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title: TAoA Letters
tags: [taoa]

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# TAoA Letters

## New Letter: Kim, Et Al. [digital identity]

Kim,

When I was at the Bitcoin Policy Summit in June, I spoke with numerous folks in the cryptocurrency and decentralized identity space. That helped me to organize my last decade's worth of thought on true autonomy in the digital space, resulting in a (lengthy) article that I call "The Architecture of Autonomy".

Ultimately, the heart of the article is identity in the digital space. It's about how our identities can be taken away or defined by others, how judgements are passed on them without our ability to contest. And it's about the ways in which we could turn this around. 

That's why I'm reaching out to you. I'm now looking for comments and thoughts on the article. In particular, I'd love to get your perspective on a few specific questions related to identity. 

Can I send it your way with those questions? (And of course if you feel like delving deeper, your perspective on any and everything else in the piece would be extremely welcome.)

The sections of the article broadly cover:

* §1. Legal protections that have been inverted.
* §2. Protecting crypto-secrets to protect digital possession.
* §3. Creating user agency with platform obligations.
* §4. Self-Sovereignty and the right to refuse definitions.
* §5. Methods of cooperative platform ownership.
* §6. The right of portability vs. designing for integration.
* §7. Contestability for algorithmic judgement.
* §8. Combining community innovation with legislative opportunity.

I'm also looking for advice on where this might be published (after at least one more major iteration, including responding to any comments I get). Would DIF have an interest in this? Otherwise, any thoughts for what to do with this oversized piece?

Thanks!

Chris

## New Letter: BPI [bitcoin]

When I was at the Bitcoin Policy Summit in June, I spoke with numerous folks in the cryptocurrency and decentralized identity space. That helped me to organize my last decade's worth of thought on true autonomy in the digital space, resulting in a (lengthy) article that I call "The Architecture of Autonomy".

Today, Bitcoin offers one of the best examples of a working, self-sovereign system for digital asset control. But, there are still gaps. The state can enforce the disclosure of private keys (except in Wyoming, where I helped to craft a law to protect them). Exchanges can oust us without reason, based on digital algorithms. We don't have the cooperative platforms we need to ensure resilience for our assets, and even if we did, we don't have the models we need to ensure they remain decentralized.

I address this and more in my article, which is a think-piece on these and other problems, as well as how to solve them using legal, technological, and policy means.

I'm reaching out to you because I'm looking for comments and thoughts on the article and to see where there might be interest in publishing a future iteration of this piece.

Can I send it your way?

The sections of the article broadly cover:

* §1. Legal protections that have been inverted.
* §2. Protecting crypto-secrets to protect digital possession.
* §3. Creating user agency with platform obligations.
* §4. Self-Sovereignty and the right to refuse definitions.
* §5. Methods of cooperative platform ownership.
* §6. The right of portability vs. designing for integration.
* §7. Contestability for algorithmic judgement.
* §8. Combining community innovation with legislative opportunity.

Thanks!

Chris

## New Letter: [consumer rights]

Digital rights are the new frontier of consumer rights. What a consumer can do online is increasingly controlled by faceless service providers, and rights that we have long taken for granted (like the ability to contest a decision affecting us, or even the ability to talk to a representative of a company) are increasingly being denied us.

To ensure consumer rights in the digital frontier (which is increasingly our home as consumers in the twenty-first century!) requires consumer autonomy, which is what I recently wrote about in a series that I call "The Architecture of Autonomy".

The series is built on the thesis that there are legal protections that support consumers in the physical world, but they've been inverted in the digital world, to instead entrap consumers so that corporations can extract value from them.

The sections of the series broadly cover:

* §1. Legal protections that have been inverted.
* §2. Protecting crypto-secrets to protect digital possession.
* §3. Creating user agency with platform obligations.
* §4. Self-Sovereignty and the right to refuse definitions.
* §5. Methods of cooperative platform ownership.
* §6. The right of portability vs. designing for integration.
* §7. Contestability for algorithmic judgement.
* §8. Combining community innovation with legislative opportunity.

As it currently stands, the series approaches things from the technical viewpoint of consumers having self-sovereign control over their digital identities, which is my own viewpoint as I'm the co-author of TLS (the protocol that protects all banking, shopping, and other financial activities on the internet) and the creator of the principles of self-sovereign identity, but I think the issues for more general consumer rights should be obvious.

I'd be happy to send you the whole article/series if you have interest in taking a look at some or all of it.

As someone involved in consumer rights, your thoughts on the article would be well appreciated, especially for consumer-rights topics that I might not be giving adequate coverage because of my focus as a technologist.

I'd also be interested in hearing if you might have ideas about any venues that would be interested in publishing this series (or more likely, a more consumer-rights-focused version of it).

Thanks for the time & attention!

Christopher Allen

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## Previous Letter

See: https://hackmd.io/7DQnjYa0S0m6oYRtmAd0YA
(for outline)

Dear X,

At the Bicoin Policy Summit in June, I was able to speak with a number of professionals in the cryptocurrency and decentralized identity space. These conversations helped me to organize over a decade's worth of thought on true autonomy in the digital space, and how current systems invert many of the rules and principles that should otherwise protect us.

What follows is my outline of a 40,000+ word essay on the topic, "The Architecture of Autonomy," which is currently undergoing editorial work. I hope you'll find it interesting & let me know if you'd like to see more as I finalize it, or even better if you have leads that might allow me to publish it in a way that will gain widespread attention.

Christopher