers, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. The <method-specific-id> depends on the <method>. For instance, there's DID methods that use the underlying wallet address as the id and others use the smart contract deployed.

Contend addressed documents wouldn't fit directly into what DID is trying to accomplish. A DID is supposed to be a unique id to identify an identity, such as a Person, a company or even your pets. A DID maps to a DID Document that may change overtime, e.g.: the public keys listed in it. If we were using content-addressing for the identifiers, they would be changing over time, which will be hard to use in a variety of systems.

This doesn't mean that we cannot use content-addressing. For instance, in IPFS world, the DID could actually be using IPNS to point to a CID. This allows to have a persistent DID pointing to CIDs at different times. There's actually a DID method called IPID (based on IPFS), that uses a strategy similar to this.