By now, it should be clear that SSI is not just a point technology, like web shopping carts or mapping apps. It is a fundamental technology shift, akin to the internet or the web itself. As such, it doesn’t have just one primary feature or benefit—or even just a small set of them. Rather, it offers an entire spectrum of features and benefits that vary in their impact depending on the particular use cases, application, or industry.
The reason is that the SSI digital identity model solves fundamental problems in digital trust, and it does so at an infrastructure level—much like the internet solves fundamental problems in data sharing at an infrastructure level. So, just like the internet, SSI can eliminate the need for thousands of smaller “bandage” solutions by providing a solid layer of open standard infrastructure.
This approach provides a wide swath of benefits for almost anyone using the internet, and that’s what we’ll explore in this chapter. To do this, we’ve developed a tool, the SSI Scorecard, that classifies 25 major features and benefits of SSI into the five categories shown in table 4.1. In part 4 of this book, we use this SSI Scorecard to analyze the impact of SSI across the use cases for a representative set of industry verticals.